The GOP’s Confederate comeback

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On August 6, 1880, Congressman James Garfield delivered one of the great speeches in American political history, and importantly, one of the earliest civil rights speeches, given four short years after the end of Reconstruction. It was called “The Boys in Blue.” It was a declaration about the meaning of America itself.

Today, the descendants of the party Garfield led desecrate that inheritance.

They wave Confederate flags at rallies. They defend monuments to traitors. They strip Black voters of political power through racial gerrymanders, while wrapping themselves in the language of “freedom” and “patriotism.” The party of Abraham Lincoln has become the political vessel of neo-Confederate grievance, resentment and reaction.

The moral collapse is total.

Garfield understood what the Civil War was about because he fought in it. He shed blood in it. He watched men die in it. He knew that the Union victory was not merely about preserving territory or political order. It was about the destruction of a slave empire built on human bondage and racial terror.

In “The Boys in Blue,” Garfield honored the Union soldiers who marched into history carrying “the flag of liberty.” He understood that the Union Army was not merely defeating an armed rebellion. It was destroying the largest system of organized human enslavement in the Western Hemisphere.

That was once the Republican Party.

It was the party of abolition.

It was the party of emancipation.

It was the party of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

It was the party that sent federal troops into the South to crush the Ku Klux Klan.

It was the party that defended Black citizenship against white supremacist terror.

It was the party that believed the Declaration of Independence applied to all people.

The first Black man ever invited to dine at the White House came there at the invitation of Theodore Roosevelt. Booker T. Washington’s visit in 1901 triggered an explosion of racist hysteria across the South. Newspapers and politicians erupted in fury because a Black man had crossed the threshold of power and equality.

Roosevelt didn’t retreat.

Imagine that happening today in the Republican Party.

Imagine the reaction from the MAGA movement.

The modern GOP isn’t offended by Confederate symbols. It’s emotionally attached to them. It nurtures a fetish for the mythology of the “Lost Cause” because the “Lost Cause” provides the emotional architecture for modern grievance politics.

The Confederate battle flag now flies, not as a symbol of regional identity, but as a declaration of resentment against pluralism, equality and democratic inclusion.

The transformation would horrify Garfield.

It would disgust Lincoln.

It would shame Grant.

There was an extraordinary editorial published by The Times in 1861 explaining the coming American Civil War to British readers. The editorial recognized with stunning clarity what many Americans still deny today: the conflict was fundamentally about slavery and racial hierarchy.

One of the prevalent delusions of the age in which we live is to regard democracy as equivalent to liberty, and the attribution of power to the poorest and worst educated citizens of the State as a certain way to promote the purest liberality of thought and the most beneficial course of action.

Let those who hold this opinion examine the quarrel at present raging in the United States, and they will be aware that Democracy, like other forms of Government, may coexist with any course of action or any set of principles.

Between North and South there is at this moment raging a controversy which goes as deep as any controversy can into the elementary principles of human nature, and the sympathies and antipathies which in so many men supply the place of reason and reflection.

The North is for freedom, the South is for Slavery.

The North is for freedom of discussion, the South represses freedom of discussion with the tar-brush and the pine fagot.

Yet North and South are both Democracies -- nay, possess almost exactly similar institutions, with this enormous divergence in theory and practice.

It is not Democracy that has made the North the advocate of freedom, or the South the advocate of Slavery.

Democracy is a quantity which appears on both sides, and may therefore be rejected, as having no influence over the result.

From the sketch of the history of Slavery which was furnished us by our correspondent from New York last week, we learn that at the time of the American Revolution Slavery existed in every State of the Union, except in Massachusetts; but we also learn that the great men who directed that Revolution -- WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, MADISON, PATRICK HENRY and HAMILTON, were unanimous in execrating the practice of Slavery, and looked forward to the time when it would cease to contaminate the soil of free America.

The abolition of the Slave-trade, which subsequently followed, was regarded by its warmest advocates as not only beneficial in itself, but as a long step towards the extinction of Slavery altogether.

It was not foreseen that certain free and democratic communities would arise which would apply themselves to the honorable office of breeding slaves, to be consumed on the free and democratic plantations of the South, and of thus replacing the African Slave Trade by an internal traffic in human flesh, carried on under circumstances of almost equal atrocity through the heart of a free and democratic nation. Democracy has verily a strong digestion, and one not to be interfered with by trifles.

The writer is making the point that democracy in the South was the engine of slavery, while democracy in the North was the engine of liberty.

The British saw it clearly because they were looking at America without illusion.

They understood the Confederacy wasn’t a noble rebellion for “states’ rights.” It was an oligarchic slave power attempting to preserve racial domination through violence.

Nothing has changed except the language.

The methods evolve. The objective remains.

Today’s racial gerrymanders are instruments of political theft. They are designed to dilute Black voting strength, fracture communities and ensure minority rule through manipulated maps rather than democratic persuasion.

The same moral sickness animates both eras.

In Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and elsewhere, Republican officials seek to carve apart Black political power with surgical precision. They do it cynically, deliberately and openly — then they hide behind legal jargon and procedural euphemisms.

But the purpose is obvious.

The purpose is to weaken the political influence of Black Americans because Republican power increasingly depends on limiting democratic participation rather than expanding it.

This is the great inversion of American political history.

The descendants of the Confederacy once fought against the Republican Party because Republicans believed Black Americans were citizens entitled to full constitutional protection.

Now, the Republican Party itself advances policies the Confederates would recognize instinctively.

That’s the truth.

The neo-Confederate movement did not disappear after Appomattox. It adapted. It survived Reconstruction. It metastasized through Jim Crow. It dressed itself in new slogans during Massive Resistance. It became “states’ rights.” Then “law and order.” Then the Southern Strategy. Then MAGA.

The thread connecting it all is racial hierarchy enforced through political power.

Donald Trump didn’t invent this corruption. He revealed it.

He gave permission for the mask to come off.

The Republican Party now openly celebrates figures who defend Confederate iconography, while attacking voting rights protections as “woke” or “unconstitutional.” The same movement that claims to worship the Constitution treats the Voting Rights Act as an enemy document.

Where is the moral outrage?

Where are the descendants of Garfield’s Republican Party?

Gone.

Driven out.

Silenced.

Defeated.

The old Republican Party died because it lost the moral courage to defend its own inheritance.

There’s no ambiguity here. There’s no “both sides.” There’s no sophisticated neutrality available to decent people.

Racial gerrymandering is an assault on democracy.

It’s an assault on citizenship.

It’s an assault on the promise purchased by the blood of the Union Army.

The men Garfield called “the Boys in Blue” didn’t march through fire so that politicians in tailored suits could manipulate district lines to diminish Black political power 160 years later.

They fought for the proposition that citizenship in America would not be determined by race.

That struggle remains unfinished because the forces that opposed it never surrendered morally — even when they surrendered militarily.

The tragedy of modern America is that one of its two great political parties now carries forward that reactionary inheritance.

Not quietly.

Not accidentally.

Proudly.

History will remember it exactly that way.

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