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

by Heather Cox Richardson

Immediately after the war, aided by Lincoln’s replacement, President Andrew Johnson, former Confederate leaders tried to reestablish their control over the government and to reinstate their prewar society. They remanded southern African Americans back into a form of quasi slavery with laws called the Black Codes, requiring former slaves to sign year-long labor contracts with white employers and giving them no legal rights to defend their interests. Republicans defended their new vision of America. They crafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring that anyone born in America was a citizen entitled to equal protection of the laws.

In March 1867, the Military Reconstruction Act put the federal government in charge of protecting black Americans in the South and enrolling voters there. The law explicitly included all men over the age of twenty-one, without regard to “race, color, or previous condition.” Leading Republican politician James G. Blaine acknowledged that the Military Reconstruction Act was of “transcendent importance and . . . unprecedented character,” a “far-reaching and radical” measure that “changed the political history of the United States.”44 Under the Military Reconstruction Act, southerners wrote new state constitutions that weakened the power of former elites and included African American men in the body politic.

When, after readmission, the white members of the Georgia legislature expelled all of their black colleagues, arguing that state laws prohibited African Americans from holding office, Congress protected black equality in government with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment guaranteed that the right to vote—and, by extension, the right to hold office—could not be denied or curtailed according to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Georgia was required to ratify this amendment as a condition of its restoration to the government in 1870.

By 1870, Americans had given the nation a new birth of freedom. They had destroyed the oligarchic threat that ran through their society and ensured that theirs was a country where all men, regardless of their race or background, were equal.

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.6

The officer who had made the call to leave the fort expressed his opinion to the head of the army: “There is not, nor ever has been, any danger of the Mexicans crossing on our side of the river to plunder or disturb the inhabitants, and the outcry on that river for troops is solely to have an expenditure of the public money.”18 The pre–Civil War West might have been a place of opportunity for white men, but even without the issue of black slavery, the government there acknowledged a hierarchy of men according to their race.

the law.20 By the 1850s, those who believed in democracy in America watched the rise of racial categories with dread. Abraham Lincoln recognized that enshrining racial distinctions in the law would destroy the Republic. Musing privately about the issue in 1854, he worked out his ideas on a piece of scratch paper: “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.”

In 1860, as Democrats embraced the language of oligarchy, with its permanent castes, Lincoln’s Republican Party cited the Declaration of Independence in its party platform, reminding Americans that preserving the principle that “all men are created equal” was “essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions.”

even as the region was brought into the Union, the Civil War exacerbated the racial lines that were already in place. Beginning in 1861, Indian wars broke out across the plains. The timing of those conflicts, coming in the midst of a war for the very survival of the Union, made them increasingly savage.

News of these atrocities spread back to the East, but rather than sparking widespread outrage, the outcome of the Sand Creek Massacre hardened American perceptions of Plains Indians. Westerners resented congressional disapproval and the condescension of those who recoiled from the bloody realities of life there. Easterners simply didn’t understand the conditions in the West, didn’t get just how bad Indians were. The massacre forced easterners, too, to adjust their ideas about Indians. In 1864, most Americans had a son or a brother or a father wearing an army uniform. No one wanted to believe that a soldier—someone who could be their kin—would cut off a man’s testicles to use them as a tobacco pouch. So they dehumanized the victims of the massacre. Indians were not people; they were savages who had forced the soldiers to kill them and treat them so brutally.

Although there were still two major southern armies in the field, it was clear that the Confederacy’s days were numbered. Yet while slave owners did not win the war, it turned out they had surrendered only on the battlefields. Over the next few years, they would set out to recover their lost power by advancing a new narrative that drew on old fault lines. They divided supporters of democracy by binding race to class, and by constraining women into roles as either wives and mothers or prostitutes. This would not have been possible in the war-torn East, of course, where those who championed the Confederate oligarchic ideology had lost. But they found a home for their worldview in the West, where there was a fresh example of Crèvecoeur’s “new American” to embody it: the cowboy.

The timing of Lincoln’s murder gave Johnson an extraordinary amount of power to stop the spread of the Union’s democratic vision. Congress had adjourned for the summer on the morning of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and it was not scheduled to reconvene until early December 1865. The exhausted congressmen had hurried to their far-flung homes. Just a month later, as news spread of Lincoln’s death, they rushed back to Washington, fully expecting that Johnson would call them into emergency session, just as Lincoln had in 1861. But Johnson had no intention of sharing power with Republicans as they set out to advance democracy. He ignored Congress and took it upon himself to rebuild America alone.

Johnson turned not to the Army, or to the ex-slaves who had supported the Union, but to former Confederates. He offered pardons to all but about 1,500 Confederate leaders and asked the southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, declare secession illegal, and essentially declare bankruptcy so that no one would ever again bankroll rebellion against the United States government. The states agreed—more or less—but then codified the racial violence that swept across the South in the summer of 1865. As employers cheated workers out of wages, gangs beat and raped African Americans into submissive behavior, and whites attacked their black neighbors, southern state legislatures created the Black Codes.

The Black Codes reinstated a form of slavery, but tied it to class rather than race.2

officers of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands began to intercede with southern whites on behalf of freedpeople.

white southerners laid down a new ideological marker for the postwar years. They began to argue that they had fought the Civil War not over slavery—despite the many state secession declarations and speeches saying exactly the opposite—but rather to keep an intrusive federal government out of their lives.

The strength of white southerners in Congress would only increase, since for the first time the 1870 census would count African Americans as whole people rather than as three-fifths of a person. Only nine months earlier, northerners had been fighting on the battlefields to save the United States government from destruction by slave owners; under Johnson’s plan, Confederate leaders would wield more power in the Union than they had had before the Civil War.

Congress tried to combat the violence taking place under the Black Codes by giving southern African American men equal standing before the law. It passed the Civil Rights Act establishing that any person born or naturalized in America was a citizen and thus gave freedmen the right to sue, hold property, and testify in court. In case state courts did not cooperate, Congress also expanded the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide federal courts in the South, so that black men could be guaranteed the right to testify.

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 Johnson’s rejection of Lincoln’s vision began the process that would resurrect American oligarchy.

When white southerners rejected the Fourteenth Amendment and Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act to put biracial conventions in charge of rebuilding the South, the Ku Klux Klan organized to prevent southern Republicans—black and white both—from voting in favor of the new state constitutions. The Ku Klux Klan murdered nearly a thousand Unionists before the 1868 elections, terrorized their neighbors, and undercut democracy in the South. Even more effective than Ku Klux Klan ropes, clubs and bullets, though, were the new tactics to which white Democrats turned when they realized that the violence of the Klan simply hardened Republican resolve.

Grant’s election would change political calculations in the South. He won in large part thanks to 70,000 southern African Americans, whose votes threw the Electoral College to him.

When Ku Klux Klan violence affected the 1870 midterm elections, Congress in April 1871 passed a bill making it a crime to keep African Americans from exercising their civic rights: voting, holding office, or sitting on juries (which were picked from the voting lists). The bill authorized the president to declare martial law in places where the Ku Klux Klan held power, and in October 1871, Grant did precisely that in nine South Carolina counties. Troops arrested hundreds of Klansmen and as many as 2000 fled the state guilty, as one testified, of “whipping and killing” to “tear down the party in power and build up the other party.”

Leveling the playing field between workers and employers seemed to many people to be the logical outcome of a war for democracy against oligarchy. After all, what difference did it make if oligarchs owned plantations or factories? In public, leading Republican Benjamin F. Wade, a senator from Ohio, mused, “Property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” But businessmen recoiled in horror from what they interpreted as a war on property, and their spokesmen, including the editor of the New York Times, hammered home the idea that any hardworking man could make it in America.

The Paris Commune had organized in 1871, the year after the Fifteenth Amendment had guaranteed black men the right to vote. White men in South Carolina took advantage of this confluence and began to attack the idea of black voting not on racial grounds—although all the men involved had been vocal in their dislike of African Americans—but on the grounds that it gave poor men control over the states’ government, and that they were using that majority power to redistribute wealth.

It was no surprise that a former slaveholder and staunch secessionist had resurrected the slaveholders’ prewar philosophy. More surprising was that by 1871 many northerners now shared it. The popular magazine Scribner’s Monthly used italics for emphasis when it warned: “The interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”16

The cowboy era and Reconstruction overlapped almost exactly, and to oppose Republican policies, Democrats mythologized the cowboy, self-reliant and tough, making his way in the world on his own.

The myth of the American cowboy was born of Reconstruction and carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: he was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own. The reality was that about a third of all cowboys were men of color—black or Mexican, and sometimes Indian—and that few rose to prosperity.

individualists, working to make it on their own. In reality the federal government was more active in the American West than in any other region. In the postwar period it provided settlers with land, fought and then corralled Indians, bolstered markets through contracts to feed and clothe Army personnel and hundreds of thousands of reservation Indians, and funded and protected the railroads that got western products—including cattle—to eastern markets. The mythologized cowboy embodied the resentment of southern Democrats and their northern compatriots, who believed that the Republicans were using the federal government to give lazy black people benefits white men did not have.20

The end of the Civil War did not mean peace. When the U.S. Army stopped fighting in the South in 1865, it simply turned its attention to the wars on the Great Plains against the Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, and Lakotas. Government officials had already settled the question of whether or not Indians were equal to white men during the Civil War, when Santees were hanged, Navajos force-marched to Bosque Redondo, and Cheyennes massacred and mutilated. During the war, Americans saw Indians as enemies of the Republic; after the war, the government codified that perception.

By 1868, the western wars had made many easterners revise their belief in the concept that “all men were created equal.” When Congress hammered out the Fourteenth Amendment, the members explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed”—that is, those either on reservations, still fighting the U.S. Army, or considered too poor and undesirable—from being counted for a state’s representation in Congress. That would avoid the problem apparent in the South, where not-yet-enfranchised black voters would swell a state’s population for the purposes of representation but would not have a say in their actual government. By cutting Indians out of the equation, Congress hoped to make sure that what was happening in the South wasn’t replicated out west. But counting Indians out of representation both distinguished them from other Americans and guaranteed that few politicians would work on their behalf. They had nothing to gain from it.

While the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to erase legal distinctions among men of different heritages in the East, it never did so in the West, where states and territories enshrined those distinctions in their legal systems, based on laws written in the previous century to distinguish between white settlers and imported slaves.

Only a decade after the Civil War, the underpinnings of democracy, which the war had been fought to uphold, were under attack. The mythology of the self-made “new man,” the cowboy, depended on the racial and gender hierarchies of the West, much as the iconography of the independent eastern farmer had a generation earlier. Western states and territories maintained racial categories in their cultural and legal systems: the cowboy was a white man. The cowboy image also had no role for women except as good wives, dependent on their men, or as prostitutes; working women in the West disappeared from popular view. Class lines in the West were much like those in the East, but white men could see themselves as superior to everyone around them. So while Republicans in the East had fought the Civil War to banish the idea that a few wealthy white men should rule society, Democrats in the West after the war were fighting for precisely that principle.

In 1882, Republicans bowed to western sentiments and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that prohibited Chinese workers from immigrating to America (although it permitted businessmen, scholars, and diplomats). Harper’s

western Republicans joined Democrats to kill the measure, noting that the West and the South both wanted to keep nonwhites from power. Western white men had no desire to share power with Chinese or Indians, so why should southern whites share it with a similarly degraded race? Thanks to the admission of the new states, the nine Pacific and Rocky Mountain states, with fewer than 3 million people, had eighteen senators, while the six New England states, with almost 5 million people, had only twelve. The weight of the new western states killed the Federal Elections Bill. It would be seventy-five years before Congress again attempted to protect black voting.

The new western states were far more in line with the hierarchical structure of the South than with the democratic principles of the Civil War Republicans. Their political orientation reflected the reality of the western economy, which looked much more like that of the antebellum South than that of the antebellum North. By 1890, a few extractive industries dominated the West. Just as in the antebellum South, those industries depended on poor workers—often migrant workers—and a few men in the sparsely populated western states controlled both the industries and politics. They had far more sympathy for the ideology of former plantation elites—who had ruled much the way they did—than for that of the common man.

These new western industries looked much more like the extractive industry of antebellum cotton than like northern subsistence farming. While popular magazines touted the freedom and independence of the miner and the cowboy, working conditions and upward mobility for westerners mirrored those of the industrial workers in eastern factories.

Sharon was an extreme example of a postwar western pattern. The unique territorial years of the postwar West reinforced the power of a few wealthy men, as the population stayed sparse and politics centered around those who could deliver capital to the region through railroad contracts, banking ties, government contracts, or Indian land cessions. Those men continued to hold power as they passed favors on to their sons or acolytes, creating political dynasties.

Populism flourished on the small farms of the West, but the towns and cities supported a power structure that favored the concentration of wealth.

By the end of the nineteenth century, western leaders had internalized the idea that democracy was, in fact, a perversion of government—exactly as southern leaders had done in the immediate postwar years. They argued that small farmers, cattlemen, and miners were not promoting American prosperity and voting legitimately for policies that answered their needs. Instead, they were illegitimately skewing government in their own interests and against what their employers were sure was best for the nation. It was what southern Democrats had said about African Americans during Reconstruction. In that era, race had become class; now class had become race.

Like the redefinition of former slaves as dangerous socialists, the redefinition of regular Americans as lazy weaklings who wanted a handout was possible because of the postwar image of the western individualist.

Turner did nothing less than reinvent American history. Before him, most people who had bothered to think about the origins of their democracy had chalked it up to the intellectual principles of Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the Founders. But Turner argued that it was born on the frontier, as Europeans—and later Americans—constructed a society on the wild edge of savagery, taming the wilderness with civilization. Turner’s actors in this drama were not a few eastern elites; they were ordinary men building democracy in the West as they tried to make a living.

Turner rewrote American history to conform to the western mythology. In reality, the West had always been characterized by a multitude of peoples who traded with settlers as well as fought them, but Turner defined the frontier as a line between the civilization of whites and the savagery of Indians. That line gave birth to American individualism, Turner explained, as a man making a homestead in the wilderness looked only to his family and thoroughly resented any control over his actions.

Turner’s thesis not only erased the multiculturalism and the mechanics of trading in the regions where cultures met, it also erased everyone but white men. In Turner’s telling, much like in the vision of Young America in the 1840s, slavery was “an incident,” and not a terribly important one at that. There were no people of color in Turner’s version of the country. Enslaved African Americans lived on the fringes, and there were no free blacks. Neither were there Chinese or Mexicans. The immigrants who became Americans on Turner’s frontier were Germans and Scotch-Irish. And there were no women.

In late nineteenth-century America, women worked, studied, labored in factories, went to college, and became teachers, writers, nurses, government clerks, and, increasingly, secretaries. In the West, women worked, farmed, raised money for schools and churches, and, increasingly, voted. They were as central to western life as they were to society in the East. But on Turner’s frontier, just as in the mythic version of the cowboys’ world, the women were invisible, offstage: the wives who supported the men and nurtured the children, or the painted ladies who wore striped stockings and lived above saloons in the cow towns.

Even today, when politicians talk about how America is exceptional, they are, consciously or unconsciously, echoing Turner’s Frontier Thesis. While Turner summed up his generation’s thinking about American democracy and the western individual, his famous thesis was not only about triumph. Rather, it issued a dark warning. Turner lived in a time where large corporations were rising in the West, and he pointed out that the director of the 1890 United States Census had recently dropped a significant statistic. Noting the westward sweep of settlement, the director wrote: “There can hardly be said to be a frontier line” any longer. The truth was that the census director was in a tearing hurry because the 1890 census had been such a complete disaster that the first director had resigned, leaving his replacement to try to cobble something together. The poor man had cut where he could. Turner nonetheless took the director at his word, and to him this presented a dire scenario. If democracy was continually remade on the frontier, what would happen to America if the frontier was gone?

Beginning in 1901, the Supreme Court, consisting of all but one of the justices who had handed down the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 maintaining that racial segregation was constitutional so long as accommodations were “separate but equal,” decided the issue with a number of cases collectively known as the Insular Cases.

The resurgence of the South’s prewar ideology came from the nation’s new political bloc: the western states. Eastern Republicans had made the mistake of thinking that westerners would join their coalition, only to discover that with their peculiar history and extractive economy, westerners had more in common with antebellum white southerners than with postwar easterners. By the 1890s, a few wealthy men dominated western society. Poor white men had little opportunity, people of color and women had even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way. Still, as in the East before the Civil War, the myth of the individualist convinced Americans that the West was the land of opportunity. Turner’s Frontier Thesis and Roosevelt’s war record took the western ideal and put it on the national stage. By the end of the century, Americans embraced the cowboy image and vowed to spread it across the globe, putting into law that some people were better than others. Once again, freedom was hierarchical.

the progressive legislation of the early twentieth century was possible because it privileged upwardly mobile white men. As in the days of the Founders, democracy was attainable only so long as it was exclusive.

Roosevelt worried that the oligarchs of industry had taken the place of oligarchs of slavery, but that didn’t mean his vision included people of color and union organizers. With them excluded from the body politic, he was perfectly willing to make sure everyone else was treated equally. He would use the power of the federal government to protect the ordinary white man’s ability to be treated according to his own merits.

For a vast number of white Americans, progressive legislation filed the deadly edges off industrialization and made it possible for them to survive.4