The Civil War Essay Example for Free

The Civil War Essay After the Civil War, the South was solidly and reliably Democratic for a full century. In large part, this was a reaction to Lincoln, who most southerners saw as a tyrant and an aggressor. Since Lincoln was the first Republican president in American history, it was guaranteed that the Republican Party would be widely unpopular in the South. In the mind of the South, the Civil War was not about slavery, but about the right of southern states to have large amounts of independence from the federal government in Washington. After the Civil War, southerners saw the Republicans as the party of â€Å"big government† or â€Å"centralized power†, who cared little for the autonomy of individual states within the union. After the Civil War, the Republican Party forced white southerners to allow newly-freed black to exercise their constitutional rights by voting, running for office, and serving in local governments. This caused further resentment for the Republican Party by southern whites. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, allowed white supremacy to return to the South after Reconstruction ended. It portrayed itself as the party of states’ rights, as opposed to the overbearing and domineering Republicans. The southern shift away from the Democratic Party was largely a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Many southerners saw blacks not as Americans simply demanding their constitutionally-guaranteed rights, but rather as troublemakers, perhaps backed by the communist party. As the moral clarity and the inevitably triumph of the civil rights movement became clear to increasing numbers of Americans, the federal government was forced to act. After all, the protestors were demanding nothing radical; they simply wanted the federal government to guarantee that no state could deprive a citizen of his or her civil rights. Due more to coincidence than anything else, a Democrat was President when these issues came to a head. It was Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat, who signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960’s. Southerners felt betrayed by these actions. To them, these acts were further examples of the federal government dictating from Washington how individual states should run their affairs. The South’s argument had little or no constitutional merit, but great emotional weight. When soldiers protected black children who were attending newly-integrated schools, for example, many southerners felt it was the Civil War all over again; the prosperous and arrogant North was enforcing its own values on the South. Due to these feelings of betrayal, vast numbers of Southerners switched to the Republican Party, and they did so rapidly. Richard Nixon was the first to exploit the â€Å"southern strategy†, using thinly-veiled racist paranoia to convince southerners that the Democratic Party had sold them out. Nixon convinced the conservative South that law and order was threatened by the Democrats’ big-government excesses, as protests and race riots raged throughout the nation. Almost overnight in political terms, this shift of allegiance took hold and Nixon achieved what had been unthinkable for a century; he was a Republican who won the presidency in large part due to southern support. This trend has held solidly for the last forty years. While southerners are no longer overtly racist, they still point to culturally conservative values, small government, and states’ rights as the reasons for their once- unimaginable shift to the Republican Party.