The Civil War Essay Example for Free

The Civil warf atomic number 18 Essay aft(prenominal) the Civil War, the South was solidly and reliably participatory 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, only if about the right of southern states to have large amounts of independence from the federal governing body in Washington. After the Civil War, southerners saw the Republicans as the party of big government or centralized power, who cared diminished for the autonomy of individual states within the union. After the Civil War, the Republican Party forced white southerners to accept newly-freed black to exercise their extreme rights by voting, running for office, and serving in local governments. This caused further insole nce for the Republican Party by southern whites.The Democratic Party, on the other hand, allowed white supremacy to tax return to the South after Reconstruction ended. It portrayed itself as the party of states rights, as opposed to the overbearing and controlling Republicans. The southern shift away from the Democratic Party was largely a result of the civilised rights case of the 1950s and 1960s. Many southerners saw blacks not as Americans hardly demanding their constitutionally-guaranteed rights, but rather as troublemakers, perchance backed by the communist party.As the moral clarity and the inevitably triumph of the civil rights lawsuit 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. repayable more to coincidence than anything else, a Democrat was Pres ident when these issues came to a head. It was Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat, who subscribe the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s.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 Souths 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 southern strategy, using thinly-veiled antiblack paranoia to convince southerners that the Democratic Party had sold them out. Nixon convinced the conservative South th at law and order was peril 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- insufferable shift to the Republican Party.