Talking About Money Book Club: How the South Won the Civil War, by Heather Cox Richardson
How the South Won the Civil War provides an alternative look at the time period after (and before) the Civil War, and explains how the determination of a few led to their ever-growing wealth while leaving most everyone else behind.
Hello, Talking About Money Community, I hope that all is well with you. 🙏
In today’s post, I announcing our latest book club pick: How the South Won the Civil War, by Heather Cox Richardson. Some of you may know Professor Richardson from her wildly successful Letters from An American newsletter on Substack. She is also a history professor at Boston College.
What first drew me to her writing was, in short, because she is female. I am not sure about you, but in school virtually all of my history teachers were male, and virtually all the history I learned (and did not memorize) featured male-centered events and was told from a male perspective. Sitting through those long boring class periods, I repeatedly had the thought, “This is not for me. What do a bunch of dead white guys have to do with my existence?” So, I tuned out the lectures, did all but the minimal required work to get through the classes, and never set foot of the history department of my liberal arts college.
It was only as an adult (and not that long ago, to be frank) that I learned that history could be for me. I discovered that there were women in the past who did quite remarkable things. And I learned (and remembered) that what happened years ago absolutely impacts my life today.
This cannot be more true than the history told in How the South Won the Civil War. The second reason why this book attracted my attention was because my family history is a little bit Northern and a whole lot Southern. I was born in New England and have lived here most all my life. But my roots are southern through and through, from Kentucky and before that from Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. My immigrant ancestors arrived well before the Revolutionary War and helped settle what became the American South.
We all know that the North “won” the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and that the Union remained intact, so what is Professor Richardson saying with such a provocative title to her book? And because this is a blog written for financial capability professionals, what are the personal financial implications of this thesis that South actually won the Civil war?
Let’s find out.
The meaning of “liberty”
What is the true meaning of liberty? One definition posits that liberty means:
The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.
Sounds nice, but does it really apply to everyone? Professor Richardson explains that no, not everyone gets liberty in the United States, and that was in our nation’s design from the very beginning. At the time of the Revolution some of our nation’s founders owned other human beings, and baked into the founding documents that only rich, white, land-owning males were the ones who were to enjoy liberty in this nascent nation.
White indentured servants (like many of my ancestors) where left out of the original plan; enslaved persons were left out of this plan; and women – who did not own property and in fact were under the complete and absolute control of their fathers and husbands – were left out of the plan. Remember the magic of compound interest? Unless your ancestors were among the anointed few at the beginning of this nation’s history, they were not laying the foundation of vast intergenerational wealth that a tiny number of families benefit from today.
And so, America and its individual states grew over the next century, each region pursuing liberty in its own unique way. Slavery slowly ended in the North, initially not because people woke up to the realization of the importance of human rights, but rather because the short growing season make the economic construct of slavery no longer feasible. Slavery thrived in cotton industry of the South, where wealthy men got wealthier by exploiting other human beings. And then came the Civil War, and the whole thing came tumbling down.
A country built on equality, or one built on subordination?
Following the Civil War the United States entered Reconstruction, an era when the country tried to reimagine itself as one creating opportunities for both white and Black people. For a time, former slaves gained some ground: they lived freely, pursued education, and held public office. The 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote. The country tried for a while to live up to the idea of liberty that the Founders wrote (but not for them) almost one hundred years prior.
The backlash to Reconstruction was fueled not only in the South, but also in the push to dominate the land in the West. Former landowners in the South made the argument that the only way for growth in America was to allow them the freedom to pursue every business option possible, no matter the cost to land or lives. And they argued that the country worked best when a few rich white men were in charge; after all, some people were only cut out for menial work. Do you remember the concept from the George H. W Bush era called “trickle-down economics”? It may have gotten its start here.
This ideology was mimicked in the West, where the imagery of the cowboy gained popularity, a solitary white male on horseback (though many cowboys were of color) wishing to pursue his dreams with as little involvement as possible from the government. This led to businesses profiting from the extraction of natural resources and the subordination of Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, and any other group that might threaten the wealth-building opportunities of a handful of white men. Oligarchs reigned supreme.
Same As It Ever Was
Reading this book was enlightening to me not only for the content, but also for what I noted as patterns repeating themselves over time. I envisioned a straight line that sometimes pointed horizontal, where equality and a strong middle class was held up by elected officials and the populace as a priority. Times of heightened attention towards equal rights happened during Reconstruction, The New Deal, the Civil Rights era/War on Poverty, and some might even say during the current period, with Black Lives Matter, Covid response, and the Green New Deal dominating the headlines.
These time periods also featured an effort to provide a social safety net under those who needed it, with such policies as Social Security, worker protections, Medicare and Medicaid, and civil rights legislation, to name a few.
But at other points in history, I see this imaginary straight line pointing vertical, with the riches flowing up to the few elite white men who can more easily access (and hold on to) resources, elected officials facilitating this transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, and a populace who cannot seem to get their voices heard. Time periods where the “survival of the fittest” mentality reigned supreme included the Jim Crow Era, Reaganonics, and most recently the Trump administration.
These are also time periods when a social safety net let so many fall through, such as with redlining in home mortgages, the constricting of public benefit programs, the growth of the prison industrial complex, and the rise at the state level of voter suppression legislation.