On How the South Won the Civil War

I was really excited to read this book but, in the end, I wasn’t so impressed.

Richardson’s thesis is obviously that the South won the Civil War. To Richardson, the “South” is represented above all by its oligarchical techniques, of which slavery is just part of the picture. In her view (rightfully, I think), the South developed a deep aristocracy that was profoundly antithetical to American democracy. Richardson finds that this is, above all, because of the South’s extractive economy. Unlike the North which emphasized manufacturing and the service sector, Southern business required a great deal of capital. In the age of King Cotton, this capital meant both having vast tracts of land and a large, inexpensive (or nearly free) labor force. As a result, large landowners were able to grow to immense sizes and establish a political, social, and economic oligarchy that pitted itself against both the North and against “average” white Southerners, who worked for wages, and slaves.

My disagreement with Richardson is her coverage of the years after the Civil War. She argues that the South basically replicated itself in the West by a variety of different means. The two most important of these means were (1) the similar extractive economy of the West, and (2) painting an image of white male settlers as unique people in opposition to Native Americans, the Chinese, Latinos, and women. In this way, the Democratic Party was able to spread itself West, and it then joined the South in rallying to the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s, in large part due to the rise of Movement Conservativism.

The basic facts of this narrative are true, but Richardson spends too much time emphasizing the similarities between the South and the West while downplaying their differences. True, the Western United States had (and has) an extractive economy much like the South, but the Federal government is still far more involved there than it ever was in the South. Richardson does address this difference to some extent, pointing out that both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s families claimed to be “self-made” although they were reliant on grants and funding from the Federla government, but she doesn’t think much about the role of actual landownership here. The Federal government owns massive swaths of land and its infrastructural projects are apparent wherever you go. Although high wealth concentration does exist on the West Coast and some other regions—take Koch Industries in Kansas, for instance, property and landownership are far less centralized thanks to laws like the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act was a disaster for Native Americans, but it did prevent the concentrations of wealth seen in the South.

I don’t want to spend too much time on their differences, but I don’t think that the South won the Civil War by replicating itself westward. Hell, I think the discussion of oligarchy falls short in the years immediately following the Civil War, where the majority of American oligarchs were based in the industrial Northeast and were members of the Republican Party, rather than the “elitist Democrats” that Richardson spends so much time discussing. Richardson prefers to talk about the Democratic Populists, who were also elitist on some level, rejecting the power of Northeastern oligarchs, but still viewing themselves as an “elite” when compared to women and racial/ethnic minorities, but the discussion of the industrial oligarchy needs to take place here. Discussions of the West are superfluous and don’t do a whole lot to illustrate her point.

Overall, I found this book easy-to-read but on the whole, unconvincing.