We are still fighting the Civil War today

It never ended

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Eighty year ago today, Japan formally surrendered in World War II, bringing one era to an end. We are used to thinking about the era that followed as the one we are still living in. It’s the era of U.S. hegemony, the so-called “liberal international order”, and America’s emergence as a more or less fully democratic country during the victories of the civil rights era. Today, in one way or another, most political factions in the U.S. and even abroad are fighting to maintain one or more of the pillars of that era.

Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs Japan’s formal surrender onboard the USS Missouri, 1945

Eighty years is a long time, but it’s still only one human lifetime. This nearness is one reason that we still feel so connected to that transition between eras. Ponder for a moment, then, the fact that just as only 80 years separates us from those events, only another eighty years - one more human lifetime - separated the people at that surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri from the end of the American Civil War and the end of he institution of slavery in the United States in 1865.

Tom Lee’s famous portrait of the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, 1865

If you’re like most people, you probably feel less instinctive connection to that second picture. That was a very long time ago, after all - slavery is gone, and the Confederacy failed to rise again, at least officially. But the distance is not so great as you might think.

Heather Cox Richardson

argued in her book How the South Won the Civil War that although the South was defeated, its fundamental ideology - rule by an oligarchic elite underpinned by racial and gender hierarchies - lived on.

And while much of “postwar” conservatism tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with this toxic legacy, one of the most clarifying things about the MAGA movement is that it makes no attempt to hide the connection. MAGA embraces the Confederate legacy explicitly through actions like renaming Army bases after slavers, changing museums so that they don’t say slavery was bad, and attacking anything that smacks of diversity. They’re proud to be part of the same political tradition that gave us slavery, segregation, and insurrection.

Could things have been different?

If this strain of American thought and life is still with us today, an obvious question arises: did things have to be this way? Couldn’t more have been done after the Civil War to make sure that the South and its toxic ideology could not rise again?

The Civil War was followed by the period known as Reconstruction, when the South was placed under federal military occupation and forced to make changes to its laws and governance. What exactly should happen during Reconstruction was hotly debated in the North. One group - known as Radical Republicans - wanted a wholesale revolution. They thought that Confederate traitors should be excluded from further participation in politics and that Southern blacks should receive full voting rights and citizenship. They also wanted the estates of traitors seized and redistributed to former slaves - the famous “forty acres and a mule”.

But there was nothing like a consensus around the Radical Republican position, even in the victorious North. More moderate Republicans were wary of such a sweeping agenda, believing that former slaves were too uneducated or racially inferior to participate in politics or look after themselves economically. There was also still a faction of Democrats (the dominant party in the South at this time) in the North who were explicitly white supremacist and opposed pretty much all Reconstruction measures.

And what happened next is that Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head.

When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 (remember: just two lifetimes ago), his vice president, Andrew Johnson, became president. Johnson was a Democrat and a Southerner who had supported the war to keep the union together but still very sympathetic to the South and its “peculiar institution”.

Lincoln had picked Johnson as a running mate for the traditional reason that American presidents pick their running mates: to make a vague gesture at some sort of national or ideological unity. In the 1864 election, having a Southerner on the ticket made it easier for Lincoln to do well with Southern sympathizers and opponents of the Radical Republicans who lived in the North, so Johnson was who he picked.

But when Johnson suddenly and unexpectedly became president, this spelled enormous trouble for Reconstruction. He tried to row back redistributive policies and rapidly rehabilitate the treasonous Southern elite. Gone was the idea of “forty acres and a mule” and gone was the idea of giving Southern blacks full political and legal rights. Formal slavery would end, but Southern whites would be allowed to keep the wealth they had bled from the backs of their slaves and to establish new forms of social and economic control over their former slaves.

What followed was a long struggle over the precise terms of Reconstruction, with Johnson’s “presidential Reconstruction” pitched against the desires of the Radicals. That story is too long to tell in all of its detail here - I have multiple 1,000+ page books on my shelf that just about cover it - but the basic result was that the power of the Southern elite emerged basically unbroken. Johnson more or less got his way. The South lived on.

A very familiar Supreme Court

Another part of this story has to do with the Supreme Court.

Although the Radicals failed to implement a lot of their agenda, one thing that they did manage to do was pass a bunch of amendments to the constitution which basically completely transformed the nature of that document. They abolished slavery, guaranteed birthright citizenship, and mandated that all citizens be given equal protection and due process. We call these amendments the Reconstruction Amendments. (In another nod to his Confederate roots, Trump is today famously attempting to overturn one of the rights granted in these amendments - birthright citizenship).

Job done, you might think - how could Southern governance live on in the face of such a legal regime?

Well the answer is that the Supreme Court nullified many of these victories in a series of decisions shortly afterwards. In the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873, the Supreme Court decided that although the Reconstruction Amendments protected citizens against abuse by the federal government, the states were still free to deny them their rights. This cleared the way for Southern states to re-implement horrific forms of racial discrimination and subjugation. As one judge noticed his dissent, this made the Fourteenth Amendment "a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing and most unnecessarily excited Congress and the people on its passage”.

A decade later, in the so-called Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the court went a step further and said that actually nothing in the Constitution prevented private individuals from engaging in racial discrimination. This meant that trains, cafes, public restrooms, theaters and everything else were free to exclude blacks, and Congress could do nothing about it. Legal equality became not just something that didn’t exist, but something that could not even be forced to exist.

The court also ruled in 1876 that the federal government could not protect Southern blacks from violence by Southern whites. Blacks who tried to organize to win their legal and political rights could now be mercilessly slaughtered, as many were. With that final piece falling into place, Reconstruction never stood a chance.

Why was this allowed?

It’s easy to blame the Supreme Court for this. But, just like today, the broader problem was that there just wasn’t a national political consensus around stopping any of these things from happening.

And this brings us to a key part of the puzzle: the problem is not just the South. As the existence of moderate Republicans and Northern Democrats shows, it’s not like the North was a homogenous mass of crusading abolitionists. Many Northerners were racist and believed in white supremacy. Many others didn’t but also just sort of didn’t really care. Others believed that trying to transform the South would cost too much money or might lead to another Civil War, which would have been bad for business and lead to millions more deaths.

At the end of the day, the political will just did not exist to force through a more radical form of Reconstruction, smash the power of the Southern elite, and give African-Americans a chance to build economic and political power of their own. Even those Northerners who really wanted to do so felt their enthusiasm wane as the costs and difficulties mounted.

And so amid the violent and contested election of 1876, a bargain was formed. Democrats would let the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes become president so long as Reconstruction ended and federal troops left the South. Republicans accepted, the South rejoiced, and the journey to Jim Crow and Donald Trump began.

The problem is not just the South

It’s worth really reiterating that this really is not just about “South = bad, North = good”.

One of the reasons that Trump has managed to reinvigorate the Republican Party is that he has managed to extend the appeal of this brand of racial politics beyond the South into the North. He wins elections because he is competitive among racist voters in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - places that until a few decades ago were Democratic Party strongholds.

Trump’s achievement is to have rebuilt the political coalition that destroyed Reconstruction - Southern and Northern whites opposed to racial equality. This historical symmetry shows us that this coalition - and the moment we live in - is not some nightmare aberration from which the United States will suddenly awaken. It is one of the oldest and most basic conflicts in American history. The Civil War was one battle in that conflict. Today is another.

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