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/* Legacy - Political/Ideological */
While the Confederacy lost the Civil War, it can be seen to have won the peace. [[Radical Republicans]] were forced in the [[Compromise of 1877]] to concede the failure of Reconstruction and withdraw the U. S. Army from the South, or at least from its mission of guaranteeing the rights of African-Americans. In a process known as [[Redemption]], the [[Republican Party]] was crushed out of existence across the South and black people stripped of their voting and other rights by a system which came to be known as [[Jim Crow]]. Northern Republicans encouraged a [[narrative]] of the Civil War which sought to make it about anything other than slavery. They were able to use the phrase "rum, Romanism and rebellion" and other means of [[waving the bloody shirt]] to generally dominate national politics through both the [[Third Party System]] and the [[Fourth Party System]].
The association of the [[Democratic Party]] with the South was entirely accurate as that region was totally dominated by Democrats by 1900. However, only with the election of [[Woodrow Wilson]] in 1912 was a Southerner able to return to the [[White House]]. Whenever Democrats held a majority of either house of [[Congress]], Southerners would immediately become the chairmen of all committees, giving that region a disproportionate influence on national politics. Ironically, because of their [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] roots, Southern Democrats were a party of [[small government]] and lower [[taxes]] (radically cutting back spending on [[public schools]] among other things during [[Redemption]]), and were hostile to organized labor. However, many Southerners changed their political affiliations from [[Democrats]] to [[Republicans]] during the [[1960s]] in a movement what is known as the [[Great Southern Conversion]].
[[American politics]] have been defined in part by the conflict between the [[Alexander Hamilton|Hamiltonian]] and Jeffersonian schools of the role of government, particularly the [[Federal government]]. The Confederacy can be seen as the [[last stand]] of the Jeffersonians, who favored a system in which state policy and sovereignty would trump that of the Federal government. To this way of thinking, subsequent American politics have actually been a competition between more and less radical Hamiltonians.
