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

by Heather Cox Richardson

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. Like elite slaveholders before the Civil War, they believed in a world defined by hierarchies, where most people—dull, uneducated, black, female, weak, or poor—needed the guidance of their betters.

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 Indians were savages, and considered women inferior.

In the Founders’ minds, then, the principle of equality depended on inequality.

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.”

Immediately after the Civil War, Americans moved westward, to a land that had its own history, quite different than that of the American East. 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.

Just as the image of the yeoman farmer in the East after the Revolution had helped pave the way for the rise of southern planters, the image of the cowboy helped spur a return to a caste system. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that American democracy itself was continually reinvented in the West, where ordinary men worked together and stood against the repressive government back in the settled East.

The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and Eisenhower’s enforcement of racial equality at Little Rock Central High three years later enabled Movement Conservatives to enlist racism in their cause. Just as slaveholders had done in the 1850s, they took the stance that no matter how popular an activist government was, it would eventually destroy America by destroying liberty. In an echo of Reconstruction, they warned that expanded voting enabled black people to elect leaders who promised “special interest” legislation. All appearances to the contrary, they said, this was not equality. It was tyranny. 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.

Peter Thiel summed up the changing political climate when he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Recalling the Enlightenment idea that government was a social compact that depended on the consent of the people governed, they insisted that the Crown’s power had limits. Colonists began to resist the king’s policies, especially the Stamp Act.

Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet that ridiculed the idea of monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. Starting from the premise that men were inherently equal, he declared the distinction between monarchs and subjects completely artificial. It could only lead to misery.

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.

the gulf widened between white men, on the one hand, and Indians and slaves, on the other.35 That distinction was carried into the founding document of the American nation. Without irony, Virginian James Madison crafted the Constitution to guarantee that wealthy slaveholders would control the new government. Under the new system, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation, Virginia commanded an astonishing 21 electoral votes, 15.9 percent of the total votes in the Electoral College, the highest percentage of votes controlled by a single state in American history.

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.

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.

Under Jackson, southerners determined to get in on the cotton boom adjusted their vision of democracy to justify their seizure of vast swaths of land owned by the Cherokees and Chickasaws. The Cherokees had embraced formal education, adopted a constitution, and even developed a capitalist economy, including slave owning. They had launched their own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1828, and some of their leaders lived in plantation homes that rivaled those of local white elites. Jacksonians nonetheless defined their Indian neighbors as “savages,” ignoring their assimilation and appropriating their land. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing southeastern tribes to leave their lands and walk a thousand miles to Oklahoma on a journey known as the Trail of Tears.

Most Americans opposed adding the slaveholding Republic of Texas, and pointed out that the lands there still belonged to Mexico. Southern Democrats backed the acquisition. Adherents of what was called the Young America Movement argued that Americans had a political, moral, and religious duty—a “manifest destiny”—to spread democracy around the world . . . and across the continent.

After the War of 1812 ended, settlers in Maine wanted to break off from Massachusetts and become a state. Southerners insisted on balancing the statehood of Maine, where slavery was banned, with a new slave state, Missouri.

While abolitionists argued that slavery was immoral, southern ministers pointed out that slavery had precedents in the Bible and in ancient Greece and Rome, and that the Founders themselves had held slaves.

Despite popular fury at the measure, Democratic president Franklin Pierce put enormous pressure on members of the House to pass it. They did, finally, on May 8, 1854. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned the Democratic Party into the party of slaveholders. In the 1854 elections, voters in the North threw Democrats out of office; only those in the most extreme districts managed to hold onto power. By 1855, moderate Democrats were gone, and slave owners had taken control of the national party.

“To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be,” Buchanan declared.27 Two days later, the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, which gave slave owners everything they wanted. It declared that African Americans were not citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, because the Constitution required the protection of property, including slaves.

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. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” he explained. Unlike in the mudsill theory, those at the bottom were there not because of a caste system, but because of improvidence, folly, or singular bad luck. If able, they were free to move up.

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.

Before the war, America had no national system of taxation. During the Civil War, Congress placed taxes of 5 percent on virtually every item made in America. Since that gave untaxed foreign products an unfair advantage over those made at home, Congress also put new comprehensive tariffs—essentially taxes on imports—on every imported product representatives could think of.

Then, to make sure that a poor man’s son and a rich man’s son had the same access to education, Congress passed the Land Grant College Act, providing western land to states to sell in order to fund public colleges. This farsighted law was the basis for the nation’s public universities.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the lands still under the Confederacy’s control.

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.

Nonetheless, “Remember the Alamo!” became a cry that justified the annexation of Texas, particularly by leaders from the new Democratic Party that had formed around Andrew Jackson. They developed the concept of “Manifest Destiny”: that it was the inevitable, God-ordained future of America to take over the entire continent.

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.

Toombs insisted that “only those who owned the country should govern it, and men who had no property had no right to make laws for property-holders.”

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.

In Turner’s view, this nation was different from any other. Unlike countries in the Old World, which were fully settled and where more complex societies had been established for ages, America had the landscape to continually reform democracy. The growing power of wealthy men at the moment Turner wrote his influential article made it more convincing, and his theory burrowed deep into the nation’s ideology. Even today, when politicians talk about how America is exceptional, they are, consciously or unconsciously, echoing Turner’s Frontier Thesis.

The press dubbed Roosevelt’s men “Rough Riders,” after the heroes in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

Rather than assuming that any new acquisitions would automatically begin the process of becoming states incorporated into the Union, as had been the case since the signing of the Constitution, the Supreme Court decided that the islands were “unincorporated territories”; that is, they were, to paraphrase the southern Democratic Justice Edward Douglass White, “foreign in a domestic sense.” Sugar growers could bring in their product without paying tariffs, but the land was not fully American.

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.

By the turn of the twentieth century, inequality was written into American law. That inequality did not spell the triumph of oligarchy, though, for the simple reason that the emergence of the western individualist as a national archetype reengaged the paradox that lay at the core of America’s foundation. Denigrating people of color, organized workers, and independent women actually weakened the ability of oligarchs to cement their power: they could not convincingly argue that government activism was designed to redistribute wealth from hardworking white men to the undeserving poor. Indeed, 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.

Lincoln divided the world largely into two groups: workingmen and the powerful few. Roosevelt also divided the world in two, but he divided it between hardworking men who wanted nothing from government, and those who wanted everything from it. While Lincoln called for a government that helped workingmen rather than oligarchs, Roosevelt’s vision inherently privileged upwardly mobile white men over people of color, independent women, or anyone mired in poverty.

The rise of the individualist resurrected the legitimacy of racism.

In the early part of the twentieth century, southern towns began to erect statues to Confederates, making them into western-style heroes and individualists. No longer were Confederate soldiers fighting for slavery. Instead, as the dedication speaker for the statue that stood on the University of North Carolina campus put it, they fought for states’ rights against “consolidated despotism.” Their heroic individualism had preserved democracy for northerners, who were finally coming around to see the light. Confederate wives, sisters, and mothers had nurtured the soldiers, cheered them on, remained devoted to the cause, and kept alive the memory of the dead.

The Osage had managed to reserve mineral rights below their land, which should have made them rich when oil turned up there. Instead it put their lives in jeopardy. Criminals married women for access to their land and then murdered them to inherit it, and then officials overlooked the murders.

Located primarily in the South and West, the rioters echoed the idea that black equality meant communism. As President Woodrow Wilson put it: “The American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.”

When Dixon worked with film director D. W. Griffith, the Kentucky-born son of a Confederate colonel, to turn The Clansman into the groundbreaking film Birth of a Nation, Wilson permitted Dixon to show it at the White House (although Wilson later denied that he had ever endorsed the film in the words so often attributed to him).

Social Security deliberately excluded domestic workers and farm workers, both fields in which black workers predominated.

It was not much of a leap from Dunning’s work to declaring that perhaps slavery wasn’t such a bad thing.

The Southern Agrarians, as they were known, blamed modernity, urbanization, and industrialization for destroying the best of American traditions in the name of progress, and they championed what they called an “agrarian” way of life, one steeped in independence, which they believed would answer the South’s economic, political, and racial problems. The Southern Agrarians included some of the South’s best-known white literary figures, but it was a housewife from Atlanta who truly popularized their version of Reconstruction. Margaret Mitchell had grown up enamored of Thomas Dixon’s books—as a child she organized plays based on them, and she once wrote him a fan letter.

Wilder loathed the New Deal, and her portrait of her upbringing was the western individualist mythology personified. In her stories, Pa was the rock of the family, protecting them from Indians and providing for his wife and four girls with the deer he shot, the muskrat he trapped, and the fields he planted. Men had to look out for themselves, he told Laura, because they were “free and independent.”35 In fact, Pa had never been able to support his family; he had relied on income from the work of Laura, her sisters, and her mother. To hear Wilder tell it, the family had scrimped and saved to send her blind sister Mary to college; the reality was that the state of South Dakota had paid for six years of tuition and room and board for Mary, and the family had scrimped and saved for the money to buy her clothes and her train ticket. Nonetheless, that image of an independent man caring for his loving wife and daughters struck a chord in the Depression, and the Little House books instantly became—and remain—some of the most influential American literary works of all time.

The government regulated the stock market to stop the risky practices that had led to the Great Crash, and stabilized the financial system with the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and savings banks, and with federal insurance for bank deposits. New Deal policies also gave Americans unemployment and old age insurance—Social Security—and helped poor people buy food. Crucially, they also gave workers real bargaining power in their negotiations with employers.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Mexican Americans challenged school segregation in California and won, forcing California Governor Earl Warren to change the laws. Then in 1948, in Shelly v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court declared that racial housing restrictions violated the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The dominance of the liberal consensus infuriated old-school Hoover Republicans, libertarians, and fundamentalist Christians who hated the New Deal’s secular reforms. Led by Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of former president William Howard Taft, these men insisted that any government intervention in the economy was socialism.

Recognizing that they had little chance of recovering popular support, they abandoned reasoned argument and instead turned to the use of narrative to regain control. They hammered on the idea that the New Deal liberal consensus was destroying America by making it communist. As soon as the war was over, Republicans in Congress, with Taft as their leader, first cut back on the rights of workers by prohibiting unions from donating to national political campaigns, among other things, then launched investigations into whether communists had infiltrated Hollywood and were spreading their dogma through films.