How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

In Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves “Movement Conservatives.” A century before, their predecessors had called themselves “Confederates.”

Although Goldwater was a westerner through and through, it was the delegation from South Carolina that put him over the top to win the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. This was no accident. Movement Conservatives embraced the same ideas that, a century before, had led South Carolina slave owners to attack the United States government.

In 1858, a slaveholder put it this way: the upper class should rest on the lower classes the same way a stately edifice rested on “mudsills”—timbers driven into the ground for support. That mudsill vision of the world stood against a very different set of principles that lay at the heart of American democracy: equality and self-determination. Those who embraced this vision believed that society moved forward because self-reliant individuals produced and innovated far more effectively than a small group of elites, whose wealth insulated them from the need to experiment.

These two ideologies were incompatible, yet they were woven together into the fabric of America from its start.

America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought India...

In the last half century, we have begun to pay attention to how the American paradox has kept people of color and women from the full enjoyment of their rights. But we have paid far less attention to the fact that it actually threatens all Americans. It has given a small group of wealthy men the language they need to undermine our democracy, and to replace it with an oligarchy.

Thus, at times when it seems as if people of color or women will become equal to white men, oligarchs are able to court white male voters by insisting that universal equality will, in fact, reduce white men to subservience. Both slaveholders in the 1850s and Movement Conservatives a century later convinced white American men that equality for people of color and women would destroy their freedom.

Oligarchs tap into the extraordinary strength of the ideology of American freedom, the profoundly exciting, innovative, and principled notion that has been encoded in our national DNA since Englishmen first began to imagine a New World in the 1500s. That ideology asserts that individuals must have control of their own destiny, succeeding or failing according to their skills and effort.

This ideology is the genius of America, and we have embodied it in two distinctive archetypes: that of the independent yeoman farmer before the Civil War and that of the western cowboy afterward. In each period, those seeking oligarchic power have insisted they were defending the rights of those quintessential American individuals.

But the reality was that they were undermining individualism. While they promised to protect the status quo, and rallied support for doing so, as they gained control these men used their political influence to consolidate their own power. Their policies hurt ordinary Americans, creating a disaffected population ripe for leaders who promised easy solutions to their problems.

Over the course of a generation, both elite slave owners and Movement Conservative leaders came to believe that they alone knew how to run the country. They saw it as imperative that others be kept from power. They suppressed voting, rigged the mechanics of government, silenced the opposition press, and dehumanized their opponents. At the same time, quite logically, they did not see themselves as bound by the law. As the only ones who truly understood what was good for everyone, they were above it. So long as they continued successfully to project the narrative that they were protecting democracy, their supporters ignored the reality that oligarchs were taking over.

The “cornerstone” of the Confederacy, as Vice President Alexander Stephens put it, was that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

In the West, Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there, over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.

that kind of talk is un-american.”

Making wealthier men pay for policies that would benefit poorer people undercut democracy because it was an attack on the nation’s core principle: liberty. Movement Conservatives took as their standard the American cowboy, the western individualist who, according to legend, wanted nothing from government but to be left alone.

If a master happened to kill a slave in the process of “correcting” him or her, the codes established, the master was not liable for murder; he “shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such an incident had never happened.”

And there began the paradox. The very men who adhered most vigorously to the Enlightenment concept that all men were created equal held slaves. Indeed, their new, radical concept of freedom depended on slavery, for slavery permanently removed the underclass from any hope of influencing government. Virginia leaders had gotten rid of the problem of the poor in society: they had enslaved them. And, of course, they had gotten rid of the problem of women by reading them out of personhood altogether. What was left—ideologically, anyway—was a minority of people running the government, a body politic dedicated to the needs of men of property. And members of that body politic were—ideologically, anyway—identifiable by the handy metric of their skin color.

Poor white men did not achieve actual economic and social equality with society’s leaders, but those leaders did not have to worry about challenges to their privilege. Their lower-class white neighbors got the benefit of believing they were on the same level as rich men, because they shared the same racial identity. They would not revolt, because preserving the distinction between themselves and slaves was more important than seeking political power.

So in America, the radical idea that all men were created equal depended on the traditional idea that all men were created unequal and that a few wealthy men should control the government, and therefore the lives, of women and men of color.

From its founding, America has stood at the nexus of democracy and oligarchy. And as soon as the nation was established, its history of conflating class and race gave an elite the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.

The idea that American democracy was simply an exuberant celebration of the individual was wishful thinking, for the growing strength of slavery in the South told a different story.

Cotton depended on slavery—as did the valuable crops of sugar and coffee—and southern leaders recoiled at the idea of emancipation. Indeed, in the face of Great Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833, they set out to protect and spread slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere. They began at home, increasing punishments for anyone who questioned slavery. Distributing anti-slavery literature brought whipping, imprisonment, or death. Vigilante committees formed and worked alongside slave patrols to intimidate poor whites who talked about land reform or workers’ rights, appeared to be insufficiently supportive of the slave system, or seemed too friendly with their black neighbors. Such men were accused of being closet abolitionists and were whipped out of town or lynched as an example to others.

“Non-slaveholders of the South!” Helper wrote in his book, The Impending Crisis of the South. “Farmers, mechanics and workingmen . . . the slaveholders, the arrogant demagogues whom you have elected to offices of honor and profit, have hoodwinked you, trifled with you, and used you. . . . They have purposely kept you in ignorance, and have, by moulding your passions and prejudices to suit themselves, induced you to act in direct opposition to your dearest rights and interests.”

On September 30, 1859, before farmers at the state fair in Milwaukee, Lincoln explained that Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” divided the world into permanent castes: capitalists driving the economy and workers stuck at the bottom. But there was another theory: that workers, not capitalists, drove the economy, and hardworking men could—and should—rise. This latter “free labor” theory articulated the true meaning of American democracy for northerners and for the non-slave-holding southerners, who, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, made up a majority in the South.

According to the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the nation’s Founders had made a grave error by thinking that “all men are created equal.” Addressing an audience on March 21, 1861, he explained that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea . . . its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The Confederacy was the first government in the world to be, as Stephens put it, “based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth,” and “if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent.”

when southerners left the Union, they left the nation in the hands of those who believed that the government should do what individuals could not: open the way for poorer men to rise

In the retelling of what happened at the Alamo, what got lost was the reality that the defenders were rebelling against the Mexican government in Mexican territory, and that they were fighting to defend their right to enslave other people. The myth also ignored the fact that many of the defenders were Mexican opponents of Santa Anna, and that some of the defenders—including Davy Crockett—surrendered.

The reality was that power in the West came from social networks and kinship ties rather than from individual prowess, but these men saw the West as a land of unparalleled opportunity, where a man willing to swing a pick could make a fortune literally out of the dirt. It was the stuff of hope and legends, and offered an enviable future to even the most downtrodden easterner. But western migrants made sure that opportunity was limited to them.

Indians in what is now Texas had started to adapt to horses by about 1500,

In spring 1865, northerners were celebrating that they had not only saved the Union but also saved the West from slavery, and that the concept of human equality was now spreading. Westerners were celebrating the fact that they had finally secured their region from Mexicans and Indians. In the North, the war had bolstered democracy. In the West, it had reinforced a society in which the oligarchic ideas of the defeated South would thrive.

“The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn despise the Republic and endanger liberty,”

Thomas Dixon’s

Author of The Clansman, on which Birth of a Nation was based.

In the 1950s, politicians and commentators agreed that those commonsense American ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: the New Deal had finally achieved the government that best reflected democratic values. In this worldview, Americans stood firmly between leftist revolution on one side and right-wing reaction on the other. “Liberalism,” the influential literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition . . . there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation.”

A young advertising executive named Harry Treleaven believed that television could turn politicians from the dull gray men they had always been into celebrities, actors with a narrative that far outweighed any of their policy positions. As a Nixon media advisor put it: “Voters are basically lazy. . . . Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. . . . The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”

In the 1980s, as it became clear to most voters that they were falling behind under the Republican program, leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual—the cowboy—was endangered by a behemoth state. To protect him, they invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy. Then they sought to spread that narrative as widely as they could. The story they told of an America under siege by “takers” was not based in fact. Rather, it followed a formula that rewrote history in order to divide voters and win election by turning their supporters against minorities and women. In this narrative, the popular policies of the liberal consensus were just what the Reconstruction years had been in this telling: a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to the undeserving. To sell to voters a program that hurt most of them, the new Republicans deliberately shaped popular culture to bolster their ideology.

Recognizing how effective popular media could be in building support for their ideas, Movement Conservative Republicans launched a campaign against the “fairness doctrine.” Since the 1920s, the government had required public broadcast media stations to present information honestly, balancing different points of view. That arguments should be based on facts put the ideology of Movement Conservatives at a disadvantage. Adherents insisted that the fairness doctrine biased the media against them. The media was, they said, liberal. Under pressure, and with Reagan’s appointees voting, in 1987 the FCC caved and ended the policy.