Author: Yonatan Eyal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521875646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
This book investigates a particular group, called Young America, within the U.S. Democratic Party during the 1840s and 1850s. It argues that members of this group changed what it meant to be a Democrat. They moved the party toward new economic thinking, greater engagement with the world, a more active reform attitude, and a new view of the U.S. Constitution, thus playing a role in the coming of the American Civil War. This is the first full-blown examination of Young America's impact in the realm of politics, as opposed to merely literature and culture.
The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861
Author: Yonatan Eyal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521875646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
This book investigates a particular group, called Young America, within the U.S. Democratic Party during the 1840s and 1850s. It argues that members of this group changed what it meant to be a Democrat. They moved the party toward new economic thinking, greater engagement with the world, a more active reform attitude, and a new view of the U.S. Constitution, thus playing a role in the coming of the American Civil War. This is the first full-blown examination of Young America's impact in the realm of politics, as opposed to merely literature and culture.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521875646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
This book investigates a particular group, called Young America, within the U.S. Democratic Party during the 1840s and 1850s. It argues that members of this group changed what it meant to be a Democrat. They moved the party toward new economic thinking, greater engagement with the world, a more active reform attitude, and a new view of the U.S. Constitution, thus playing a role in the coming of the American Civil War. This is the first full-blown examination of Young America's impact in the realm of politics, as opposed to merely literature and culture.
The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861
Author: Yonatan Eyal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139466690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
Book Description
The phrase 'Young America' connoted territorial and commercial expansion in the antebellum United States. During the years leading up to the Civil War, it permeated various parts of the Democratic party, producing new perspectives in the realms of economics, foreign policy, and constitutionalism. Led by figures such as Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and editor John L. O'Sullivan of New York, Young America Democrats gained power during the late 1840s and early 1850s. They challenged a variety of orthodox Jacksonian assumptions, influencing both the nation's foreign policy and its domestic politics. This 2007 book offers an exclusively political history of Young America's impact on the Democratic Party, complementing existing studies of the literary and cultural dimensions of this group. This close look at the Young America Democracy sheds light on the political realignments of the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War, in addition to showcasing the origins of America's longest existing political party.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139466690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213
Book Description
The phrase 'Young America' connoted territorial and commercial expansion in the antebellum United States. During the years leading up to the Civil War, it permeated various parts of the Democratic party, producing new perspectives in the realms of economics, foreign policy, and constitutionalism. Led by figures such as Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and editor John L. O'Sullivan of New York, Young America Democrats gained power during the late 1840s and early 1850s. They challenged a variety of orthodox Jacksonian assumptions, influencing both the nation's foreign policy and its domestic politics. This 2007 book offers an exclusively political history of Young America's impact on the Democratic Party, complementing existing studies of the literary and cultural dimensions of this group. This close look at the Young America Democracy sheds light on the political realignments of the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War, in addition to showcasing the origins of America's longest existing political party.
The Jacksonian Promise
Author: Daniel Feller
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801851681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In Jacksonian Promise historian Daniel Feller offers a fresh look at the United States in the tumultuous Age of Jackson. Viewing the era through the eyes of people who lived in it, Feller's account captures the optimism and energy that filled America after the War of 1812. His emphasis on Americans' confidence in the future and faith in improvement challenges historians who depict the Jacksonian temperament in terms of anxiety and foreboding. Jacksonian Promise opens with the Jubilee anniversary of Independence in 1826, when Americans celebrated their national birthright of liberty and opportunity. Blessed with abundant resources and what they held to be the best government on earth, citizens believed they could accomplish nearly anything. They felt it in their power to remake themselves, their country, and the world. Feller traces the influence of this enterprising spirit across a broad range of Jacksonian activity. Experiment and innovation flourished as Americans built canals and factories, founded unions and utopias, staged religious revivals and moral crusades, and campaigned to eradicate social ills and to purify law and politics. Yet despite their common source, competing programs of progress soon clashed with each other. As citizens organized to pursue their hopes for America's future, divisions arose among that pointed ultimately toward civil war.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801851681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In Jacksonian Promise historian Daniel Feller offers a fresh look at the United States in the tumultuous Age of Jackson. Viewing the era through the eyes of people who lived in it, Feller's account captures the optimism and energy that filled America after the War of 1812. His emphasis on Americans' confidence in the future and faith in improvement challenges historians who depict the Jacksonian temperament in terms of anxiety and foreboding. Jacksonian Promise opens with the Jubilee anniversary of Independence in 1826, when Americans celebrated their national birthright of liberty and opportunity. Blessed with abundant resources and what they held to be the best government on earth, citizens believed they could accomplish nearly anything. They felt it in their power to remake themselves, their country, and the world. Feller traces the influence of this enterprising spirit across a broad range of Jacksonian activity. Experiment and innovation flourished as Americans built canals and factories, founded unions and utopias, staged religious revivals and moral crusades, and campaigned to eradicate social ills and to purify law and politics. Yet despite their common source, competing programs of progress soon clashed with each other. As citizens organized to pursue their hopes for America's future, divisions arose among that pointed ultimately toward civil war.
The Root and the Branch
Author: Sean Griffin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151282593X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
The Root and the Branch examines the relationship between the early labor movement and the crusade to abolish slavery between the early national period and the Civil War. Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals contributed to the antislavery project, from the development of free labor ideology to the Republican Party’s adoption of working-class land reform in the Homestead Act. By pioneering an antislavery politics based on an appeal to the self-interest of ordinary voters and promoting a radical vision of “free soil” and “free labor” that challenged liberal understandings of property rights and freedom of contract, labor reformers helped to birth a mass politics of antislavery that hastened the conflict with the Slave Power, while pointing the way toward future struggles over the meaning of free labor in the post-Emancipation United States. Bridging the gap between the histories of abolitionism, capitalism and slavery, and the origins of the Civil War, The Root and the Branch recovers a long-overlooked story of cooperation and coalition-building between labor reformers and abolitionists and unearths new evidence about the contributions of artisan reformers, transatlantic radicals, free Black activists, and ordinary working men and women to the development of antislavery politics. Based on painstaking archival research, The Root and the Branch addresses timely questions surrounding the relationships between slavery, antislavery, race, labor, and capitalism in the early United States.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151282593X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
The Root and the Branch examines the relationship between the early labor movement and the crusade to abolish slavery between the early national period and the Civil War. Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals contributed to the antislavery project, from the development of free labor ideology to the Republican Party’s adoption of working-class land reform in the Homestead Act. By pioneering an antislavery politics based on an appeal to the self-interest of ordinary voters and promoting a radical vision of “free soil” and “free labor” that challenged liberal understandings of property rights and freedom of contract, labor reformers helped to birth a mass politics of antislavery that hastened the conflict with the Slave Power, while pointing the way toward future struggles over the meaning of free labor in the post-Emancipation United States. Bridging the gap between the histories of abolitionism, capitalism and slavery, and the origins of the Civil War, The Root and the Branch recovers a long-overlooked story of cooperation and coalition-building between labor reformers and abolitionists and unearths new evidence about the contributions of artisan reformers, transatlantic radicals, free Black activists, and ordinary working men and women to the development of antislavery politics. Based on painstaking archival research, The Root and the Branch addresses timely questions surrounding the relationships between slavery, antislavery, race, labor, and capitalism in the early United States.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876
Author: William Nester
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1612346588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
Although Abraham Lincoln was among seven presidents who served during the tumultuous years between the end of the Mexican War and the end of the Reconstruction era, history has not been kind to the others: Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. In contrast, history sees Abraham Lincoln as a giant in character and deeds. During his presidency, he governed brilliantly, developed the economy, liberated four million people from slavery, reunified the nation, and helped enact the Homestead Act, among other accomplishments. He proved to be not only an outstanding commander in chief but also a skilled diplomat, economist, humanist, educator, and moralist. Lincoln achieved that and more because he was a master of the art of American power. He understood that the struggle for hearts and minds was the essence of politics in a democracy. He asserted power mostly by appealing to peopleÆs hopes rather than their fears. All along he tried to shape rather than reflect prevailing public opinions that differed from his own. To that end, he was brilliant at bridging the gap between progressives and conservatives by reining in the former and urging on the latter. His art of power ultimately reflected his unswerving devotion to the Declaration of IndependenceÆs principles and the ConstitutionÆs institutions, or as he so elegantly expressed it, ôto a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.ö
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1612346588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
Although Abraham Lincoln was among seven presidents who served during the tumultuous years between the end of the Mexican War and the end of the Reconstruction era, history has not been kind to the others: Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant. In contrast, history sees Abraham Lincoln as a giant in character and deeds. During his presidency, he governed brilliantly, developed the economy, liberated four million people from slavery, reunified the nation, and helped enact the Homestead Act, among other accomplishments. He proved to be not only an outstanding commander in chief but also a skilled diplomat, economist, humanist, educator, and moralist. Lincoln achieved that and more because he was a master of the art of American power. He understood that the struggle for hearts and minds was the essence of politics in a democracy. He asserted power mostly by appealing to peopleÆs hopes rather than their fears. All along he tried to shape rather than reflect prevailing public opinions that differed from his own. To that end, he was brilliant at bridging the gap between progressives and conservatives by reining in the former and urging on the latter. His art of power ultimately reflected his unswerving devotion to the Declaration of IndependenceÆs principles and the ConstitutionÆs institutions, or as he so elegantly expressed it, ôto a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.ö
A Different Manifest Destiny
Author: Claire M. Wolnisty
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496207904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Book Description
The South possessed an extensive history of looking outward, specifically southward, to solve internal tensions over slavery and economic competition in the 1820s through the 1860s. Nineteenth-century southerners invested in their futures, and in their identity as southerners, when they expanded their economic and proslavery connections to Latin America, seeking to establish a vast empire rooted in slavery that stretched southward to Brazil and westward to the Pacific Ocean. For these modern expansionists, failure to cement those connections meant nothing less than the death of the South. In A Different Manifest Destiny Claire M. Wolnisty explores how elite white U.S. southerners positioned themselves as modern individuals engaged in struggles for transnational power from the antebellum to the Civil War era. By focusing on three groups of people not often studied together—filibusters, commercial expansionists, and postwar southern emigrants—Wolnisty complicates traditional narratives about Civil War–era southern identities and the development of Manifest Destiny. She traces the ways southerners capitalized on Latin American connections to promote visions of modernity compatible with slave labor and explores how southern–Latin American networks spanned the years of the Civil War.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496207904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Book Description
The South possessed an extensive history of looking outward, specifically southward, to solve internal tensions over slavery and economic competition in the 1820s through the 1860s. Nineteenth-century southerners invested in their futures, and in their identity as southerners, when they expanded their economic and proslavery connections to Latin America, seeking to establish a vast empire rooted in slavery that stretched southward to Brazil and westward to the Pacific Ocean. For these modern expansionists, failure to cement those connections meant nothing less than the death of the South. In A Different Manifest Destiny Claire M. Wolnisty explores how elite white U.S. southerners positioned themselves as modern individuals engaged in struggles for transnational power from the antebellum to the Civil War era. By focusing on three groups of people not often studied together—filibusters, commercial expansionists, and postwar southern emigrants—Wolnisty complicates traditional narratives about Civil War–era southern identities and the development of Manifest Destiny. She traces the ways southerners capitalized on Latin American connections to promote visions of modernity compatible with slave labor and explores how southern–Latin American networks spanned the years of the Civil War.
Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares
Author: John H. Matsui
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues that the political ideology and racial views of American Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative of the North versus the South. Moving beyond the traditional optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants of the Civil War era into “premillenarian” and “postmillenarian” camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing. This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances. Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to actively perfect the world via moral reform—of self and society—and free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans’ utopian plans to reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the reconstruction of southern society. Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union victory in 1865.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues that the political ideology and racial views of American Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative of the North versus the South. Moving beyond the traditional optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants of the Civil War era into “premillenarian” and “postmillenarian” camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing. This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances. Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to actively perfect the world via moral reform—of self and society—and free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans’ utopian plans to reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the reconstruction of southern society. Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union victory in 1865.
Building Blocs
Author: Cedric de Leon
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804794987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Do political parties merely represent divisions in society? Until now, scholars and other observers have generally agreed that they do. But Building Blocs argues the reverse: that some political parties in fact shape divisions as they struggle to remake the social order. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in Indonesia, India, the United States, Canada, Egypt, and Turkey, this volume demonstrates further that the success and failure of parties to politicize social differences has dramatic consequences for democratic change, economic development, and other large-scale transformations. This politicization of divisions, or "political articulation," is neither the product of a single charismatic leader nor the machinations of state power, but is instead a constant call and response between parties and would-be constituents. When articulation becomes inconsistent, as it has in Indonesia, partisan calls grow faint and the resulting vacuum creates the possibility for other forms of political expression. However, when political parties exercise their power of interpellation efficiently, they are able to silence certain interests such as those of secular constituents in Turkey. Building Blocs exposes political parties as the most influential agencies that structure social cleavages and invites further critical investigation of the related consequences.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804794987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Do political parties merely represent divisions in society? Until now, scholars and other observers have generally agreed that they do. But Building Blocs argues the reverse: that some political parties in fact shape divisions as they struggle to remake the social order. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in Indonesia, India, the United States, Canada, Egypt, and Turkey, this volume demonstrates further that the success and failure of parties to politicize social differences has dramatic consequences for democratic change, economic development, and other large-scale transformations. This politicization of divisions, or "political articulation," is neither the product of a single charismatic leader nor the machinations of state power, but is instead a constant call and response between parties and would-be constituents. When articulation becomes inconsistent, as it has in Indonesia, partisan calls grow faint and the resulting vacuum creates the possibility for other forms of political expression. However, when political parties exercise their power of interpellation efficiently, they are able to silence certain interests such as those of secular constituents in Turkey. Building Blocs exposes political parties as the most influential agencies that structure social cleavages and invites further critical investigation of the related consequences.
Building a House Divided
Author: Stephen G. Hyslop
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806193409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
By the time Abraham Lincoln asserted in 1858 that the nation could not “endure permanently half slave and half free,” the rift that would split the country in civil war was well defined. The origins and evolution of the coming conflict between North and South can in fact be traced back to the early years of the American Republic, as Stephen G. Hyslop demonstrates in Building a House Divided, an exploration of how the incipient fissure between the Union’s initial slave states and free states—or those where slaves were gradually being emancipated—lengthened and deepened as the nation advanced westward. Hyslop focuses on four prominent slaveholding expansionists who were intent on preserving the Union but nonetheless helped build what Lincoln called a house divided: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who managed a plantation in Mississippi bequeathed by his father-in-law. Hyslop examines what these men did, collectively and individually, to further what Jefferson called an “empire of liberty,” though it kept millions of Black people in bondage. Along with these major figures, in all their conflicts and contradictions, he considers other American expansionists who engaged in and helped extend slavery—among them William Clark, Stephen Austin, and President John Tyler—as well as examples of principled opposition to the extension of slavery by northerners such as John Quincy Adams and southerners like Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton, who held slaves but placed preserving the Union above extending slavery across the continent. The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras in this book, reveals the critical fault in the nation’s foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once.
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806193409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
By the time Abraham Lincoln asserted in 1858 that the nation could not “endure permanently half slave and half free,” the rift that would split the country in civil war was well defined. The origins and evolution of the coming conflict between North and South can in fact be traced back to the early years of the American Republic, as Stephen G. Hyslop demonstrates in Building a House Divided, an exploration of how the incipient fissure between the Union’s initial slave states and free states—or those where slaves were gradually being emancipated—lengthened and deepened as the nation advanced westward. Hyslop focuses on four prominent slaveholding expansionists who were intent on preserving the Union but nonetheless helped build what Lincoln called a house divided: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who managed a plantation in Mississippi bequeathed by his father-in-law. Hyslop examines what these men did, collectively and individually, to further what Jefferson called an “empire of liberty,” though it kept millions of Black people in bondage. Along with these major figures, in all their conflicts and contradictions, he considers other American expansionists who engaged in and helped extend slavery—among them William Clark, Stephen Austin, and President John Tyler—as well as examples of principled opposition to the extension of slavery by northerners such as John Quincy Adams and southerners like Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton, who held slaves but placed preserving the Union above extending slavery across the continent. The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras in this book, reveals the critical fault in the nation’s foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once.
How the South Won the Civil War
Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019090092X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019090092X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.