The Republican House Divided: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the GOP by Tim Galsworthy published by the University of South Carolina Press (Nov. 2025).
As many of you know, I study the popular memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the last 160 years. Since 2010 I have been a regular reader of Kevin Levin’s blog Civil War Memory, now on Substack, and I look to David Blight and his fellow memory specialists for insights into why our memories are so different about this important era. The Republican House Divided: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and the Transformation of the GOP by Tim Galsworthy is a unique contribution to Civil War memory studies because it traces the transition of Republicans recalling the Civil War as their first big achievement as a party in keeping the United States together and making African Americans into citizens into the Confederate ideal of limited Federal government (an racism) as the Republican standard. The GOP today is more likely to appeal to Confederate ideology than it is to quote Charles Sumner.
Galsworthy traces the modern turn of the Republican Party from being the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Robert E. Lee. The Republican Party led the effort to contain slavery during the 1850s. Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 literally led seven states to secede from the United States. The Republicans led the Union effort to suppress the Confederacy. Lincoln declared emancipation for millions of slaves in the Confederacy and later backed the 13th Amendment in 1864. Republicans in Congress passed the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment that recognized that African Americans were citizens and allowed Black men to vote. In 1866, the Republicans overrode President Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act, which we still use to protect everyone in America.
Blacks made up a sizeable portion of eleven Southern states, and they became a pro-Republican electorate beginning in 1868. Even as the Southern white elite retook control of the Southern states and imposed Jim Crow laws disqualifying Blacks from voting, Northern Republicans still tried to defend civil rights. However, after Theodore Roosevelt the Republicans started to resemble the Democrats, the historic defender of slavery. By the 1920s, the Republicans were just as infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan as the Democrats and their commitment to equal rights was highly questionable. The party still honored Lincoln, but it preferred that white voters did not tie Charles Sumner and Thad Stevens to the GOP.
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, Republicans had gotten three-quarters of the Black vote, but political changes had come with the modern welfare state. While Roosevelt had not made any great strides in advocacy for civil rights, his New Dealism kept people from starving. After Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman did begin forging a Democratic path towards civil rights and in the 1950s elections, Republican Eisenhower had only gotten a third of the Black vote.
The Republican turn towards embracing the Confederacy accelerated during Nixon’s run for the presidency in 1960. Nixon had seen Eisenhower begin to play the Confederacy card when he was vice-president. Eisenhower spoke of his great regard for Robert E. Lee and allowed the playing of Dixie when he visited Southern cities. Nixon not only adopted the symbolism of the white South, he also adopted many of their policies. Not willing to turn his back on Abraham Lincoln, Nixon told audiences that Lincoln would have defended the states’ right to discriminate against African Americans. In the 1960 election, Kennedy got 68% of the Black vote, the highest percentage to vote for a Democrat in history up to that time. But, while Nixon had lost the Black vote, he almost matched JFK in attracting the support of white Southerners. Nixon and his colleagues decided that the Republican Party could only prosper if it became the mechanism for Southern whites to fight back against desegregation.
During JFK’s presidency, the Republicans set up OPERATION DIXIE, a specially designed campaign to convince whites in the South that the Republicans had finally abandoned their Reconstructionist past and fully identified with keeping “the Old Ways” intact. In the 1962 Congressional elections, Republican candidates secured nearly twice as many votes in the South as they had in 1960.
But there were dissenters. Jackie Robinson, a lifelong Republican, spoke out against the abandonment of Blacks. Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Senator Jacob Javits of New York argued that it was immoral to abandon African Americans, particularly because this was the one-hundredth anniversary Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation!
On the right, there was pressure to hasten the embrace of segregation. Barry Goldwater told Republicans in 1961 that they should “forget the Negro vote.” When he announced that he was a candidate for the presidency, he told reporters that Arizona was Confederate territory and he began using Confederate imagery in his campaign materials. While the liberal wing of the Republicans still adhered to civil rights, it got weaker and weaker every month, while Goldwater now had the center stage. Along with the growing conservatism of the rank and file, the recent arrival of the Dixiecrats, Democrats who were leaving their old party because it would not support segregation, pushed the Republican Party even further to the right. They clearly embraced Goldwater.
In 1964, Goldwater was beaten in nearly every region of the country, but he won the Deep South. This precedent established the new base of the Republican Party in the heart of the old Confederacy. On the other hand, Goldwater completely turned off the African American vote. He only got 6% of the Black vote.
What attracted Southern whites and alienated Blacks was, in part, Goldwater running as the embodiment of the Confederate ideal. He was greeted at his rally with the playing of Dixie and he ran his campaign in the South as a Rebel. Having been a boy at the time, I thought that the Republicans did not roll out the Southern Strategy until Nixon ran on it in 1968, but author Tim Galsworthy shows that Goldwater’s gains in the old Confederacy had set the stage for the conversion of the Republican Party.
While Goldwater had made real gains in the South, Nixon was the next candidate for the presidency. He sought to turn the Silent Majority of white people against the “unruly” Black voters. Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey ran against Nixon, and he, a Minnesota liberal and civil rights advocate, also adopted the Confederacy in his speeches in the South. In one appearance he told his audience that the last Republican who had appeared in that city was William T. Sherman. He did not convince anyone with his newfound Confederate identity.
When Nixon won the 1968 election, he sent his vice-president Spiro Agnew to cater to the South. Agnew was from Maryland, and so could be thought of as a Southerner, but his family was made up of Greek immigrants with no ties to the Confederacy. As part of his efforts, Agnew gave an address at Edgefield in South Carolina where the Ku Klux Klan had carried out a pointed campaign of terror during Reconstruction. Agnew also dedicated the Confederate Disneyland at Stone Mountain where he said that Robert E. Lee was the best army commander of the war and Stonewall Jackson was the best division commander. He even hailed Jeff Davis!
While the leadership of the party embraced the Confederacy, their old opponent, Nelson Rockefeller gave up. He abandoned his support for outreach to Blacks, broke off his relationship with Jackie Robinson, and softened his opposition to segregation. Strange that a politician who had heroically opposed this sort of dangerous alliance with white supremacy got into line with Nixon just ten years later.
Tim Galsworthy does a good job of examining the turn in the Republican Party in the 1960s. He uses the last section of the book to describe how this change still impacts the GOP. If you have been reading the releases from the Trump Administration over the last year, you would have to agree with this. I would have like for Galsworthy to spend more time on the transmission of Confederacy Lite up to the present day, since it has been a half-century since Nixon resigned. Why did Gerald Ford from Michigan, Ronald Reagan from California, George H.W. from Maine, and Donald Trump from New York keep the Confederate creed alive and what were their methods? Why didn’t the Wall Street backers of the Republicans put a stop to this dangerous turn. Perhaps Galsworthy will take that on in his next book.
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