How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, advances a provocative thesis: The Confederate ideology of hierarchy and oligarchy was not destroyed on Civil War battlefields but migrated westward, where it regained strength and, over 150 years, came to dominate American politics. She traces this argument from the nation's founding through the presidency of Donald Trump, identifying a recurring pattern in which wealthy men exploit a contradiction at the heart of American democracy to seize power.

Richardson begins with what she calls the "American paradox." The Founders declared that all men are created equal while simultaneously owning slaves, excluding women from governance, and treating Indigenous peoples as savages. This was not a contradiction but a feature, she argues: Equality among the men who governed depended on the exclusion of those deemed incapable of self-determination. She traces the paradox to colonial Virginia, where, after Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 united poor whites and enslaved Black people against Tidewater elites, colonial leaders split the lower classes along racial lines. The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 gave white servants legal protections while stripping all rights from enslaved Black people, making slavery hereditary and racial. This arrangement shaped the Constitution itself, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation and gave slaveholding Virginia outsized electoral power.

In the antebellum era, Richardson shows, the cotton economy transformed the South into an oligarchy. Wealth concentrated among a few large planters who defended permanent hierarchy: Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina argued in 1858 that every society needed a "mudsill" class to perform menial labor so an educated elite could drive progress. Slaveholders attacked democracy through censorship, gag rules, election fraud in Kansas, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared that African Americans had no rights. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican presidential candidate who championed the opposing "free labor" theory that hardworking men could and should rise, warned that these efforts would destroy the Republic. His 1860 election prompted southern secession; the Confederacy, as Vice President Alexander Stephens declared, rested on the principle that "the negro is not equal to the white man" (65). The Civil War temporarily resolved this crisis: The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship, and prohibited racial restrictions on voting.

That triumph proved fragile. Richardson's central argument is that Confederate ideology found a second life in the American West. Even as eastern Republicans erased racial categories from law, the West entrenched hierarchy. California's 1850 constitution limited citizenship to "free white persons" and prohibited nonwhites from testifying against whites. The Gold Rush era saw the systematic dispossession of Mexican landowners despite treaty guarantees and the enslavement of Indigenous children. The Civil War intensified racial violence in the region: The Dakota War of 1862, the forced march of Navajos to Bosque Redondo, and the Sand Creek Massacre, in which Colorado militia killed peaceful Cheyennes, all hardened Americans' dehumanization of Indigenous peoples.

During Reconstruction, Democrats linked race to class, arguing that Black suffrage allowed people to use their ballots to confiscate white taxpayers' money. This argument gained traction in the North amid fears of labor radicalism and the 1871 Paris Commune, an uprising of Parisian workers that Americans interpreted as a revolt of the lower classes against property owners. Simultaneously, the myth of the cowboy emerged: a hardworking white individualist who asked nothing of government. In reality, about a third of cowboys were men of color, and the federal government was more active in the West than anywhere else, but the image proved politically powerful.

The new western states, admitted rapidly between 1889 and 1890 to bolster Republican electoral strength, created a political bloc more aligned with the antebellum South than with Civil War-era Republican principles. Western extractive industries concentrated wealth and depended on cheap labor. Western and southern leaders cooperated across party lines: Southern states disenfranchised Black voters while western Republicans helped block anti-lynching legislation. Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 Frontier Thesis reimagined American democracy as born on the frontier through the efforts of ordinary white men, erasing people of color and women from the national story.

By the early twentieth century, the restoration of racial and gender hierarchies paradoxically enabled progressive reform. Because people of color were formally subordinate, oligarchs could no longer convincingly claim that government activism redistributed wealth to the undeserving. From President Theodore Roosevelt, who broke up industrial trusts and promoted a "square deal" for ordinary white men, through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal regulated business and expanded infrastructure, progressives grew the role of government while maintaining racial distinctions, excluding domestic and farm workers from Social Security and directing subsidies to white farmers.

World War II disrupted this arrangement. Americans from all backgrounds served, and the fight against fascism forced the nation to confront its own discriminatory practices. Veterans of color returned determined to claim full equality, launching legal challenges that led to the desegregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This expansion of equality triggered what Richardson calls democracy's second great crisis.

Movement Conservatives, a postwar political movement that coalesced around opposition to the New Deal, exploited the paradox's corollary: If equality depends on exclusion, then inclusion destroys freedom. William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative writer and organizer, argued that reasoned debate should yield to an "orthodoxy" of religion and individualism. Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign brought this ideology to national prominence. Though he lost in a landslide, he carried five Deep South states plus Arizona, merging the Old South and the New West against the liberal consensus, the postwar bipartisan agreement that government should regulate business and provide social welfare. President Richard Nixon then pursued a "southern strategy" of abandoning Black voters, while the politicization of abortion attracted Catholic Democrats and the religious right built a powerful grassroots network.

Republican candidate Ronald Reagan brought these strands together in 1980, launching his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near where three civil rights workers had been murdered, and declaring in his inaugural address that "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem" (200). His tax cuts reversed the Great Compression, the midcentury narrowing of income inequality, and produced the Great Divergence: By 2015, the top 1 percent of families owned as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, with minorities and women disproportionately affected. Subsequent Republican leaders, from House Speaker Newt Gingrich's purge of party moderates to the development of Fox News Channel, pushed the party further right while manipulating electoral systems through voter suppression and gerrymandering.

Donald Trump's 2016 election, Richardson argues, stripped the remaining veneer from this ideology. He cultivated white supremacist support, denigrated women, lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, and governed in ways that concentrated wealth while attacking the press. Richardson draws an explicit parallel to 1860, quoting a Georgia legislator's warning against "black Republicans" in language nearly identical to Trump-era rhetoric.

Richardson concludes that this crisis differs from the one that followed Reconstruction. For the first time, all Americans have a voice. Women became an independent voting bloc after 1980 and have increasingly voted against the individualist ideology, with the gender gap growing from 8 points to 23 points by 2018. The question the Founders posed, whether a government based on human self-determination can endure, remains open, but Richardson suggests that the full inclusion of all Americans in democracy is the only way to neutralize the paradox that has twice allowed oligarchy to rise.