How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson published by oxford University Press (2020) 272 pages $27.95 Hardcover.
No, the new book How the South Won the Civil War is not an alternate history of the 1860s. It is an argument for the proposition that the ideas that underlay the Confederacy gained a foothold in the West and eventually became the dominant paradigm within the late-20th Century Republican Party.
At the same time that blue-clad soldiers were freeing slaves in the South, soldiers in identical uniforms were slaughtering Native Americans in the West. As Easterners were rejoicing at the end of slavery, Richardson writes; “Westerners were celebrating the fact that they had finally secured their region from Mexicans and Indians. In the North, the war had bolstered democracy. In the West, it had reinforced a society in which the oligarchic ideas of the defeated South would thrive.”
Reconstruction had a different meaning in the West from the civil racial equality it moved towards in the East. The clause of the 14th Amendment granting citizenship irrespective of race to those born in the U.S. covered most non-whites in the East. However, in the West the largest groups of people of color were Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. The naturalization laws barred Chinese born abroad from becoming U.S. Citizens. Native Americans living in tribal societies were left out of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. There were only a little over 4,000 African Americans living in California in 1870, but many times that number of Chinese immigrants and native peoples.
At the same time, a popular image of the Westerner as an independent man free from government intervention took hold nationally through pulp Westerns and the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill. Of course the image ignored the fact that Western whites exploited resources of lands won just a couple of decades earlier by United States troops and that they received the land free or at very low cost from the Federal government. The railroads that took their goods to market had been heavily subsidized by the same Federal government that the Western whites supposedly had no need of. The white Western large landowner had more in common with the master of a plantation in the Old South than was recognized at the time, according to Richardson. As the Republican Party saw its power base shift from New England towards the West, its base shifted from racial egalitarian towards views that were not dissimilar from those of Southern Democrats. How far a march was it really for the Party of Lincoln to become the Party of Jeff Davis after 1968? The ground for the power shift had been prepared decades earlier.
If you have already read Richardson’s well-regarded history of the Republican Party To Make Men Free you will find that the author trod some of the same ground before. In fact, I wonder if you really would even want to read this new book if you already read Richardson’s 2014 classic. I think the new book, with its provocative title and its immediate pre-pandemic/BLM feel repackages Richardson’s earlier insights for an American electorate wondering how the hell the Republican Party moved so far away from Lincoln.
Unlike To Make Men Free, in this volume Richardson draws a direct line from the Civil War and the suppression of Native Americans in the 19th Century to the Trump administration. Whether the evidence is compelling will likely depend on your condemnation or approval of the current president.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
