Equality for Some

While researching my 2014 book To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, I read Barry Goldwater’s book Conscience of a Conservative. As a historian of nineteenth-century American politics, I was struck by how Goldwater’s book, written in 1960, echoed an 1858 speech by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond. Writing a century apart, both men warned that widespread voting would lead to redistribution of wealth, insisted that the government could not promote social welfare, and called for a few elite leaders to direct society. In Hammond’s day, that argument led southern elites to create the Confederate States of America, replacing the fundamental principle that “all men are created equal,” with the idea that some men were better than others, and those men should run the nation.

How, I wondered, was it possible for men like Goldwater and Hammond, with their anti-democratic message, to achieve such power in a democracy? And what did it mean that certain modern Americans continue to use the same language?

My new book attempts to provide some answers. How the South Won the Civil War explores why certain leaders make the same arguments today that elite slaveowners did before the Civil War. From there, the book examines how a handful of oligarchs—super wealthy and powerful men—manage to convince ordinary Americans to support their belief that society should be run by elites.

Ultimately, oligarchs in America have been able to undermine democracy because of a paradox built into our history. From the beginning, the Founders’ ringing principle that “all men are created equal” depended on the idea that most Americans—women, black Americans, and all people of color—were excluded from it.

The idea that equality for certain people—originally propertied white men—depended on inequality for everyone else left a curious loophole for those eager to seize power for themselves. In times when it seemed as if women and people of color might become equal, they argued that such an expansion of rights would overturn the American system. This was a message voters could rally around, and they sup- ported leaders who promised to preserve American values even as those leaders took more and more power. At heart, then, this rhetoric, based in the peculiar paradox of American history, has enabled oligarchs to undermine democracy.

What I wanted to reclaim with How the South Won the Civil War is that while this powerful political rhetoric is steeped in racism and sexism, it also taps into the enormous excitement and promise of democracy that sparked a new nation in 1776: the idea that people in this new, radical country were not bound to the fate of their parents, but could indeed create their own destiny.

Our greatest leaders have challenged the American paradox and urged us to make the principle of equality a reality. As Abraham Lincoln put it the same year that James Henry Hammond was talking about a world controlled by a few wealthy men, “I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it where will it stop?” Lincoln called for Americans to rededicate themselves to making sure “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” A century and a half later, we require no less dedication.