Did the Confederacy Ever End?

On July 30, 2017, April Reign posted a message onto Twitter that would reverberate throughout the night. She created a hashtag called #NoConfederate in response to HBO’s Game of Thrones creators plans to create a show called Confederate where the Confederacy triumphed in the American Civil War. Overnight, the hashtag became the second most popular on Twitter and forced a defense by HBO of the show. When I heard the news about the protest, I pondered to myself a singular question. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to explore how the Confederacy has survived in spite of the Union’s victory? Admittedly, there is no government that rules over a country called the Confederate States of America and there has not been such a nation since 1865. However, its influence on American politics and on American culture continue through various facets even now.

[pullquote]Wouldn’t it be more interesting to see if and how the Confederacy survived in spite of the Union’s victory?[/pullquote]

In 1865, Reconstruction began and military governments ruled in the former Confederate states. Even when the federal government allowed the states of the South to participate in Congress, they remained under observation and Virginia, Texas, and Mississippi did not participate in the 1868 presidential election. African-Americans could vote under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868 and the Force Bills of 1870 and 1871. Law professor and historian Bruce Ackerman pointed out that were African-Americans not allowed to vote in 1868, Horatio Seymour (Democrat) would have carried the popular vote despite the pro-civil rights Ulysses Grant (Republican) burying him in the electoral college. This happened despite Seymour’s vice presidential candidate Francis Blair of Missouri denouncing civil rights for African-Americans and urging full acceptance of the South without any more repercussions. In 1872, the Democrats could not find a candidate to unseat the popular Grant. Therefore, they endorsed the Liberal Republican ticket of Horace Greeley for president and Benjamin Gratz Brown for vice president that arose when Greeley criticized the numerous scandals surrounding Grant’s cabinet. Greeley lost and the Democrats of both the North and the South could only hope for a change in fortune after Grant’s retirement.

Confederate influence on American politics continued throughout the entirety of Reconstruction. In the 1876 election, Rutherford Hayes (Republican) defeated Samuel Tilden (Democrat) in the electoral vote while losing the popular vote while an Electoral Commission (with an eight Republican-appointed majority out of fifteen) voted based on their parties 8-7 to end the election in favor of Hayes when the voting results in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida was too close to call. In 1880, James Garfield (Republican) defeated Winfield Hancock (Democrat) in the electoral college by a vote of 214 for Garfield to 155 for Hancock. However, he won the popular vote in all polls though by wildly different amounts. He won by less than 10,000 votes according to one poll. Both candidates won 19 states and Hancock swept the former Confederate states in the closest popular vote margin among the two major candidates in American history. A major reason that Hancock (a Union general) was able to win the South was that white Southerners tended to vote solely Democratic after Hayes compromised with the South to end military Reconstruction.

Though the New York Democrat Grover Cleveland would win the popular vote in 1884, 1888, and 1892 and would win the electoral college in 1884 and 1892, increasing Republican support in new states in the northern and western United State and the Panic of 1893 during Grover Cleveland’s second term rendered the Fourth Party System from 1897 to 1933 virtually dominated by the Republican Party with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Nevertheless, the former Confederate states consolidated their control over both white and especially African-Americans by refusing the right of most African-Americans to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment. There was also a decided split between the South and the Deep South. The Deep South is an admittedly vague term that usually connotes states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The other states would usually vote for Democrats over the next 80 years for president. States like Tennessee could go to Warren Harding in 1920 or even Louisiana could go to Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. After the 1876 election, no state from the Deep South ever voted for a Republican for president until the anticivil rights Republican Barry Goldwater won several Deep South states in 1964. Both before and after the 1964 election, independent Southern candidates won states in the Deep South such as Strom Thurmond winning Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina in 1948, Henry Byrd winning Mississippi and Alabama in 1960, and George McGovern winning Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia in 1968. Even after the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s and the Republican shift in the South during the 1960s and the 1970s, Democrats remained in control of the position of governors for far longer. In 2003, Sonny Perdue became the first Republican governor of Georgia since Benjamin Conley in 1872 and the same patterns emerged in other Deep South states, albeit more quickly than in Georgia.

To be clear, the parties do not openly show any vestige from the Confederacy. While the Republicans became vilified in the South as the party of Abraham Lincoln and of the conquerors, Theodore Roosevelt spoke fondly of his pro-Southern mother and Democrats such as Walter Mondale of Minnesota helped to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats split during the election of 1860 over the Northern Democrats’ refusal to announce the territories completely open to slavery and the split remained palpable well into the 1960s.

The Confederacy also had an enormous impact in the national government besides the presidency. Hayes promised to always have a southern Democrat in his Cabinet and to that end he hired a Southerner as his postmaster general. Both Republican and Democrat presidents rarely balked at nominating former Confederate soldiers for positions not only in the Cabinet, but also to the United States Supreme Court. Grover Cleveland nominated Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of Mississippi and Edward Douglass White of Louisiana to the Supreme Court while William Howard Taft (Republican) appointed Horace Lurton of Tennessee while promoting Edward Douglass White from associate justice to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court! Such actions did not provoke widespread disgust and were accepted by the American people as being in the spirit of meritocracy and of reconciliation.

Though the Confederacy affected government directly, it also harmed the South’s image in such a way that the image of the South has never completely healed. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson became the first person elected to the presidency from a former Confederate state since 1848 with Zachary Taylor of Louisiana’s election in that year. In 1976, Jimmy Carter of Georgia became the first man the American people elected from the Deep South since 1848. In both the Republican and the Democratic Party, candidates from the former Confederacy did not help out tickets because the South was so solidly Democratic that no candidate from the South appeared until Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas ran as the vice presidential nominee with Al Smith on the Democratic ticket in 1928. The South formerly held great clout in the presidency, as eight of the first twelve presidents came from a state that would join the Confederacy. Formerly respected figures in antebellum politics became disgraced for their support of the Confederacy. John Tyler of Virginia, the president of the United States from 1841 to 1845, and John Breckinridge of Kentucky, the vice president from 1857 to 1861, both sought positions within the new Confederate government and military respectively. Additionally, Justice John Archibald Campbell left the U.S. Supreme Court to join the Confederacy in 1861.

However, a key question following such a historical background is whether vestiges from the Confederacy still survive today. Certainly the reforms during the latter half of the twentieth century destroyed most of the most egregious effects of the Confederacy after Reconstruction, but not all of them died. Mississippi remains the only state with a Confederate flag on its state flag and the people of the state confirmed as the de jure flag in 2001. On May 29, 2017, Brandenburg, Kentucky, accepted a monument to Confederate soldiers formerly standing at the University of Louisville. In 2008, H.W. Crocker III even wrote a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, stating on the cover that the South “had the moral high ground” and falsely stating that the Vatican supported the Confederacy. I have seen Crocker’s book in a public library this year and in a Barnes & Noble store with other books in the Politically Incorrect Guides series and they are readily available books. Americans should learn to accept the fact that the Confederacy was an even more oppressive version of South Africa or Rhodesia. At least in those countries, slavery was illegal while apartheid was the law of the land.

[pullquote]I do not oppose Confederate as I believe that that could lead to other controversial shows being cancelled in the future. I do wish they had looked at the century and a half following the Civil War’s conclusion.[/pullquote]

The Confederacy as a government and even as a strong governmental influence died decades ago. However, American culture has not recovered from its seismic effects. I do not oppose HBO producing Confederate as I believe that such a reversal could lead to other controversial but important shows being cancelled in the future. I do wish the producers of Game of Thrones had looked at the century and a half following the Civil War’s conclusion. The actual historical events and phenomena are almost certainly more interesting and more complex than any screenwriter could create or could even imagine.

Luke Voyles ’18 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at lrvoyles@wustl.edu.