[ Music ] >> History and Biography is sponsored by Wells Fargo. [ Music ] >> Hi. I'm Heather Cox Richardson. And I'm a professor of history at Boston College. And I'm thrilled to be here at the National Book Festival this year although, of course, I'm not in Washington. I'm here on the coast of Maine sitting in front of all the books I used to write the books I write, and in the space where I produce things. So I'm thrilled to be here talking about my new book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, a name, by the way, that I did not come up with. But somebody listened to what I was trying to write about and said, "Well, this the only possible title you can have." And the reason she said that is because the book is really -- started really as an attempt to understand why today's Republican party is so clearly tied to the image of the American Confederacy. Like how did the Confederate states of America, which lost in the Civil War, become such a powerful symbol for today's -- one of today's major political parties? It's kind of a funny question if you think about it. And the more I got into figuring out why that was the case, why Republicans so were -- why Republicans were interested, for example, in waving Confederate flags or Confederate statues. What I figured out was that American democracy has within it a fundamental contradiction. And that is the founders who came up with the idea that you know, all men are created equal, in fact, owned other human beings, they enslaved Africans, they enslaved indigenous people, and they considered women a lesser being altogether. So inherent within the concept of American equality, there was also the concept of American inequality. And that contradiction, that contradiction, that paradox has driven our politics ever since because what that did was it gave to oligarchs a language that they could use to undermine democracy. And the way it worked was this, oligarchs have been able since the beginning to convince voters, white male voters, those people who were created equal from the start that any time that people of color or women began to approach equality, there was a corollary to that American paradox that what it would mean for women or people of color to get equality was inequality for those white men who had initially been the ones included in the idea that all men are created equal. And with that corollary to that first American paradox, we have within ourselves within this country a fundamental weakness of American democracy. So the book really takes that central idea and plays it out through American history, how in the 1850s, extremely wealthy enslavers in the American South managed to use that corollary to the American paradox, first to garner enough power to control the American South and then to take over the federal government. And it seemed like during the Civil War that ideology of the South, the idea that really American democracy should be an oligarchy -- an oligarchy based in hierarchy moved to the American West. And in the American West, what the Euromericans who moved there after the Civil War discovered was that ideology fit nicely in the West in that period because the West had an economy that was not unlike that of the American South. It's based in extraction, which calls for a small group of very wealthy men, and a lot of workers who are fairly interchangeable, and that ideology got a second life in the American West. And it first took over our mythology, but then over time, because of the peculiarities of the American political system, it took over American politics. And with that, it moved from the American West back across the American continent, the American government, and took back over our society. So that by 18-, 19-, so that by 1964 when Barry Goldwater, who [inaudible] Western cowboy is being nominated for the Republican National Convention. The state that puts him over the top in that convention is South Carolina, the birthplace of the American Confederacy. Like all of my books, this book began as what I thought was a very small idea. And that was -- the question, again, trying to explain how today's Republican party became so attached to the Confederacy, which is really counterintuitive if you think about it. The Confederates were people who tried to destroy America. I was a rebellion against the United States government. So why is it that a 21st century American political party has so identified with that particular movement. One of the things that's fascinating about the material that I covered in this book is the way it looks at the American West because many people think of the American West because many people think of the American West, and they think of it as the land of freedom, a land where anybody could become prosperous and control usually his destiny. What's interesting to me about the material in this book was that it suggested that just the opposite was true, that that image was a deliberate attempt to justify a hierarchical society that put a few white men on top, and these, of course, were symbolized by the American cowboy, the guy who had his wife maybe or women in the upstairs in the saloons in the West but who ran their lives in a way that they insisted was independent, but it was really dependent on federal assistance, and it was a way of life that deliberately denigrated people of color and, again, put women into positions either of being wives or being somehow led out of acceptable American society. And realizing that we were probably telling the story of the American West wrong in popular mythology really emphasizes to me, I think, how important it is to keep re-examining our history. In part because we get new sources but also in part because we change. We change as people, and we change as a country, and the stories that we tell matter for how we define ourselves, and one of the things that really jumped out at me as this book developed was the idea that so often when people talk about the history of Mexican Americans for Chinese American people or women, they somehow see that as being separate from history, that it's somehow a niche history. But in fact, what you realize when you look at the larger picture of America and what happened in the American West and how that rebirth or rejuvenation of the idea of an American hierarchy in the American West after the Civil War really -- -- reinstated the idea that a few good white men should rule the country. What you do when you recognize that that is rebuild in the American West and that ideology has regained strength out there. It's a recognition that there is no separate -- separation, that there is no separation between indigenous history and American political history and women's history. But these are all important pieces of our national story and that until we recognize that built into our story is this weakness that equality cannot depend on inequality because it always gives oligarchs the ability to undermine democracy. Once you realize that, you recognize that the acquisition of equality for all before the law and equality of access to resources is not simply an issue of importance to an indigenous community, for example, but it's an issue of importance to all of us to enable us to protect our democracy. For all of America's defense of equality, the idea of a hierarchy in which a few good, educated, well-connected, wealthy men should run the lives of everybody else never went away. That was a way that the world had been organized in the West for a very long time, and remember, the idea of equality was really radical. The idea that every individual should have the right of self-determination is what makes America such a radical arrival on the international scene in 1776. But that idea that some people should control everybody else has always been part of the American scene. And the question is, how did those people who believed that manage to get voters who believe in equality to sign on to their program. And the way that they do that is to leverage the language of this American paradox and the corollary to the American paradox. But it's important, I think, to remember that the reason that oligarchs have had the ability to leverage that language is because there's a good side to all this as well, that voters really do want to defend American equality. They do care about human self-determination. They do care about the American dream. And that in a way, makes them susceptible to their manipulation by people who are using them, who are using them to reinforce their own power. And that's going to be the challenge for America going forward. How do you keep that incredible power of the idea of self-determination, of the idea that people really should be able to have access to the resources and to the equality before the law that they need to make their dreams come alive, make themselves the newest entrepreneurs be -- have the ingenuity to do new and exciting things, at the same time not leaving them vulnerable to the idea that if they open up that great American dream for people of color and for women that they have somehow destroyed it for themselves. Those two things are not incompatible. But our history and the language that can be deployed to defend that history has made us vulnerable. And I think it's important for us to recognize that. In the early 19th century, slave owners began to believe that they really were better than other people, and you can see that both in the way they talked about their enslaved people who are really doing the work, that it is building their society and the way they begin to denigrate those people and increasingly sort of turn them into another that is not on the same plane as the people that they consider humans, and it's a really clear construction of that dehumanization of enslaved Americans in the early 19th century. But on the other hand, they began to talk about themselves as somebody better, and that idea that people who are running society are somehow better than the people who are actually doing the work begins sort of to be in a sense of hole in which society is spiraling. So ministers begin to talk about how good the enslavers are, and the -- and novels begin to talk about these patriarchal, these gentle, giving patriarchs of these societies in which they are, in fact, enslaving other human beings. And gradually, especially the very large planters in the South begin to believe that they really are better than other people, and by 1858 there's a famous speech given in Congress by a man named James Henry Hammond. He's a senator from South Carolina. And he gives a speech in which he says, "You know, really we in the South have figured out how the world should work, that really the world needs to be run by a few, smart, well-educated people, you know, the best people. We are really the ones who know how to plant crops and know how the economy works. And you can see that because look at how much money we have." And the rest of the world really is, you know, most people are really -- they are kind of lazy, and they're hard workers, and they're loyal, but, you know, they really don't want very much, and they really can't figure out how to make their lives work without us taking care of them. They are, he says, the mudsills of society. And what he means by that is mudsills are literally pieces of wood that are driven into the mud to support the building above it, the grand edifice above it. And what he says is, "Most people are down in the mud, and we're the ones at the top who really understand what civilization is like. So what needs to happen is those people at the bottom need to produce a lot, and that money we really need to go ahead and concentrate in these upper stories, if you will, in this grand edifice of society we're building because we're the ones who understand what fine art is, for example. You know, we're hanging fine art on our walls, and we understand good food. You know, we have things in the 1850s like this exotic stuff called olive oil. And we understand education, and we read important books, and we have important connections, and we, by concentrating the power of the economy in ourselves, are moving society forward. And it's very important that we never let those people at the bottom have any kind of political clout because if we do, they're going to vote in favor of redistributing some of the wealth that they, in fact, have earned, and when that happens, we will not have the money we need to keep moving that ball forward." And you can see this really dramatically in the [inaudible] that Alexander Stephens gives. He's going to be the vice president of the Confederacy, expand the idea of succeeding from the United States, and creating a country. And what he says is, you know, "We're going to revise that stupid idea that was in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Of course, they're not created equal. We're going to create a new society that does it right, and that proves that really we should be on top of everybody else, and we should spread this idea around the world and create this new world in which very few of us are going to move the social ball forward and create this new prosperous world." Well, Abraham Lincoln listens to this, and Abraham Lincoln comes from essentially the mudsill, right? You know his father is barely making it by the time they move first from Kentucky to Indiana. They moved there before they go to Illinois. His father is barely making it, and he himself has worked as a day laborer, you know, splitting logs and working in the fields. And he obviously is a genius, and he looks at this, and he says, "Really? I should spend my life like this?" And he says, "No." And quite deliberately, in 1959, he responds to James Henry Hammond's speech with his own speech before the Milwaukee agricultural fair in which he says, "No. There's some people who think the world works best if you put a few very wealthy people on top of it, but there are those of us who believe," and that's the mudsill theory, "but there are those of us who believe that the way the world really should work is for the government to put its resources and its protection on the people at the bottom because if you give those people access to resources and equal protection before the law, they're going to innovate. They're going to come up with new ideas." And, remember, Abraham Lincoln is our only President who has a patent. He has invented something himself. You are going to have constant movement, constant new ideas, really hard work, people who are thinking of new things, and what they're going to do is they are going to find all sorts of new ways to do things, and they are going to create more value than they can possibly consume, and they're going to support -- because they are going to create so much, they are going to support a class above them. The merchants and the small entrepreneurs who are going to do the exact same thing, and they, in turn, will support a very small group at the very top of industrialists and financiers. We don't need a lot of them, but they, in turn, will hire people at the bottom." And this, he says, is the concept of free labor, and this is how he defines American democracy and American equality. Because he says, "You know, if you concentrate all the wealth at the top, those people are going to end up in their own bubble. Those are my words, not his. They are not going to innovate. They're going to get lazy. They don't really have to do anything because they're taking all the wealth from other people, and society is going to stagnate." He says, "If you really want to move things forward, put stuff at the bottom, and those two different ideas about what democracy means and what equality means, are ones I think that you can see reflected in America from before that period but also after that period including into the present." Lincoln's articulation of the importance of supporting people at the bottom, the people who are inventing, the people who are working hard, the people who are changing is, to my mind, really the heart of what American democracy should be about, and that's one of the reasons it's so exciting to be at a festival that actually talks about the importance of American ingenuity because while Lincoln is talking about the ingenuity of literally in his case farmers and small inventors, one of the things that I was really trying to highlight in this book, you know, How the South Won The Civil War, was the importance of ideas and the importance of thinking in new ways, and the ability of Americans to take an old way of thinking and discard it and able to try something new and something better and to think of things in a new way. And that's one of the things that is so exciting about the Library of Congress, and also this particular festival is that the way that we communicate these new ideas and the way we change the way we think is through books and through writing. And to be part of that, in this moment in America when we are seeing a world that looks a lot like the 1850s did, a world that looks like the time when these very large slaveholders convinced a number of their own core, white voters, that the only way for those people to stay in power was to keep people of color and women down to make sure that they didn't participate in that equality. We are looking -- we are sitting in a moment that looks a great deal like that. I think that's exactly why today's Republican party is so, including the President, is so defensive of Confederate symbols. So we're looking at a moment that looks very much like that of the 1850s. But while in many ways that seems [inaudible] and seems very frightening, it is also a time of great new ideas and the sort of chaos that produces new ideas, the sort of time that Abraham Lincoln was looking at in 1859 when he said, "No, that's not what American democracy is about. American democracy is about the hard workers, the people at the bottom, the people who are coming up with new ideas or coming up with new inventions, who are thinking of new ways to approach American democracy and to create a new government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people." And we're in a moment just like that today. And for all that is frightening, it is also an incredibly exciting time to be participating in American democracy. [ Music ]