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A Union Army headquarters building
How the South Won the Civil War
By Heather Cox Richardson
Oxford University Press
“The South lost the war but won the peace.” Discuss.
In How the South Won the Civil War, Heather Cox Richardson gives this classroom perennial a provocative twist. College history students have long encountered some version of this prompt on their exams. Typical responses begin with the existential threat that the slaveholders’ insurrection posed to the Union and the incalculable benefit that flowed from the emancipation of four million slaves.
But students then describe the white supremacist backlash that followed the Confederacy’s military defeat—a backlash that included the proliferation of white supremacist terrorist cells (the Ku Klux Klan); the failure of land reform (“forty acres and a mule”); the gutting of the Civil Rights Act of 1875; the withdrawal of federal troops from the ex-Confederate states; and the restoration throughout the South of one-party Democratic rule. Students sometimes also point to the continuing systematic denial of rights to African Americans that had been guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Richardson reframes the question in space and time. No longer is the fate of the Confederacy decided in the South. On the contrary, its champions—the “oligarchs”—would fan out throughout the United States to fight another day. Twice in American history, a tiny cabal of “extraordinarily wealthy men” have conspired to undermine the “genius” of America that is the promise of freedom, a “profoundly exciting, innovative, and principled notion” that has since the 16th century shaped the DNA of the inhabitants of the patch of earth that would become the United States.
The promise of freedom has evolved over time; at a minimum, it has found expression in the democratic idea that George Washington called the “Great Experiment,” that is, the establishment of a government based on the idea that “human beings had the right to determine their own fate.” A present-day Jeremiah, Richardson laments the betrayal of the nation’s soul, first by the slaveholders whose secession from the Union in 1861 convulsed the nation in civil war; and second, by the “movement conservatives” in the 1950s who challenged the “liberal consensus” behind desegregation and paved the way for the Republican Party of today.
Richardson is a prolific historian—this is her sixth book—who specializes in the political history of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Best known for her lean and lucid history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014), she is a frequent commentator on contemporary affairs and since late 2019 has published a much-admired daily online newsletter on contemporary politics entitled “Letters from an American.”
How the South Won the Civil War is a fast-paced, engaging, and morally impassioned survey ofAmerican political history that does not pull any punches. Richardson’s heroes—not only the usual suspects such as Washington, Lincoln, and FDR but also a multitude of women and people of color—champion freedom, equality, and democracy. Her villains, who are invariably wealthy white men, are status-anxious revanchists terrified of change. To an extent that is rare among professional historians today, she frames her narrative around the core commitments of the major political parties, reinventing for our age a venerable genre of historical writing that predated the late-19th-century emergence of the historical profession.
In the early Republic, historians wrote as they voted. George Bancroft’s History of the United States of America (1834) was staunchly Democratic, while Richard Hildreth’s History of the United States (1860) defended the Whigs. Richardson lionizes the party of Lincoln and the mid-20th-century political consensus that birthed the civil rights movement, the equal-rights wing of the women’s movement, and the Great Society.
Political history written by academic historians today often focuses more on what lawmakers did than on how politicians justified their positions. For Richardson, in contrast, partisan jousting remains the primary concern. Administrative agencies, state (and municipal) politics, Congress, and the courts are mostly offstage. When it comes to the ballot box, Richardson is no “plague on both your houses” cynic. A fervent admirer of the original, mid-19th-century Republican Party, she has positive things to say about Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower and loathes mid-19th-century Democrats and the post-Eisenhower-era Republican Party.
Richardson’s drama unfolds in three acts. Act One foregrounds the “American paradox,” which turns out provocatively to be no paradox at all. Everyone knows that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence—which trumpeted the “radical idea” that “all men were created equal”—was drafted by a slaveholder who regarded Indians as savages and women and paupers as his inferior. How could this be? While seemingly inconsistent, this “apparent contradiction” was a “key feature of the new democratic republic.”
Like most political elites throughout history, the authors of the Declaration remained wedded to the “traditional idea” that, despite their rhetorical commitment to human equality, a few wealthy men should control the government and rule the lives of women, the poor, and people of color. “This is the paradox that sits at the heart of our nation.”
Richardson is hardly the first historian to ponder this paradox. Gordon Wood has long contended hopefully that, though the primary beneficiaries of the War of Independence were white men, the egalitarian promise of the Revolution, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, would eventually be extended to groups other than themselves. Richardson is less sanguine. Like Wood, she praises white male equality as an “extraordinary” idea. Unlike Wood, she believes that, from the standpoint of the authors of the Declaration, the exclusion of Blacks, women, and Indians was a feature, not a bug.
White male equality for them was inconceivable in the absence of white male dominance over their inferiors. Freedom for all meant no freedom for white men. It was this peculiar syllogism that explained why the American paradox was so pernicious: It gave a small group of wealthy men the language they needed to “undermine our democracy, and to replace it with an oligarchy.”
How could wealthy white men—a tiny minority of the electorate—persuade a majority of voters to back their cause? Like their present-day successors, they silenced dissenters, broadcast fake news, and rigged the electoral process. In the 1850s, the slaveholding oligarchs who dominated Southern politics went even further, linking racism, sexism, and eventually classism to the “uplifting ideal” that had inspired the Founders—“faith in the possibilities of equality.” Enslaved African Americans, as South Carolina Sen. James Henry Hammond explained in 1858, were an “inferior” class at the “mudsill” of society, whose labor permitted well-connected, educated, and wealthy whites to advance.
The authors of the Declaration of Independence had made a grave error, warned Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in 1861, when they proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” On the contrary, the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy rested on the “opposite idea”: the “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The poor whites who backed Hammond and Stephens were simultaneously vicious racists and fervent democrats. Freedom for them was inconceivable in the absence of unfreedom for Blacks. And so the war came.
Act Two foregrounds the Civil War, which the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln fought to “banish the idea that a few wealthy white men should rule society.” The abolition of slavery was a means to this end. Emancipation—the “new birth of freedom”—vindicated the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence, and, for a time, Republicans used the “might of the newly powerful federal government” to “guarantee that equality.”
The Republicans won the war but lost the peace, just as the history textbooks have long contended. Yet their egalitarian crusade met with defeat not only in the South, but also in the West. The West, far from being the land of freedom of myth and legend, was from the 1850s onward rigidly structured by race—with whites at the top, and Blacks, Indians, and Mexicans at the bottom. Brutal wars of extermination against Indian tribes during the Civil War only “reinforced” the tragic fact that it was not just in the South, but also in the West, that the “oligarchic ideas of the defeated South would thrive.”
Act Three opens in the East, with the transmogrification of the Republicans into the party of land-grabbing railroad barons and tariff-hungry industrialists. Republican maverick Theodore Roosevelt briefly challenged the party’s embrace of big business by insisting that corporations pay fair taxes and not monopolize public resources. Yet he too favored white men over people of color, independent women, and the indigent poor.
The contest between oligarchy and democracy took a different form during the New Deal. Committed to government activism, the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt promoted policies that “privileged white men over women and people of color.” FDR’s fight against fascism changed the political calculus, leading to a revival of the civil rights movement that had been stalled after the Civil War, and, for a brief moment, a liberal consensus challenged the American paradox.
Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that found school segregation unconstitutional, however, the “drive for universal equality” emboldened movement conservatives such as journalist William F. Buckley to demonize the liberal consensus as an attack on white male prerogative, emulating the James Henry Hammonds of the 1850s.
Associated Press
Barry Goldwater’s failed candidacy in 1964 paved the way for Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump.
Movement conservatives scored a temporary victory in 1964 with the nomination of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate. Often photographed wearing a ten-gallon hat, Goldwater symbolized the ascendancy of the South-West coalition that had coopted the egalitarian vision of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Once again, oligarchs trumpeted the “fundamental American idea” that admitting people of color and women to “positions of equality with white men” would “by definition, destroy American freedom.” Goldwater’s defeat proved to be a setback, but only a temporary one. By widening the gap in the Republican Party between ideology and reality, Goldwater’s candidacy paved the way for the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump.
How the South Won the Civil War provides liberals with a riveting “just so” story. It is not written for, and is not likely to find favor among, libertarians, white nationalists, or MAGA true believers. But is it persuasive? The answer to this question is in large part a matter of personal conviction. If one affirms that America has a soul that was “born in idealism” to uphold the “profound principle” that “all human beings had a right to self-determination,” Richardson has written a compelling account of the betrayal of this ideal.
Political theorists for centuries have pondered whether equality and liberty can be reconciled. Must liberty for some demand inequality for others? Richardson, taking inspiration from uber-Republican Abraham Lincoln, has written a testament for everyone who shares her belief that—despite all of the white supremacist evils that the nation has confronted, and is confronting—the circle can be squared.
Richardson’s strong suit is ideology, party warfare (especially for the 19th century), and cultural criticism. She makes an intriguing case, for example, for the influence of TV Westerns on the worldview of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. A comprehensive political history would pay more attention to public policy, international relations, the nonfederal state, and the bipartisan embrace of social norms that cut across party lines.
But this is not the book Richardson intended to write. How the South Won the Civil War is a bracing wake-up call for Americans who have forgotten, or were never taught, that white male ressentiment is powerful, immoral, and un-American, that powerful white men have twice tried to destroy the Republic, and that patriotic Americans have an obligation to educate themselves to help ensure that this never happens again.
If Lincoln were alive today, he would be a Democrat, Mario Cuomo once said. In an age in which electoral politics is showing signs of strain reminiscent of the crisis of the 1850s, Richardson has doubled down on party genealogy. Nineteenth-century defenders of African American rights—and there were many, white as well as Black—would understand why Richardson finds so much to admire in Lincoln’s Republican Party, yet today’s readers may have trouble imagining any Republican Party other than Donald Trump’s. This summer’s protests for racial justice are one promising sign that at least some Americans are upholding the fight that Lincoln’s Republicans began. Let us hope that the “better angels of our nature” that Lincoln invoked in his First Inaugural will make their voices heard in November.
