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

by Heather Cox Richardson

As Abraham Lincoln mused, if slavery depended on skin color, any man could be enslaved to a man with lighter skin than his own. If it was based on intelligence, then any man could be enslaved to a man with a better intellect. Lincoln saw where this argument led: “Say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.” “I should like to know,” he continued, “taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?”3

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 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans claimed 33.5 percent of the nation’s capital income. By 2010, that same cohort claimed 54 percent. Americans of color, workers,

In the years before 1860, southern leaders arranged for the government to protect slavery. They kept its functions small to keep it from interfering with what they claimed was an economic institution, except when they wanted the government to exert authority to defend their property rights. When poorer men advocated roads or the dredging of harbors to spur economic growth, Democrats insisted that any federal assumption of economic activity threatened to crush American liberty. The federal government should simply deliver the mails, manage foreign affairs, collect the tariffs, maintain a small military force in the West to push back against Comanches, and, of course,

protect slavery. For that, they reversed their position and wanted a powerful government. But 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—as Lincoln had called for.

“If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A.?” Lincoln demolished the idea that categories should be based on race: “You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.” He also tore down other permanent categories: “You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.”21 Lincoln got to the heart of the matter: “But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

He warned that Congress was dangerously expanding the federal government to give privileges to black men that white men did not have. This, he said, would destroy America, because a big government would require tax levies, which would fall on white men who had worked hard for their property. That money would be spent on government officials providing services for African Americans, like those working for the Freedmen’s Bureau. Republicans believed their policies leveled the playing field between former slaves and white Americans. Johnson argued that they were a redistribution of wealth that undermined American liberty by taking a man’s property.5

Rather than making a reasoned argument that fairly presented others’ positions, it misrepresented the views of the professors with whom Buckley disagreed, claimed that the wealthy white Yale-educated Buckley was a member of a persecuted minority, and smeared supporters of the liberal consensus as the tools of socialists and atheists.16

And while he boasted of how his grandparents had come to Arizona when “there was no federal welfare system, no federally mandated employment insurance, no federal agency to monitor the purity of the air, the food we ate, or the water we drank,” and that “everything that was done, we did it ourselves,” the Goldwater family’s money had come to them the same way it came to other western entrepreneurs: from U.S. government investment. After 1905, federal subsidies for the Roosevelt Dam provided paychecks for workers who spent their earnings at the Goldwater family’s department stores. Then more money came in during World War I, and in the 1920s, federal water reclamation projects made up 15 percent of Arizona’s economy. Then the New Deal pumped more money into the West. Hoover Dam and the fifty other federal agencies operating in Arizona brought $342 million into the state, while the federal government took less than $16 million out in taxes.34

The Founding Fathers had not set up a democracy, he said, precisely because they had feared “the tyranny of the masses,” who would want to redistribute wealth. Instead, they had gathered control of the government into the hands of intelligent elites. In an unmistakable echo of the mudsill theory, Bozell claimed, “Our country’s past progress has been the result, not of the mass mind applying average intelligence to the problems of the day, but of the brilliance and dedication of wise individuals who apply their wisdom to advance the freedom and the material well-being of all of our people.”

at the Office of Management and Budget showed that the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would decrease them and explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” he rationalized. “The whole thing is premised on faith . . . on a belief about how the world works.”1