In 1865, General Lee surrendered to the Union after the Confederate army’s ambush at the Battle of Appomattox, effectively ending the bloodshed that made up the Civil War. The South’s loss contributed to several blunders led by the Confederate leaders, causing the demise of their government, economic ruin, weak infrastructure, and an unstable army. The pain of their loss inspired Southerners to reimagine the events of the war that fit into an alternate history, where the efforts of the Confederacy are celebrated as part of their Southern heritage to gain independence from an oppressive government. The memorialization of the people who fought to preserve white supremacy and racial segregation in America's most violent conflict maintains a heavy presence in present-day society in order to avoid telling uncomfortable truths and come to terms with their inevitable defeat as a result of carelessness with their strategy. While the Union technically won the Civil War, the impactful control of the war’s narrative in the aftermath kept their message alive with the utilization of modern, hidden tactics throughout history, minimizing the real cause of the conflict that inspired the North’s reason to fight.
The South’s path to “victory” started off with their rejection of Northern liberty laws. Personal-liberty laws passed in the pre-Civil War era by Northern state governments served to negate the measures present in the Fugitive Slave Acts and to protect the well-being of enslaved residents living in the North. The South took the Union’s actions as a method of maintaining control of their region by slowly eliminating their way of life. Hostility increased after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, prompting states to discuss the idea of secession in order to form a new nation mirroring their own values. On the day of December 9, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to declare secession from the United States when their representatives passed a proclamation, sparking a secession crisis by claiming that “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations” in reference to free states refusing to abide by the Fugitive Slave Acts (“South Carolina Declaration of Secession”).
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The main concern for Southerners stood at Lincoln’s election to the presidency due to his “opinions and purposes” that remained “hostile to slavery”, eliciting concerns of slave extinction under his administration (‘South Carolina Declaration of Secession”). Despite all laws that the North passed to prohibit slavery, the South refused to abandon their beliefs and resisted change. Southern states maintained their stance on expanding states’ rights apart from federal control by standing their ground on their threat to secede from their desire to gain independence, with criticism aimed toward Northern attempts to take control of federal law. As Southern states started making their transition to the Confederacy, Northern states found themselves having to soften their position on abolition in order to keep the country intact. While these laws sealed the Union’s win in their efforts to outlaw slavery in the Constitution, disagreements between the two sides exploded into the Civil War, resulting in the loss of countless lives on the battlefield. Furthermore, the South continued to curb Northern ideals to preserve fought the idea of abolition in order to expand slavery into the nation.
Discussions of expansion started with Missouri applying for statehood into the Union. Northern states protested the addition of another slave state, believing that pro-slavery states occupied political dominance over free states in the Senate. The Constitution granted the right for states to consider each slave as three-fifths of a person for tax, population, and legislative reasons. The South gained an advantage in the government in terms of bringing more Southern delegates into Congress, disenfranchising black individuals in the process. An agreement was reached between the two sides with the addition that “authorize the people of the Missouri territory to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states” while also prohibiting slavery of the “thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north” parallel (“Conference committee report on the Missouri Compromise”). While the passage of the compromise postponed the inevitable war that occurred later on, the political discourse between the North and South escalated with the issue of admitting Missouri into the country by establishing slavery as the basic foundation of the Southern society and halting the steady liberation of slaves. The issue of slavery continued to dominate the nation despite the North’s attempts to extend abolition.
The North’s inability to eradicate slavery for the future intensified the Southern dream, compelling Southerners to hold faith in their principles. With the South’s loss in the Civil War decades later, Southerners turned their loss into an advantage by enacting federal laws echoing the ideals abolished by the North. For instance, while Reconstruction attempted to unify the country by granting citizenship to black Americans, states continued to pass laws that unfairly targeted black people. In 1865, Southern states like Mississippi enacted the Black Codes that restored some basic human rights to former slaves but also threatened to fine “$200” and imprison black citizens “at the discretion of the court” if they “shall fail or refuse to pay any tax levied according to the provisions of the 6th Section of this act”, “keep or carry firearms of any kind”, or “shall be hired out by the sheriff or other officer, at public outcry, to any white person who will pay said fine and all costs and take such convict for the shortest time” (McPherson). The defeat left Southerners resentful toward the North, which triggered the passage of the Black Codes to retain control of black lives by limiting their freedom once again and reinforcing slavery in an effort to halt political globalization.
The ratification of the 14th Amendment eventually struck down the unconstitutionality of the Codes, but the South’s actions deepened the rift between the two regions and reignited a war that had supposedly ended in the North’s favor during 1865. Therefore, the real issues tied back to the South opposing assimilation originated from the hope of keeping the memory of the Confederacy relevant even after the end of the war. Restoring the slave system meant creating systems that had a goal similar to slavery, presented in a different manner. One strategy introduced to recreate the flow of cheap labor in the workforce included sharecropping, as seen from slave owners such as P.H. Anderson who offered his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, a job to come back onto his plantation in exchange for money, food, clothing, and housing; Anderson not only turned the job down but asked his former master to pay back his owed wages to rebuild a positive opinion of his ex-master (“Letter from a freedman to his old master”).
Anderson reveals the anger behind his enslavement at his former master’s request, which showed that the South never truly surrendered from the war. The South’s need to utilize slave labor and raw materials that once produced an abundance of wealth expose their unwillingness to shift with the times. Instead, their traditional values focus on white power, propelling a nation that remains resentful of a history that does not accept their values. Some ex-Confederates used their privilege to their disadvantage, like Alexander Stephens during a cornerstone speech proclaiming that “our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the White man” declaring that “that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural condition” (Stephens). Stephens rejected the system of slavery as a whole; however, he viewed African slavery as a “positive good” that remained vital for society to function properly due to their inferiority to white people, exposing the true thoughts of Southerners who did not plan on living peacefully among the Northerners but instead planned on taking back the country under their terms. He eventually went on to claim that slavery had no influence in the war, effectively taking racial equality a step backward.
The recognition of white nationalism in the United States further drove the institution of slavery even after abolition as a result of the war. While Congress eventually passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that preserved equal rights for black citizens, disillusioned Confederate supporters formed the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups that focused on the superior influence of white identity in their political ideology. The creation of a society that incorporates the rhetoric of white privilege encompassed into the Confederacy’s values today proves that Americans still live in a world that regards white people over minorities, destroying the significance of the North’s victory. In addition, the South rewrote history in order to protect their dignity and justify their ancestors’ actions by propagandizing the narrative of America’s history. To protect the image of Confederate soldiers who died for the Confederacy, ex-Confederate comrades and advocates began arguing that the cause of the war stemmed from the issue of states’ rights instead of slavery. The distorted view of the war circulated to Americans all around the nation who quickly embraced the new way of normalizing their history. The forgotten meaning of the war angered Americans such as Frederick Douglass who remembers the war as a “painful sequence both of slavery and of the late rebellion” fought between “ideas, a battle of principles and ideas which united one section and divided the other” through “slavery and freedom, barbarism, and civilization; between a government based upon the broadest and grandest declaration of human rights the world ever heard or read, and another pretended government, based upon an open, bold and shocking denial of all rights” that “no sentiment ought to cause us to forget” (Douglass). Douglass aimed to curb the minimization of the role slavery played in the war and change the benevolent representation of the enslaved system.
Southern culture has been stereotyped for its stubbornness, which contributed to the sabotage of American political progress that abolitionists strived to change in the aftermath of the war. In conclusion, the Union won the Civil War while the Confederacy claimed true victory in the long run with racist ideas seeping into the nation’s narrative through laws in a post-Civil War society that reinforced oppression, sharecropping, and other components intertwined with slavery. These laws succeeded in creating racial barriers that strictly prohibited black citizens from executing their basic rights as free people. While slavery was eventually outlawed, elements of the system continued to exist on a certain level even in the modern day. The ideology of white supremacy that emerged against racial equality dominates the political sphere, sparking debates in terms of the direction the nation should be heading. As a result, the “Lost Cause”-esque theory established an outlet in the modernized Republican Party for Confederate supporters to spread their message to others in mainstream media. Confederate supporters maintain a presence in politics, with a few holding government positions in the Senate who carry the future of the country in their hands. The Union’s win over the South, however, prevented a grim future from occurring in terms of racial segregation. A Southern triumph holds the powerful possibility of changing the course of history, where issues of slavery and secession remain rampant all throughout America. While race relations continue to be tenser than before, the Confederacy’s loss serves as a stepping stone on a long journey to building a unified country
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