How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

In her book "How the South Won the Civil War," Heather Cox Richardson argues that the system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and established a foothold, leading to the rise of a new white male oligarchy. She reveals the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 12 May 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

While the North triumphed in the Civil War, abolishing slavery and ushering in a new era of freedom for the nation, Heather Cox Richardson contends in this thought-provoking work that democracy's bloody triumph was fleeting. The system that had supported the vanquished South moved westward and established a foothold there. It was a logical fit. For decades, Eastern settlers had been encroaching on the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and the treatment of Native Americans solidified racial hierarchies. The South and West were equally reliant on extractive industries, such as cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter, giving rise to a new white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion.

To explain why this occurred, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern yeoman farmer who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, single-handedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century, and Western and Southern leaders found even more common ground. As resources and people flooded into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. Movement Conservatives, led by Westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology.

Weight: 306g
Dimension: 210 x 138 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197581797