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
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