How The South Won The Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, And The Continuing Fight For The Soul Of America

By Heather Cox Richardson

In her new book, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, Heather Cox Richardson says oligarchy and democracy are two incompatible ideologies woven into the fabric of this nation. While readers may disagree with her premise, and many will, it would be hard to deny the historical facts presented by this history professor and author of five previous books on American politics. Richardson’s sources are thoroughly documented, inviting readers to do their own research.

In an oligarchy, the author explains, wealth accumulates “in the hands of those who had the knowledge and skills to use it most effectively. Those educated, wealthy, and connected men would create progress.” Lesser people in the hierarchy (“dull, uneducated, black, female, weak, or poor”) labor to produce that wealth. In a democracy, however, power is held by elected representatives of all the people. In this concept of equality and self-determination, “self-reliant individuals produced and innovated far more effectively than a small group of elites, whose wealth insulated them from the need to experiment.”

The men who established the United States of America on the concept that “all men are created equal” defined “all men” as themselves. They “owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior,” the author reminds us. Even today, she continues, “At times when it seems as if people of color or women will become equal to white men, oligarchs are able to court white male voters by insisting that universal equality will, in fact, reduce white men to subservience.”

In 1859, a South Carolina senator explained the slaveholders’ belief of two classes in society. He said most people belonged to a class of menial laborers, the “mudsill” of society, who were content to have their labor directed by their betters. They supported the men who were intelligent and wealthy, who understood the economy and ran the government.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln argued against this “mudsill” theory, which divided the world into permanent castes, with capitalists driving the economy and workers stuck at the bottom. He espoused the “free labor” theory, in which workers drove the economy and hardworking men could rise in fortune.

When California became the first Western territory to attain statehood, it limited citizenship to “free white persons,” gave the vote to white male citizens only, and prohibited non-whites from testifying in court against white people. Richardson describes how the federal government violated Indian treaties, passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and other laws that wrested property ownership from Mexicans, and denied nonwhites access to the legal system. Throughout the West, government at all levels sided with wealthy cattlemen and industrialists, just as slaveowners had held power in the pre-war South.

As the West gained political power, North versus South changed to West versus East. “Like the antebellum South, society in the West was hierarchical according to race, class, and gender,” the author writes. Americans who moved there after the Civil War kept alive the vision of the world that had inspired Confederates. Just as the South in the early nineteenth century became the cultural and political force that dominated American society, so has the West in the late twentieth century: “In both of those eras, rich men attempted to garner power through words and images that convinced American voters that extending the right of self-determination to people of color, women, and poor Americans would destroy it for white men.”

The West and South came together in the 1964 Presidential election, when Republican candidate Barry Goldwater carried his home state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South. His platform of individualism and small government, the author suggests, was rejected by Americans who recognized “that they would not be where they were now without the government stabilizing the economy and promoting opportunity.”

During the Ronald Reagan presidency, the author states, Republicans “rewrote history in order to divide voters and win election by turning their supporters against minorities and women. In this narrative, the popular policies of the liberal consensus were just what the Reconstruction years had been in this telling: a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to the undeserving.” As an example, she offers Reagan’s image of a “welfare queen” who lived on taxpayer dollars.

“The world of 2018 looked a lot like that of 1860,” Richardson writes. This time, it was the Republican Party “slashing regulation and taxes on the wealthy, establishing government policies to benefit party leaders and people with money, and arranging public policy to remand the vast majority of Americans to positions from which they could never rise.”

How the South Won the Civil War is a must-read for any individual interested in understanding the political culture and history of the United States. Well-documented, balanced, and easy to read, the book shows how Lincoln’s Republican Party became today’s Democratic Party, and the Democrats of the 1800s are the Republicans of today. The development of conservative and liberal philosophies, especially in the 1950s, is also traced. The opposing ideologies of a wise and wealthy elite versus resourceful workers struggling to better themselves still compete in American society.