How the South Won the Civil War Quotes

“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.”40”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“The search for majorities always results in either greater disfranchisement or wider suffrage, and in this case, leaders reached out to poor white men for their victories.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“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.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“They controlled government simply by refusing to compromise on their principles, enacting policies designed to destroy the liberal consensus, and refusing to consider any measure advanced by their opponents. Thanks to gerrymandering, they didn't have to. Grover Norquist said triumphantly: "We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We just need a president to sign this stuff. . . . Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“In 1888, when Cleveland won the popular vote again by about 90,000 votes, Republican operatives maneuvered the Electoral College to award victory to Benjamin Harrison. (When Harrison, a devout Presbyterian, mused that Providence had given him the victory, his political manager, Mark Hanna, grumbled, “Providence hadn’t a damn thing to do with it. [A] number of men were compelled to approach the penitentiary to make him President.”)2”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“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.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., a devout Catholic fresh out of Yale, the son of an oilman, suggested a new approach to destroying the liberal consensus. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley suggested that the whole idea that people would make good decisions through argument based on evidence—the Enlightenment idea that had shaped America since its founding—was wrong. Had that been true, Americans would not have kept supporting the government activism launched by the New Deal. Americans’ faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition,” he said, than the superstitions the Enlightenment had set out to replace.15 Rather than continuing to try to change people’s beliefs through evidence-based arguments, he said, those opposed to the New Deal should stand firm on an “orthodoxy” of religion and individualism and refuse to accept any questioning of those two fundamental p”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“The conflict between a hierarchical society and one based on equality is rooted deeply in European-American society, and it is a battle America has fought since its founding. When a group of slaveholders embraced the idea that they, and they alone, should control the nation’s political and economic system, thus threatening democracy in the 1860s, Americans fought back and rededicated the country to equality. A quirk of geography and timing meant they failed to make their principles stick. The idea of the American paradox moved west, where its adherents over time reasserted control over American culture. From Reconstruction through World War II, Americans recreated a hierarchical society. The fight against fascism—the modern form of hierarchical society—once again challenged that paradox. The ensuing drive for universal equality, though, enabled oligarchs to mobilize their corollary to the American paradox, gaining power by convincing voters that equality for people of color and women destroyed liberty. Now, for the second time, we are called to defend the principle of democracy.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

“Andrew Henry, the editor of the West Alabamian newspaper, wrote that white men would have to “submit to have our wives and daughters chose [sic] between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! Submit to have our children murdered, our dwellings burnt and our country desolated!!”
― Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America