How the South Won the Civil War

Southern elites, Western libertarians and the conservative coalition

By Randall J. Stephens

Randall J. Stephens is a professor of American and British studies at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is “The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

In 1964 the Republican Party nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president. Goldwater, a strident conservative who liked to wear a cowboy hat, called for reductions in federal spending, criticized an “activist” Supreme Court and hoped to curtail welfare programs. In his 1960 book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” which helped revive the conservative movement, Goldwater proclaimed that he had “little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.” His aim was “not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”

It seemed like an odd, if not dangerous position to those Americans who had depended on the government during the dark days of depression and war in the 1930s and ’40s. Baffled by Goldwater’s national appeal, the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter asked, “When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?” Bucking the consensus, the Southwestern senator had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that the federal government should not compel states or individuals on such matters. Southern segregationists nodded with approval.

Martin Luther King Jr., like many other African Americans, believed that Goldwater was a threat to democracy and to the black freedom struggle in the South. In King’s estimation, Goldwater gave “aid and comfort to the racists.” King warned that Goldwater’s campaign was “obviously an attempt to appeal to all of the fearful, the insecure, prejudiced people in our society.”

Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, explains Goldwater’s crusade and the trajectory of modern conservatism in her masterful “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.” A timely book, it sheds light on what was perhaps the most important political coalition of the 20th century.

It’s not surprising that Goldwater won his home state of Arizona. Yet he also swept the Deep South, taking Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. White Southerners, many of them Democrats, saw a kindred spirit in the square-jawed, bespectacled stalwart from the West. His campaign may have been a colossal failure, but, Richardson claims, it established a new, fiery brand of conservatism, drawing on long-standing connections between the South and the West.

For decades there had been a Western brand of anti-government, anti-communist, free-market, right-wing libertarianism that had united Americans from Southern California to South Carolina. Regions and cultures that seemed so different were, in fact, joined in a common cause. Richardson tells the engrossing and deeply relevant story of these connections, and she ties that story to the most important political and social developments of American history. While the Confederate South may have lost the war in 1865, its conservative, elitist ideology found fertile soil in the sprawling American West.

Goldwater, a key player in Richardson’s account, won the 1964 nomination with the support of South Carolinian delegates, who rallied to his cause. Similar to the elite slaveholders of the pre-Civil War South, says Richardson, these men held fast to hierarchies and considered the lesser sorts — the poor, minorities, women and the weak — to be dangerously unfit for self-governance. Throughout, she emphasizes that this oligarchic “vision of the world stood against a very different set of principles that lay at the heart of the idea of American democracy: equality and self-determination.” Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, these competing visions have been in sharp contrast.

Another central figure in Richardson’s narrative is the South Carolina slaveholder, governor and senator James Henry Hammond, perhaps one of the vilest characters in American history. Hammond ascended to power even though he admitted to sexually assaulting his four young nieces, “lovely creatures,” in his words. For Richardson, Hammond embodied the ironclad authoritarianism of the white slavocracy. White Southern elites saw themselves as destined to lead and rule over menial laborers, slaves and a horde of inferiors. These men built the region’s slave system on this rigid order, and the Confederacy aimed to protect it at all costs.

That old Southern order seemed to come to a swift end in 1865. The Civil War and Reconstruction, writes Richardson, “had given the nation a new birth of freedom.” The Northern victory, for a time, did away with the threat that oligarchy posed. Yet that victory was short-lived. Southern states stripped African Americans of hard-won rights, and an era of white-supremacist violence lasted decades.

Shifting to the West, Richardson traces the other ways the freedoms secured during the Civil War evaporated. As settlers fanned out across new territory and the government provided incentives for exploration and homesteading, the ideals of the Confederacy took root. Violent campaigns against indigenous peoples, Mexicans and new Chinese immigrants, along with white beliefs about natural rights to land and resources, drove the quest for empire. Notions of racial and gender hierarchy followed the migration of Southerners into the West.

Richardson fittingly turns to the myth of the American cowboy, which “carried all the hallmarks of the strife of the immediate postwar years: [The cowboy] was a hardworking white man who started from nothing, asked for nothing, and could rise on his own.” In fact, she underscores, about a third of cowboys were people of color, and it was a dangerous, unrewarding life. Theodore Roosevelt and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated the West as a land of opportunity and promise, but those perceptions bore little relation to the harsher realities. As in the South before, so now in the West, “poor white men had little opportunity, people of color and women had even less, and leaders worked to keep it that way,” Richardson writes.

Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan built their political careers on the Western myths of proud independence and self-made heroism. Both also had a taste for cowboy cosplay. Goldwater appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1963 in Western gear with his arm around the muzzle of a tan horse. In the 1970s and 1980s, photojournalists snapped pictures of Reagan on horseback, wearing his white cowboy hat, at his Rancho del Cielo in the Santa Ynez Mountains, known as the Western White House. Reagan defined himself against effete, urban New Deal liberalism. His political philosophy was as ill-suited to the economic realities of the late 20th century as Hollywood western film sets were to the elements. Reagan was fond of telling adoring crowds: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Today, amid the worst health crisis of the modern era and when Americans could use more government help, that tired saying seems particularly grotesque.

Moving from Reagan and the rise of the New Right, Richardson turns to more recent history. She sees in President Trump the culmination of an elite white paternalism, imbued with a sense of macho self-reliance, that the Republican Party has nurtured for decades. In the 2016 election, Trump swept all the states of the former Confederacy, with the exception of Virginia. He also had a strong showing in the West. His cynical vision of an America that only he could save, his cronyism, his casual misogyny, and his preference for elite corporations over the middle and working classes fit a long-standing pattern. It was little wonder that Trump fulfilled his promise to gut the government, ignore expertise and “put in charge of government departments officials whose only qualification was great wealth.”

Richardson ends her book with a kind of call to action. The conservative vision of oligarchs, she argues, stands in direct contrast to other American ideals of equality and self-determination. She fittingly titles her conclusion “What Then Is This American?” Does the nation truly hold to its possibilities and promises? When he started his presidency, Trump defined it as “a land of carnage, a nightmare.” But Richardson sees positive developments in the resistance and the female candidates who claimed stunning victories in the 2018 midterms. An otherwise dark picture is brightened when she notes that “women and voters of color are helping to redefine the image of an American for the twenty-first century, as they did briefly, after the Civil War and after World War II.” There is a glimmer of hope, especially in these tumultuous times, that a more just and equal America will emerge and thrive.

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
By Heather Cox Richardson
Oxford. 240 pp. $27.95

Originally posted here April 17, 2020 at 4:34 a.m. PDT