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

by Heather Cox Richardson

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.

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.”

Westerners wholeheartedly endorsed those sentiments. A friend of William Sharon’s, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, helped to write them into American law. A Forty-Niner like Sharon, Field rose quickly in legal circles in California, and Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1863 to represent the important new region. Field was a Democrat who shared the racism of his party. He was also an advocate for mining leaders like Sharon, who had once loaned him $25,000—Field never repaid it—and put him up in a fancy hotel for free whenever he came back to San Francisco. In his thirty-four years on the Court, Field wrote more opinions than almost any other Supreme Court justice in history, insisting that the primary law in America was not the promotion of equality but rather the protection of property.24

White delegates to the convention heckled and threatened black attendees. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson—until then a keen Republican—left the Cow Palace shaken. “A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy,” Robinson said. He added that he now knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Eisenhower so valued expertise that he had accepted the presidency of Columbia University after the war and continued his practice of consulting a wide range of experts after he moved into the White House. He warned that simple solutions were misleading. The modern world was complex, and inaccurate “stridency” coming from people like Joe McCarthy threatened to undermine democracy by inducing voters to place too much power in the hands of charismatic leaders.

Nixon initially tried to steer a middle course between traditional Republicans and the party’s growing Movement Conservative faction, but his own political crisis helped boost the latter’s narrative. Worried about his chances for reelection in 1972, Nixon and his handlers decided to break off Catholics and southern voters from the Democratic Party by politicizing the issue of abortion. Until the 1970s, abortion had been seen largely as a civil rights issue, with NOW organizer Betty Friedan noting in 1969 that “there is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies.” In 1971, even the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortion rights, taking the position that life began at birth, and a Republican campaign document from 1972 revealed data showing that “a sizeable majority of Americans, including Roman Catholics, now favoring liberal abortion laws.” More Republicans than Democrats supported abortion rights, a reality reflected in the fact that the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who, like the chief justice during the case, Warren Burger, was a staunch Republican.55

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.

In both of those eras, rich men attempted to garner power through words and images that convinced American voters that extending the right of self-determination to people of color, women, and poor Americans would destroy it for white men. That argument is based on the American paradox, and it is a reflection of American history, not of logic.