Restoring the Union not only ensured a continuation of the vibrant antiliberal tradition in America, it also gave antiliberalism a continuing foothold within the constitutional system, even as “purified” by the Civil War amendments. The Democratic Party, which had been captured by the slaveholders in the antebellum years, remained the party of the South, and therefore of institutionalized racism, after the war and for the next century, even under progressive liberal reforming presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
