When It was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War by LeeAnna Keith

Hill and Wang, 340 pp.

How The South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson

Oxford University Press, 237 pp.

By Allen Barra

Of all the reasons offered as to why Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the one which should be most obvious is scarcely mentioned: Trump went into the election with perhaps 230 electoral votes in his pocket. The Republicans had the Old Confederacy (with the exception of Virginia, though West Virginia remains red), the Southern-leaning states of Missouri and Kentucky, and all of the Far West except New Mexico in tow before the first ballot was cast.

Depending on where you draw your borders, this means that in the last few presidential elections and probably for the next one, 20-25 of the southern and western states won’t even be in play for the Democrats.

Two new books, -- When It Was Grand by LeeAnna Keith and How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson – walk step-by-step through the process of how this came to be. The books were not intended as companion volumes, but they complement each other, and anyone who reads one will probably want to read the other.

LeeAnna Keith, a teacher of history at the Collegiate School in New York, is the author of The Colfax Massacre (2008) about the failure of Reconstruction and the birth of the Jim Crow era, so she knows the territory well. With a forceful clarity, she sweeps aside all the nonsense about what our civil war was about: “There is a war,” she quotes the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison saying, “because there was a Republican Party. There was a Republican Party because there was an Abolition Party. There was an Abolition Party because there was slavery.”

The greatest transformative movement in American history was the rise of radical Republicans who “helped to destroy slavery and used the conflagration of the Civil War to initiate a revolution in race relations.” A coalition of black and white men and women, intellectuals, industrial leaders, all of whom coalesced around the issue of slavery, began at what seemed like an insignificant minority and grew into the Radical Republicans who “dominated their party and transformed the nature of government to achieve their goals.”

In the years before the Civil War, the old Whig Party was going the way of the Federalists some thirty years earlier; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all escaped slaves be returned to their masters, enraged anti-slavery Whigs and accelerated the disintegration of their party. A powerful new political entity, the Radical Republicans, sprang up in its wake. Keith boldly names Stephen Douglas, the so-called “Little Giant” of the Senate and the most prominent Democrat in the country, as “the founding father of the Republican Party ….”

More influential than the ineffectual president, Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), Douglas, “by a single legislative initiative, the Kansas-Nebraska bill … accidentally ballooned into existence an opposition movement that formed almost immediately as a potent new political party.” To be Republican at the creation of the party was to be a radical. Their ranks included Kentucky abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay and even a New York poet named Walt Whitman. Their agenda extended beyond slavery: in the spring of 1958, Rad Reps presented the first suffrage campaign. Douglas’s brainchild, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, wiped out the Missouri Compromise and allowed citizens of Kansas and Nebraska Territory to decide whether or not to allow slavery.

It was an era of scorched earth politics in which slaveholders had “disproportionate control of the congressional committees, the Supreme Court and federal bureaucracies …” and the presidency as well. James Buchanan (1857-1861) was so in the pockets of pro-slavery Democrats that Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens cuttingly remarked that if the president were to stop advocating the Southern cause in Washington, ‘the South could always get him back under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act.”

The Supreme Court in particular, packed with slave-owners, acted as nothing less than a judicial arm of the Southern planter class, especially Chief Justice Roger Taney, who, in writing the majority opinion for the Dred Scott Decision, concluded “Blacks” – and he did not distinguish between free or slave – “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The immediate effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, writes Keith, was to complete “the transformation of the Democratic Party into the tool of white supremacy …” This led to the violence of Bleeding Kansas, where border “’ruffians’ of both political stripes flooded into the territory to influence the citizens’ attitudes.” The violence “put the country on what seemed like a war footing.”

Abolitionist heroes such as Massachusetts Rev. Theodore Parker began to have more influence on politics. It was Parker who coined a phrase much quoted today: “The arc [of the moral universe] is a long one, and from what I see I am sure that it bends towards justice.” That arc wasn’t bending fast enough to please a firebrand named John Brown, “a moral purist who despised the Republican Party until his death.”

“Had Lincoln met him,” writes Keith, “he would not have liked either the Harper’s Ferry conspiracy or John Brown himself, a man without a sense of humor.” (Harriet Tubman, known as “The General” to Brown and his followers, also rejected Brown’s policies and refused to ally with him.) Lincoln’s Republicanism “was just the kind that sickened Brown most.”

Keith makes a convincing case that our 16th President “disdained the particulars of radicalism in favor of a more sweeping vision of the role of Republicans in the crisis of the state.” Or as Lincoln himself put it, “John Brown was no Republican.”

Abe Lincoln was no Radical, but slowly he came to affect perhaps the greatest changes of any president in American history. As the War ground into its second terrible year, he came to embrace the idea of black men as soldiers.

When It Was Grand highlights heroes that most books on the Civil War have relegated to footnotes, such as Lincoln’s friend, Major General David Hunter, who in March, 1862, was made head of the Army’s Department of the South. Hunter was given the task of quickly mobilizing black men, nearly all former slaves, into an army – “in short, to have launched a revolution in a little less than six months.” The U.S. Navy had the honor of being the first service arm to bring African-Americans into its ranks, but in an absurdly short time, new regiments of black troops were forming in every state, North and South, where the Union army was encamped. Gen. Hunter’s wisest act was to select the Massachusetts abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to prepare the first regiments of black soldiers for combat. Higginson (a writer and journalist in civilian life) was the first to promote the work of Emily Dickinson.

African-Americans joined the U.S. Army in a steady stream; on January 1, 1863, with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the stream became a flood. In their first engagement in October, 1862, black troops in Missouri got their baptism of fire. One newspaper reported that “the colored soldiers fought like tigers.”

Another hero was a man born into a family of slave owners, Lorenzo Thomas, a respected but undistinguished officer in the Army for more than three decades. Lincoln knew Thomas and saw qualities that others had overlooked. At age 59, Thomas was given the task of integrating regiments of black soldiers into the regular ranks. In the company of General Grant, Thomas served “in the most thrilling and dangerous work of the Vicksburg campaign,” taking the message of the Lincoln administration to the countless camps of “contraband” – the euphemism given to slaves in Confederate territory as “captured” property. “When you meet white men,” he told his perspective soldiers, “be polite, courteous; but be men … I tell you these things not only because I am commanded to do so by the President,” Thomas insisted, “but because I feel them. I was raised by a slave, I once owned slaves, I know what all the prejudices are upon the subject. But I have overcome them.”

Thomas would personally enroll more than 70,000 black men into the U.S. armed forces. The Civil War put guns in the hands of black men and taught them how to use them. “In your hands,” Frederick Douglass told black units, “that musket means liberty; and should your constitutional rights at the close of this year be denied … you have a Constitution which proclaims your right to keep and bear arms.”

The summer of ’64 was “the worst in American history, and black people fighting for the Union experienced the most terrible parts.” The carnage in Virginia alone was the bloodiest in world history, and black troops were in the thick of the fighting. For all that there was good news for African Americans in October when Roger Taney died, opening a door for the radicalization of the Supreme Court of the United States – “a transformation initiated though never completed” thanks to John Wilkes Booth.

Still, the efforts of the “Black Republicans,” as enemies called Radicals white and black, “bestowed a glory on the Republican Party that subsequent history could not erase.” Not that they haven’t tried.

With no Lincoln to continue the gains won in the War, the Radicals began to lose their way. “Republicans disengaged from racial politics,” Keith concludes, “during the Jim Crow era, decades when they aligned themselves with big business and conservative social values. They prized moderation, coming to view references to racism as more offensive than racism itself.”

When It Was Grand is soul-stirring, a fitting tribute to heroes whose legacies, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln’s, have faded. But inevitably the book must end on a down note: “Can Americans of the twenty-first century redeem the promise of the Radical Republicans?” Only, says Keith, by recapturing the idealism of the men who ended slavery in America: “To commemorate their trials and triumphs is to move at last in the direction of a truly post-Confederate United States.”

Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War picks up with this intriguing question. Cox is a professor of history at Boston College, whose previous work includes histories of Reconstruction, including West from Appomattox (2007) and The Death of Reconstruction (2001). How the South Won begins with a contradiction at the heart of America at its conception: “The same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. This apparent contradiction was not a flaw, though; it was a key feature of the new democracy. For the Founders, the concept that all men are created equal depended on the idea that the ringing phrase ‘All men’ did not actually include everyone … In the Founders’ minds, then, the principle of equality depended on inequality.”

As the principle of equality inched closer to some kind of actuality in the North, the Southern states morphed into the Confederate States of America, an association based on the premise, even if it was not so articulated, that the phrase “All men are created equal” was wrong. Like Keith, Richardson doesn’t equivocate on what the Civil War was about: “The cornerstone of the Confederacy, as Vice President Alexander Stephens put it, was that ‘the Negro was not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’” Stephens’ government was, he thought, “The first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

How the South Won The Civil War takes off into new territory, literally, in Richardson’s thesis that “In the West, Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there, over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” Angry Southern Democrats who loathed the idea that racial equality could be enforced by government “saw the West as the only free place left in America … ” They promoted the image of the western cowboy as a hardy individualist, carving his way in the world on his own. Ignoring the reality that American soldiers and cowboys were often men of color and the government provided settlers with land, protected them from Indians, and helped develop the western economy …”

Simply put, “Banished in the East, the shadow of legal slavery continued to dim the West.”

No doubt you’ve heard some of these ideas expressed before about both the Southern and Western states. But Richardson illuminates the issues by highlighting the similarities between the two regions. The cultivated image of the western individualist took hold after 1880, the year that the Republican Party lost control of the southern states, which went solidly Democratic. From then until the end of the century, eastern Republicans saw several western territories become states that allied themselves with the former Confederate states: “By 1890, the West had an ideology more in common with that of the South than that of the North.”

And so the original paradox of freedom based on inequality was reborn, and, finally, given substance and form by westerners, first Arizona’s Barry Goldwater and then, from California, Ronald Reagan, who inherited Goldwater’s legacy and put a pleasant face on it – though a face which gave American politics “the welfare queen.” (“She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands …”)

By the time of Reagan’s ascension in the late 1970s, the Democrats identified as the party of civil rights and had lost all of the South and West to a revamped Republican Party: “Between Goldwater and 2016 Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, every Republican presidential nominee except Gerald Ford (whose elevation did not come through usual channels) has come from west of the Mississippi River.”

When, in the 2016 election Trump’s supporters talked angrily of succession and even revolution if their man did not win, they were, whether they knew it or not, reviving sentiments from 1860. Trump’s followers “defended Confederate monuments and accepted the support of the Ku Klux Klan. The parallels between the antebellum Democrats and the modern day Republican Party were clear."

Amazingly, early in the 20th century the traditional South began a campaign to rehabilitate its image. In 1902 a North Carolina Baptist minister turned writer named Thomas Dixon wrote, with an able assist from Rudyard Kipling, The Leopard’s Spots, A Romance of the White Man’s Burden. It was the Old Testament for the idea that the southern states were degraded by the federal government and the Negro race, but “The day of Negro domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever.”

The New Testament would come three years later with his novel The Clansman [sic], which in 1915 was turned into the motion picture event of the decade, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation.

Such distinguished literary figures as Allen Tate and future U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren were at the center of a loosely knit group of writers known as The Southern Agrarians, who offered Southerners the soothing notion that the War had been fought not over slavery but principle. It was in this period that most of the statues honoring Confederate soldiers that have proved so controversial a century later were erected. “The statues were to confirm the idea that no longer were Confederate soldiers fighting for slavery. Instead … they fought for states’ rights.”

The currents of thought in How The South Won the Civil War are swift, and in the end, irresistible. But at several points in the book, Richardson undermines her thesis by extending into popular culture. I’ll concede that Hollywood’s Golden Age produced many classic films about “an individual winning victory over a corrupt and distant government,” such as Gone With The Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington but I don’t see how The Wizard of Oz, no matter what the political intentions of author Frank L. Baum were, fits into this argument. After all, Dorothy triumphs over the Wicked Witch of the West and the mean schoolteacher, not the Wizard.

Still, How The South Won the Civil War is the best book on how the Republicans went from the party that campaigned for Harriet Tubman to the party that campaigned against the Welfare Queen.

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was recently cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for literary and film criticism.