The Confederacy Captured the Courts: The Struggle for A More Perfect Union Continues

The Civil War in New Mexico and Arizona

On 25 July 1861 the Confederacy claimed its first bit of Union territory when Lt Col John Baylor took the small town of Mesilla in the New Mexico Territory. After taking nearby Fort Fillmore, he declared himself governor of the newly created Confederate Territory of Arizona. He was greeted as a liberator and cheered in the streets by its Anglo citizens.

In the November 1860 election, the Anglos of Mesilla organized their own plebiscite for the presidential election — territories didn’t vote for president — and overwhelmingly supported Kentucky’s John Breckinridge. While the territorial legislature would declare for the Union in April 1861, the Anglos were Confederates, having migrated in the previous twenty years when northern Mexico was in need of settlers. While most of these migrants went to Texas, a significant number arrived in what is now New Mexico and Arizona.

The entirety of what is now Arizona and New Mexico (plus the southeast corner of Nevada) was organized into the Territory of New Mexico. Baylor claimed everything south of the 34th parallel for the South. The Confederate plan was to take the copper, silver, and gold mines from the Union all the way up to the Colorado Territory and to create a corridor to the Pacific Ocean.

In the years preceding the Civil War, there was a very visible struggle between the slavelords of the South and the abolitionists of the North over which new states and territories would allow human bondage. It was an existential struggle for both sides because it would determine which side would dominate the federal government. What is less well known is that the struggle has continued through to this present day.

Same Issues, New Era

While the former Confederates no longer advocate for a right to own real live human beings — Or do they? See, you aren’t really sure, are you? We’re still fighting about white supremacy, whether we’re a democracy or not, the role of women, and the separation of church and state. Only this time the struggle is fought in the courts and legislatures. In this Supreme Court term alone, they’ve told a Black woman she can be fired by a president on a whim (Slaughter), the South it can disenfranchise Black folk (Callais), and the president he couldn’t redefine who was an American by fiat (Barbara), and one of those votes was a maybe. Same fight, same side winning.

It’s all driven by the same political, social, and cultural norms that drove the Old South. And, it is those exact same norms that are driving the current resurgence of racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and religiosity.

To understand just how severe this threat is to our American democracy, we have to understand where the desire to destroy our democracy comes from. To be able to couch the struggle in the correct terms in the right context, we have to understand its history. To be able to predict where its going, we have to know where it came from. Seriously, this is just our generations round of the same fight we’ve been fighting from the beginning of the country.

With each new Supreme Court decision, Pentagon policy, or immigration announcement, we get bolder, clearer, and more openly racist comments from the Republicans in office and from rightwing media. It seems like the racism-is-bad consensus is no longer holding true. Perhaps it never was. Perhaps it was always more a desert mirage, dissipating as we got closer to it.

One of the most surprising things is how neatly the things our federal government does maps onto the social, political, and cultural norms and beliefs of the Confederacy. What was Dixie known for? Slavery and racism, oligarchy and classism, misogyny, religious conservatism, and authoritarianism.

Southern Values

Anti-Black Racism

“The Song of the South” didn’t need to add a lyric using the n-word or threatening violence against Blacks if they stepped out of line. It also didn’t need to sing about Blacks not voting, neither, because everybody knew that Uncle Remus (played by James Baskett) couldn’t attend the premier because of everybody’s favorite racist uncle, Jim Crow. They had poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses that kept everything race neutral.

Race neutral, kinda like John Roberts keeps going on about, right? Like the 2023 case against Harvard in which he echoed his famous, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Like the Callais case in which the Court went out of its way to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the section that Roberts assured us would protect Black voting rights when they destroyed the pre-clearance requirement from the VRA. We’re just in Act Four of the American racist drama now.

Oligarchy and Classism

The South was founded on plantation farming and the Deep South loved them some gang labor. You know, where you have to get a team of Blacks together and work ’em so hard in the heat, humidity, mud, and mosquitos until they die! That was the basis of the Southern economy and social structure. At the top were the landed gentry, the bottom, the slaves, and not far above them, poor whites. They were a democracy, though. The franchise had been restricted to those who owned property.

When it push came to shove, they begrudgingly expanded it to everyone who could pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test, or had a grandfather who voted… As long as they voted the right way. When they didn’t, that’s where the Klan came in.

Nowadays, we don’t have those things, but we do have Citizens United, guaranteeing that the wealthy have an outsized influence in our elections and government. It literally provides an avenue for politicians and elections to be bought and sold like so many slaves at auction. It is now government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy.

Misogyny

The Old South decided a woman’s political existence dissolved into her husband’s the moment she married. They transferred their property to their husbands and were prohibited from owning property, voting, serving on juries, or holding elected offices. Southern women were subservient — at least in theory.

If you think that sounds like a good time, the modern Tennessee Evangelical churches have you covered! They want household voting, one household, one vote, and by household, they mean him.

The modern Republican Party wants women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

Religious Conservatism

Kinda like the Puritans, the Southerners think there is only one way to love you some Jesus. The modern evangelical movement that believes we are in the End Times and they are bringing about the second coming of Christ started in the Deep South. They actively discouraged immigration in any and all of the waves of immigration we experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They kept themselves pure, unsullied by the Catholics and less white peoples of Europe.

What do modern Evangelicals tell us now? The Sermon on the Mount only applies to people in your country, people like you? Civil rights are only granted to citizens? America is a Christian nation? America is a white nation?

Those rascally old Southerners used to twist the words of the Gospel and the Old Testament to support slavery, just like they are now twisting those very words to support concentration camps and family separation.

Authoritarianism

A man is the king of his home is an idea that traces its origins to Medieval England, but was enshrined in law in the Old South. The Southern Planter was required to be the lord and master of his household domestic and agricultural. They needed to supply the strict moral guidance that women, children, and Blacks could not provide themselves. He had total power, controlling all property, dictating all daily operations, and doling out “justice” as he saw fit on the plantation.

The Supreme Court agrees. They’re given the president more power than even King George III (the king the original thirteen colonies rebelled against) had, at least according to Sonia Sotomayor. In 2024, they gave the president — you know it’s only one — immunity for all “official” acts while in office. And, this year, he gets to fire whoever he wants for any reason he wants, maybe even a member of the Federal Reserve Board.

Still Fighting After All These Years

It’s been 165 years, almost to the day, since Lt. Col. Baylor marched into Mesilla and proclaimed himself governor of Arizona, and the goals of the Southern slavers then are still the goals of their descendants now. The only real changes we’ve seen are the tactical. We’ve changed the weapons we fight with, but not the stakes. It is the same existential fight that it was in the Civil War. Understanding what is at stake seems to have motivated many to vote in the special elections and in the primaries. Hopefully, that momentum will see us shift our norms and expectations away from those of the Old South and towards those of a more perfect union.

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