- [Narrator] And now Crosscut Festival Main Stage featuring selection of curated sessions from this year's Crosscut Festival.

Thank you for joining us for how the South won the Civil War with Heather Cox Richardson, moderated by Knute Burger.

We would like to thank our tech and economy track sponsor Comcast.

We'd also like to thank our founding sponsor the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

- Hello, and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Knute Berger, editor at large for Crosscut and host of Mossback's Northwest on KCTS 9.

I'm excited to have a conversation today with professor Heather Cox Richardson, whose recent book, "How the South Won the Civil War, Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America," is not only an eyeopening analysis of American history but brings us to what she sees as a critical moment in shaping our nation's future.

Professor Richardson is a professor of 19th century history at Boston College.

And the New York Times has called her a breakout star for her ability to contextualize current events with historical perspective in her substack newsletter, letters from an American.

Heather, thank you for being here.

- It's a great pleasure.

- Now, when you're book, "How the South Won the Civil War," and you look at a fundamental division in American ideas.

On the one hand, some believes that freedom and equality are essential to democracy.

On the other hand, many believe that democracy poses a threat to freedom and Liberty.

This seems like a pretty big disagreement about how to run our country.

Can you explain the divide?

- Well, what you're referring to is what I called in this book, the American paradox.

And that is set from the very beginning, the idea that all men are created equal.

A principle that really can be expanded to include far more than simply men or white men as they thought about it at the time.

But the idea that all people are created equal dependent from the beginning on the idea that some people were simply not welcome at all in American society.

So people of color and women were, by definition unfree or unequal.

To enable that idea of equality to exist, you had to have removed from the body politic those that were considered unworthy.

So what I was trying to set up was the idea that in our history equality has always depended upon inequality but it doesn't have to.

That is simply a sort of a function of the way our country was settled and the the early history that led into the Declaration of Independence and then of course, the Constitution.

- So how is that played out?

I know the two documents you just referred to, do kind of differ in their approach or they are taken by different sides in the argument.

So how has it played out politically from the founding to say the mid 19th century?

- To yesterday, the Declaration and the Constitution are very different documents.

The Declaration sets out our principles and they were an attempt to tell the rest of the world why it was okay to rebel against a government.

And then the Constitution of course, sets out the body of laws on which our government is based.

And they're, they do very different things even though a lot of the writers were the same.

But what the, what I tried to argue in the book was that this, the fact that inequality is baked into our concept of equality, meant that from the very beginning of American democracy there was a flaw in it.

Fundamental flaw that would enable people who were anti-democratic, who were oligarchs to go ahead and deploy a rhetorical strategy that would enable them to destroy democracy.

'Cause if you think about it, it's a funny idea.

If you have a democracy, why would people vote to end a democracy?

What would make them do that?

So what the book was kind of trying to do was to figure out, how people who were against democracy, how oligarchs, who really thought they should run the world went about breaking down the democratic process.

And what I suggested was that this idea that equality dependent upon inequality gave them a wedge to work against democracy throughout our history.

And it happens in a series of steps where what first happens is, as people of means begin to garner power what they do is they put in place a series of laws that destabilize the population.

And you can do that in a bunch of different ways but in America the destabilization has tended to be around economics.

And then once they have started to unsettle the democratic voters, in the case of America before the Civil War, it was largely white male voters.

You start to unsettle them and you start to, they start to say, "Wait a minute, what's wrong with this picture?

We're all supposed to be working our way up in society and you guys are getting real rich, real fast."

And what they do then is they, convinced that those voters that they are in fact, sliding back, that they're not doing as well as they should be but that the problem is not the people in power that the problem is somebody else.

They have to create a different group of people to hate.

And then once they have started getting that into society, the idea that some people just aren't as good as others, that they really should be sort of kept down.

Then the oligarchs take over the media, so that it's very hard to get alternative ideas in there saying, "Wait a minute, the problem is not those people, the problem is the people in charge."

And then finally they take over the government.

But the trick to them doing that is always to make voters think the very beginning that the real problem, the reason they are falling behind is because some of those people who were unequal are trying to become equal.

And if they do that, they're going to take things away from that initial group of voters.

So it's a linguistic argument in a way or a rhetorical argument in a way but it takes a look at the breakdown of a democracy.

- So you say that the South won the Civil War, yet the Civil War was fought extensively over slavery.

Slavery was abolished.

So how did the South win?

- So there are a bunch of ways to look at what I wrote there and why it is the title, "How the South Won the Civil War," is the title of the book.

And what it's important to do is to remember what exactly I'm talking about when I say how the South won.

And what I argued was that that concept of oligarchy, which is actually has a number of layers to it, in America at least.

It has the idea, essentially that some people are better than others.

Because what happens is that as wealth and power begin to move upward and begin to, people who are at the top of the scale begin to exercise more and more power, not just over the economy and over politics but also over culture and over religion and over the media.

So people start to say, well, it's not that he was lucky, it's that he worked harder or he's just better or he gets an education 'cause he's smarter.

It starts to break down the idea of democracy itself.

And gradually, as I say, as those, that rising group of people gains control over the media increasingly you start to hear, well, you know, they're just better.

They just know more, they have better connections.

They deserve the money that they make.

And gradually society begins to spin around the idea that some people really are better than others.

So we have this idea that everybody is created equal.

It's in the Declaration after all but in reality some people are just better than others.

And you see this really dramatically in America before the Civil War, when the elite southerners, those enslavers who held 25 to 50, and even more than 50 other human beings as their chattel.

By the 1840s, 1850s, they're literally starting to say that they're better than other people.

And when they go ahead and put together the Confederate States of America, the Cornerstone Speech quite literally says that the Declaration of Independence, the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander Stevens who becomes the vice president of the Confederacy.

Literally says that the problem with the Declaration of Independence was that the founders were wrong that all men are created equal.

So the ideology of the Confederacy is that some people are better than others.

That some people really should rule and they have better ideas, they understand how the economy works.

And this becomes articulated really effectively in a speech in 1858 in the Senate by James Henry Hammond, there is this senator from South Carolina.

And he literally says that the majority of people in the world are what he calls mudsills, the pieces of wood, you thrust into the dirt in order to support a building.

And that they're hardworking and they're loyal but they're not very good at what they do, they don't know how to work.

If they're left to their own devices, they'll be lazy and they'll just dance and they'll waste their time and not really accomplish much.

But if they're overseen by people who really understand how the world works, they're gonna produce a lot.

And the trick is to make sure that what they produce continues to flow upward to the people at the top because they're the ones who really understand how to move the economy forward, how to get good educations, what fine art is.

And that if you can continue to have the money moving upward that you're going to go ahead and move society forward, more effectively than if you actually let the people at the bottom use the capital that they produce.

So he articulates that in 1858.

And the idea there is that, really it's anti-democratic, some people are better than others.

And what I'm arguing in the book is that that ideology, which should have died in 1865, when the United States government and the North wins the Civil War, it's say, no, no, we're all created equal including in this case, African-American men.

We're gonna include them in the body politic and really strike back at the idea that some people are better than others.

Which was a real concern for people like Lincoln and the other people who organized the Republican Party.

But that ideology of the South moves to the West and in the West, it lives really naturally because the West has a very different history than the American East.

And it's based in a series of hierarchical societies, even before the United States acquires the majority of it with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.

And during the Civil War, even as the United States government is trying to break down gradations of society in the East.

It's reinforcing them in the West through things like the mass execution of the Dakotas in 1862 and the Long Walk of the Navajo in '64 and finally the Sand Creek massacre in 1864 as well, when not only after the long march have you put indigenous people into what are essentially concentration camps, but in '64 you are, the United States army is literally mutilating the bodies of the people that it massacres at Sand Creek.

So you get the reinforcement of those hierarchies and right there the Confederate ideology, that idea that some people are better than others lives very naturally.

And then it takes on its own life in the West in the figure of the American cowboy, which of course we've been living with ever since.

- Yeah, that seems like such a strange contradiction because the cowboy is supposed to represent somebody who, not only is independent of government but independent of authority of any kind, whether it's the Railroad Barons or the plantation owners.

So the idea of the American cowboy becoming a kind of avatar for oligarchy is, I don't know, I mean, that's hard to process that.

- Well, but think about-- - Can you talk about them a little bit?

- Think about them, think about the fact that he, first of all, in mythology, there's a difference between the real American cowboy, who did exist but only for a very brief period of time, really from about 1866 to about 1886, when a terrible blizzard hits the, especially the Northern Plains after a drought and kills off a ton of the cattle.

And really at that point the ranging turns to ranching.

Both for that reasons and because of the fact that after barbed wire comes in 1873, it goes ahead and fences off a lot of that land and crosses all the problems between the ranchers and the, I'm sorry, the rangers and the settlers.

But so they do exist.

But the reality of cowboys, the reality, if you actually look at what their lives look like, their lives do not look statistically all that different and this is a broad brush.

But they don't look all that different than the lives of an industrial worker back East.

The pay is very low.

The conditions are really terrible.

It's very, very dangerous work.

The most of the money goes to the to the people who've invested in the cattle rather than in the man on the ground, And a third of the cowboys are men of color as well.

But in mythology, and the mythology is developed very early on in newspapers, especially Democratic newspapers.

Who are using the cowboy to push back against their concept that the Republicans back East are turning the government into socialism.

They use that word at beginning of 1871 by using an active government to level the playing field between white Americans and black Americans.

They deliberately set up the idea of the cowboy as a hardworking man, who's gonna work his way up and he's fun loving and he's hardworking and he wants nothing of the government.

Again, caveat here, remember that the government invests more on the American West than it ever did in the American East.

So the idea that the cowboy is doing it all on his own is completely a mythology.

But he's supposed to be working this way up and not wanting anything from the government.

And he's gonna be able to work his way up into a home with his good wife.

You know the cowboys world is really a bro world, if you will, here are very few women in the mythology.

In reality, you can't survive in the West without the kinship networks that women make possible.

We know that now very, historians are very aware of that.

But when you talk about that cowboy after I just set them up, you know who's not there, in addition to the fact that women are not there, the other people who aren't in that cowboy myth are the people of color.

The indigenous people, Mexicans and the Mexican Americans and the Asians and the Asian Americans who are going really to be building the West.

And they disappear under that cowboy myth as the people who are not part of it, not part of society, not hardworking and whom the cowboy dominates.

And that's I think a really important caveat to our image of the cowboy because for all that he represents that myth, that myth has tucked within it a hierarchy that puts him at the top.

- Right, and the history of the settling of the West is very much as you say, a history of deciding who counts and who doesn't.

And one of the questions I have about that is the role of women in this equation, women getting the vote.

This was obviously a major advance.

How has it changed if anything, the dynamic that you're talking about?

- Well, one of the things that I felt like I didn't have enough room to cover in this book, in part, 'cause I wanted to keep it really short, I wanted to make it readable.

Is the role of women in all of the mythologies that I talk about in that book.

But one of the things that's interesting about the way that women get the vote in the, throughout the late 19th century and into the 20th.

But initially when women are agitating for the vote immediately after the Civil War, especially around 1868 with the 14th Amendment and then going forward.

What they're agitating for originally is the idea that as citizens, as people who participated in the American Civil War, as people who were instrumental in the survival of the United States government, women deserve equality because they are equal.

That's gonna help them get the vote in the territory of Wyoming in 1869 and then in Utah, '70.

Oh, well, that's a little bit of a different question but what it's not going to do is to continue because after 1870, there's a real law in women getting, continuing to get the vote.

And by the late 1880s, when people are once again, discussing, letting women vote, especially in the American West, which is where women's suffrage gets it's, really gets its feet on the ground.

Yeah, initially, in the late 19th century.

They're not talking about women being equal, about women have an equal right, end of discussion.

They're talking about women purifying the government because they are women, because they are wives and especially because they are mothers.

And that's a really different thing.

In that case, you're asking for suffrage based on this mythology of the cowboy sort of man, the individualist man who is symbolized by the cowboy.

And whose womenfolk, if you will, are at home and are at home taking care of the children and are bounded by this, the society.

That, again, looks a great deal like the aetiology of the American South before the Civil War.

So women get the vote but they get the vote in a really specific way, the idea that they're going to purify America.

And I think you can see that when you look at the suffragist movements in the early 20th century.

The women who are marching are not marching for equality, for equality sake, they're marching as wives and mothers and they marched through Washington in white clothing, pushing babies.

And so the idea there of there being a certain kind of person, a certain kind of family style, a certainly kind of role that makes you welcome in America is I think reinforced with the idea that women are going to vote because they're moms and because they're wives, not because they have inherently an equal right.

And I think that is again, a theme that you see carrying through into the 20th century and even the 21st.

- Well, now that we've got to our current century guide, what do you make of the Capitol insurrection on January 6th?

- Well, there was a big leap there (laughs).

I didn't see it coming.

I truly did not see it coming.

Let me start by saying, seeing that Confederate flag, flying in the US Capitol was a gut punch to people like me that I just never saw it coming.

And when I think of that, I think of the fact that never before did that happen, even during the Civil War itself, when the soldiers were ranged around the Capitol in rings as Julia Ward Howe wrote about so movingly in the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I have seen him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps.

They have builded him an alter in the evening dues and dams.

They kept out that Confederate ideology because that's not what America stood for.

And the fact that we had people in America who brought that flag and everything that it stood for into the heart, because the Capitol is the heart of our American government still makes me sick to my stomach.

So what do I make of why they were there and how they were there?

I think we have, we are still living through and perhaps in a more powerful way, a stronger way than we ever have before this conflict between the etiologies that are at the heart of our American history.

On the one hand, that we are all created equal and that our democracy should reflect that.

And our government should be one that is of the people by the people and for the people.

And on the other hand, the idea that permitting that to happen as a form of socialism or a form of leveling or a form of redistribution of wealth that according to the slave holders before the Civil War, the framers never intended.

And those two things are still at war, I think and right now there is reason to believe that those oligarchies are more powerful than they ever have been before.

- Well, one of Donald Trump's advisors, tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said, quote, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

You said that we're at a critical point for democracy.

And that quote seems to me to underscore exactly what you're talking about.

Here's a Western tech entrepreneur siding with those Southern attitudes that you were talking about.

- Well, and push onto the rest of that quotation because he goes on to suggest that the last time we could have both was the 1920s because that's before people of color and women could vote.

And, but he's not the only one, David from the conservative writer observed at one point that if there were a clash between democracy and conservatism that, the conservatism in the movement conservative sense not in the ideological sense coming out of Edmund Burke and the French revolution.

And later on picked up and altered quite significantly by Lincoln, that if they had to make a choice between conservatism and democracy, that the current day conservatives would choose their ideology and not democracy - In your writings, these things, the kind of progressive impulse seems to come in waves in your book, on the history of the Republican Party to make men free.

You write about, you know there was Lincoln, there was Teddy Roosevelt, there was Dwight Eisenhower but the GOP seems to revert to this other mode.

What do you think the future of the Republican Party is right now?

- Well, it's important to remember when you think about the future of the Republican Party right now, is that the people who are currently in charge of the party are not traditional Republicans.

And that was the point of that book you referring to was to point out that the party had taken a really dramatic turn in the 1990s, coming actually out of the 1950s.

But by the 1990s, it had taken a really dramatic turn by purging from the party, the traditional Republicans, the ones that people like Newt Gingrich called rhinos.

Republicans is name only and that was a brilliant rhetorical strategy because of course it was actually the other way around that the Gingrich revolutionaries were the ones who were Republicans in name only.

And were launching what was really quite a radical new look, a new kind of American government.

And so right out of the bat, we're already talking about people who are not traditional Republicans.

But within that faction, the movement conservative faction as it became known.

Now they're splitting between what I've been calling business Republicans, the oligarchs, if you will.

The people who think that they're the ones who know how to run the government and that what you need to do is cut regulation and cut taxes and move money upward because that's really how you create the most effective kind of economy and prosperous society.

And on the other hand, the racists and sexists and white nationalists and white supremacists who, they wedded in the 1980s and the 1990s to go ahead and make sure they could continue to win.

Because in fact, a government that does actually support our infrastructure and provide a basic social safety net and regulate business is actually quite popular.

So what you're seeing is those two things splitting apart right now.

And what is the future?

The future, I really do think at this point, either we are going to toss overboard democracy altogether and go full oligarchy.

The way so many other countries are flirting with right now around the world.

Or in fact, we are going to reclaim that progressive, and I wouldn't even call it progressive.

I would actually call it traditional American democracy that says that the government should belong to all of us and it should respond to everybody's needs and not just the needs of a certain portion of the population.

So anybody's guess what's going to happen.

But one of the things I try and do is encourage people to put some skin into the game and help us make that decision in a fair way.

- Well, Heather, thank you very much, unfortunately we're just about out of time.

So thanks again, for answering the questions and for a terrific conversation, have a good night.

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