Southern politicians adopted, and propagated this interpretation of the war and; they intimately connected it with the opposition to desegregation. George Wallace and others draw allusions to the Confederate cause and the States Rights Democratic Party echoes many of the Confederate Catechisms’ claims in its published platform. The States Rights Democratic Party was founded in 1948 in opposition to President Truman’s desegregation of the military and speech calling for equality between the races as well as the Democratic Party’s acceptance of some Civil Rights platforms. The party used the emerging rhetoric, masking overt racism as liberty, and discrimination as a states rights issue. They took from Tyler stating that they, “oppose the totalitarian, …show more content…
Colmer had done fifteen years earlier. In his 1963 speech “Segregation now, Segregation Forever,” he argued that it was not racism, but ‘freedom’, that justified segregated institutions. He claimed that just as their ancestors had fought Northern aggression and federal overreach in the Civil War, they were again fighting those same malevolent forces. The memory of the Civil War is central to Wallace’s rhetoric, he began his inauguration speech with this line, “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people,” comparing himself to Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and the people of that Confederacy as Wallace’s …show more content…
The Southern Strategy is a product of the rewriting of the memory of slavery and the Civil War. In the election of 1968 Nixon lost the Deep South to Wallace but won the Tennessee and the Carolinas thanks in part to the then burgeoning strategy. Nixon met with former States Rights Democratic Party presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, now a republican senator, and traded a decrease in federal pressure to desegregate southern schools for the senator’s support. Nixon went on to speak about the ‘silent majority’ that stood with him in believing the Civil Rights Movement had gone too far. This strategy propelled Nixon to victory in the border states and secured his nomination to the Presidency. The Southern Strategy further developed in with the candidates and campaigns to follow. The republican party became increasingly socially conservative, operating under the now accepted States’ Rights narrative, and in exchange is able to constantly count on electoral support from the former states of the
Both sides desired a republican form of government. Each wanted a political system that would “protect the equality and liberty of the individuals from aristocratic privilege and…tyrannical power.” (404) However, the north and south differed greatly in “their perceptions of what most threatened its survival.” (404) The secession by the south was an attempt to reestablish republicanism, as they no longer found a voice in the national stage. Prior to the 1850s, this conflict had been channeled through the national political system. The collapse of the two-party system gave way to “political reorganization and realignment,” wrote Holt. The voters of the Democrats shifted their influence toward state and local elections, where they felt their concerns would be addressed. This was not exclusively an economically determined factor. It displayed the exercise of agency by individual states. Holt pointed out, “[T]he emergence of a new two-party framework in the South varied from state to state according to the conditions in them.” (406) The “Deep South” was repulsed by the “old political process,” most Southerners trusted their state to be the safeguards of republicanism. (404) They saw the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, a member of the “the anti-Southern Republican party,” as something the old system could not
David Walker was born a free black man in Wilmington, North Carolina, September 28th, 1785. His mother was a free black woman, and his father was a slave. Walkers father passed away a few months before he was born. In his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, in reference to the cruelty of slavery he observed, Walker stated, “If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. As true as g-d reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrow, which my people have suffered. This is not the place for me- no, no. I must leave this part of the country. It will be a great trial for me to live on the same soil where so many men are in slavery; certainly I cannot remain where I must hear their chains continually, and where I must encounter the insults
The American Civil war is considered to be one of the most defining moments in American history. It is the war that shaped the social, political and economic structure with a broader prospect of unifying the states and hence leading to this ideal nation of unified states as it is today. In the book “Confederates in the Attic”, the author Tony Horwitz gives an account of his year long exploration through the places where the U.S. Civil War was fought. He took his childhood interest in the Civil War to a new level by traveling around the South in search of Civil War relics, battle fields, and most importantly stories. The title “Confederates in the Attic”: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War carries two meanings in Tony Horwitz’s thoughtful and entertaining exploration of the role of the American Civil War in the modern world of the South. The first meaning alludes to Horwitz’s personal interest in the war. As the grandson of a Russian Jew, Horwitz was raised in the North but early in his childhood developed a fascination with the South’s myth and history. He tells readers that as a child he wrote about the war and even constructed a mural of significant battles in the attic of his own home. The second meaning refers to regional memory, the importance or lack thereof yet attached to this momentous national event. As Horwitz visits the sites throughout the South, he encounters unreconstructed rebels who still hold to outdated beliefs. He also meets groups of “re-enactors,” devotees who attempt to relive the experience of the soldier’s life and death. One of his most disheartening and yet unsurprising realizations is that attitudes towards the war divide along racial lines. Too many whites wrap the memory in nostalgia, refusing...
A numerous amount of generals and soldiers of the south had a predisposed idea regarding what every person was fighting for, and from the looks of it, they were more so on the same page. When referring to what the war was being fought over, Englishmen Pickett used an analogy that gives reference to a “gentlemen’s club”, and not being able to maneuver out of it (Shaara 88). The men believed that the war conceived out of the misinterpretation of the constitution in regards to what or what not they had the right to do. In all, a large number of those fighting believed that the confederate army fought to protect the southern society, and slavery as an integral part of
On the question as to whether states’ rights was the cause of the Civil War, Dew references a speech made by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, during his inaugural address as one that “remains a classic articulation of the Southern position that resistance to Northern tyranny and a defense of states’ rights were the sole reason for secession. Constitutional differences alone lay at the heart of the sectional controversy, he insisted. ‘Our present condition…illustrates the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established’”(13).
...ain the “laid-back” attitude and shy away from social change. The irony of the political divide is the North is now Democratic and the South is Republican.
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
People attending schools before 1960’s were learning about certain “unscrupulous carpetbaggers”, “traitorous scalawags”, and the “Radical Republicans”(223). According to the historians before the event of 1960’s revision, these people are the reason that the “white community of South banded together to overthrow these “black” governments and restore home rule”(223). While this might have been true if it was not for the fact that the “carpetbaggers were former Union soldiers”, “Scalawags… emerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionists”(227). Eric Foner wrote the lines in his thesis “The New View of Reconstruction” to show us how completely of target the historians before the 1960’s revision were in their beliefs.
The South won in Reconstruction in many ways. Rebuilding the South was one of its major focuses. Several canals, bridges, and railroads were rebuilt with Reconstruction funds. The Republicans in Congress agreed with southern legislatures on how important business was. For this, a large amount of money was gathered to help the South’s reconstruction. Even though slavery was abolished with the passing of the 13th Amendment, it still existed in the South in the forms of “Black Codes” and cults like the Ku Klux Klan. In conclusion, Lincoln won the war for the North, but President Johnson won Reconstruction for the South by allowing them to create their own laws to keep the former slaves down and keeping their Southern lifestyles.
When even the highly-supported secession documents clearly outline how important slavery was to the southern states, it is hard to deny its fault in the war. The argument that the Confederacy was fighting for states’ rights is the most-often suggested alternative, however all one needs to do is dig deeper and calculate what these
Looking at the United States in 1965, it would seem that the future of the liberal consensus was well entrenched. The anti-war movement was in full swing, civil rights were moving forward, and Johnson's Great Society was working to alleviate the plight of the poor in America. Yet, by 1968 the liberal consensus had fallen apart, which led to the triumph of conservatism with the election of President Reagan in 1980. The question must be posed, how in the course of 15 years did liberal consensus fall apart and conservatism rise to the forefront? What were the decisive factors that caused the fracturing of what seemed to be such a powerful political force? In looking at the period from 1968 to the triumph of Reagan in 1980, America was shaken to the core by the Watergate scandal, the stalling of economic growth, gas shortages, and the Vietnam War. In an era that included the amount of turbulence that the 1970's did, it is not difficult to imagine that conservatism come to power. In this paper I will analyze how the liberal consensus went from one of its high points in 1965 to one of its lows in 1968. From there I will show how conservatism rose to power by the 1980 elections. In doing so, I will look at how factors within the American economy, civil rights issues, and political workings of the United States contributed to the fracturing of the liberal consensus and the rise of conservatism.
As a central figure in the Republican Party and passionate advocate for anti-slavery, William Henry Seward characterized the conflict between the Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans as inevitable. Each political party had two radically different ideologies regarding the expansion of slavery into western territories. The Southern Democrats believed that slavery should exist in all western states while the Northern Republicans strongly disagreed. Similar to the ideologies of the Republicans, Seward believed that slavery was unjust and humans were granted the r...
The turmoil between the North and South about slavery brought many issues to light. People from their respective regions would argue whether it was a moral institution and that no matter what, a decision on the topic had to be made that would bring the country to an agreement once and for all. This paper discusses the irrepressible conflict William H. Seward mentions, several politician’s different views on why they could or could not co-exist, and also discusses the possible war as a result.
Amid the post Civil War chaos, various political groups were scrambling to further their agendas. First, Southern Democrats, a party comprised of leaders of the confederacy and other wealthy Southern whites, sought to end what they perceived as Northern domination of the South. They also sought to institute Black Codes, by limiting the rights of Blacks to move, vote, travel, and change jobs,3 which like slavery, would provide an adequate and cheap labor supply for plantations. Second, Moderate Republicans wanted to pursue a policy of reconciliation between North and South, but at the same time ensure slavery was abolished.
The separation of the south and north was not the only separation the United States was going through, the Democratic Party had split. The northern and southern democrats turn on each other. After several delegates walk out of the democratic convention, Douglas, who was not supposed to be put up as a nomination for president because he would not support the idea to make all states have slaves, was nominated for president. After the fact that Douglas was nominated without the entire Democratic Party consent, the southern democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, who believed that all the states should have slavery, thus a split in the Democratic Party. (Foner,496)