Finally passing

IN FEBRUARY 1961 the festivities marking the centennial of Jefferson Davis's inauguration as president of the Confederacy drew some 50,000 revellers, including the governors of three southern states, to Montgomery, Alabama. In the run-up to the commemoration, which lasted a week, white Alabamans formed “Confederate Colonel” and “Confederate Belle” chapters. Teachers came to school in period costumes. Hundreds lined the streets to escort the actor playing Davis from the railway station to the Exchange Hotel, where he was met by the sitting chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court portraying his antebellum counterpart. The next night 5,000 people attended a centennial ball.

Compare Montgomery's centennial with the sesquicentennial, which this February drew a ragtag few hundred enthusiasts (and no elected officials) to parade through Montgomery. The 1961 celebration took place in a South engulfed in a battle over segregation. The war's ultimate legacy was not yet clear. But that battle is now over. Forced segregation, the Confederacy's last death throes, lost. A black man now sits in the White House, and by most economic indicators the South has drawn nearly level with the rest of the country.

This month marks the 150th anniversary of the American civil war's beginning. The first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, on April 12th 1861. Passions can sometimes still flare—as William Faulkner, the South's great novelist, wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Earlier this year, for instance, a group of Mississippians proposed honouring a Confederate general who later became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan with a special car licence-plate. In South Carolina more than a thousand people marched through downtown Columbia in January to protest against the flying of the Confederate flag on the statehouse grounds.

Such lingering echoes are hardly surprising, though they are ever rarer. The war split and nearly broke America. It killed 620,000 soldiers—more Americans than died in all the country's wars until Vietnam, combined. And it set 4m slaves free.

In 1860 in the 11 future Confederate states, 38% of the population—including majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina, and nearly a majority in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana (the other Confederate states were Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia)—was enslaved. The South's economy depended on them. During the 19th century the North's economy became largely industrial and increasingly urbanised. The South remained largely agricultural, its wealth concentrated in land and slaves. The war destroyed that wealth. Income per head in the South dropped to less than 40% of that in the North, and stayed there for the rest of the century. As late as 1938 Franklin Roosevelt singled out the South as “the nation's No. 1 economic problem.”

Yet after the huge public investments of the New Deal and the second world war, the South began to attract industry and manufacturing—in part precisely because it was poor, and its labour cheap. Today, average income per head in the 11 former Confederate states has almost caught up; it is $36,350, compared with a national average of $40,584. Admittedly, the aggregate figure masks great regional differences. Agriculture, manufacturing and mineral production remain central to the economies of the Deep South states; almost all of the former confederate states are poorer than average (with Mississippi the poorest state in the union). Virginia, by contrast, ranks 7th among states in income per head; it has a thriving tech sector, as well as a number of federal agencies and wealthy suburbs of Washington, DC. North Carolina boasts its own tech hub in the university triangle of Raleigh-Durham.

Texas and Florida both face budgetary problems, but so do many states. Economically they more closely resemble Arizona, another state that has boomed over the past decade, than they do other Southern states. Similarly, Mississippi's companions at the low end of the per-capita income table are West Virginia and Idaho, neither of which fought for the Confederacy. Like Mississippi, they lack a big city, have relatively uneducated populations and rely heavily on mining and agriculture. The poverty of the Deep South is less southern than rural. The economic legacy of the war, in other words, has all but faded.

Strong government, hated government

Politically as well as economically, the civil war left the South broken and directionless. Jefferson Davis was captured in southern Georgia a month after his best general, Robert E. Lee, surrendered. Abraham Lincoln advocated reconciliation, but he was shot just five days after Lee's surrender. The next election, in 1866, put Congress under the control of radical Republicans, who stationed federal troops throughout the South.

Republican Congresses also passed the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution, which stated that everyone born in the United States had certain rights as citizens that states could not take away, and that states could not bar people from voting due to “race, colour or previous condition of servitude”. Those amendments, like the 13th, which banned slavery, came with clauses granting Congress the power to enforce them. Such grants of power were new. The Bill of Rights limited federal power. These post-civil-war amendments expanded it.

But if a more powerful and active federal government is one enduring legacy of the war, another is distrust and even hatred of that government. White southerners resented “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”—their terms, respectively, for northerners who came south after the war to seek their fortune, and for white southerners who supported the federal government. Some of these attitudes persist. In late 1865 Confederate veterans in Tennessee formed the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organisation that used violence against former slaves. It still survives, milder on the surface but vicious underneath.

How it all began

For most of the next hundred years, white southerners ardently subverted the promises of the civil-war amendments by enacting the segregationist policies that came to be known as Jim Crow laws. These laws gained legitimacy when the Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that laws enforcing segregation were constitutional, provided the facilities available for blacks and whites were equal. In practice they never were, but segregation remained law and custom in the South. The Supreme Court signalled an end to all that in the 1954 case Brown v Board of Education, which ruled that separate facilities were inherently unequal.

But that ruling set off huge resistance in the South. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi all physically blocked black students from entering formerly white schools. The long dormant Ku Klux Klan rose again. This time, however, southern resistance was met both by organised civil disobedience and by some measure of federal will. John Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, were Democrats and civil-rights advocates, willing to use federal muscle where other presidents were not.

The civil-rights movement presaged a partisan sea-change in American politics. After the war, Republicans were anathema in the South, and southerners were anathema in national politics. Before the outbreak of war southerners had dominated federal political institutions, producing most of its presidents, House speakers, Senate leaders and Supreme Court justices. After the war's end, the next president to be elected from a former Confederate state was Johnson, a Texan, in 1964. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law with Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in attendance. His advocacy discomfited segregationist southern Democrats such as John Stennis and Strom Thurmond. Thurmond switched parties early, in 1964. Others followed.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan's advocacy of smaller, less intrusive government resonated nationally, but he made a particular push for southern white Democrats. During the civil-rights era, segregationists often couched their position as a defence of “states' rights”; and Reagan's endorsement of those rights at a Mississippi county fair, while campaigning for the presidency in 1980, sealed his success in the South. His election gave Republicans control of the Senate for the first time since 1955.

Since then the South has grown steadily more Republican, though two of the three Democrats elected after Johnson—Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—were southerners, who could attract southern whites. Today most southern members of Congress are Republican. And southern states are growing much faster than northern ones. In the next Congress Texas, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina will all add seats at the expense of the north-east and the Midwest.

The long tail

Segregation was the civil war's long tail. In 1963, two years after the mock inauguration of Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, Alabama's governor, stood on those same capitol steps and declared that “from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland…I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever.” Segregation was so unjust that it is easy to see it as inevitably doomed. It was not. It took blood and struggle to end it. But ended it was, and two decades later Wallace himself, the face of segregation, apologised for his words.

Ten years after that, the South elected its first black governor, Douglas Wilder in Virginia. In 2008 Barack Obama won Virginia, North Carolina and Florida and ran strongly in Georgia. The gap in black and white voter registration has narrowed dramatically throughout the South. And black Americans, who left the South in the early 20th century in what became known as the Great Migration, are moving back. Today Atlanta is home to more blacks than any city apart from New York, and 57% of black Americans live in the South—the highest proportion since 1960.

Jefferson Davis saw the light

Voting remains racially polarised; southern whites tend to vote Republican and southern blacks Democratic. In 2008, for instance, Mr Obama won 98% of the black vote in Alabama and Mississippi but only 10% and 11% of the white vote. But that is hardly unique to the South: Mr Obama ran 12 points behind John McCain nationally among white voters. And racially polarised voting is both a subtle problem—a far cry from the obvious injustice of segregation and slavery—and a waning one. Young white voters backed Mr Obama in much higher numbers than older ones did.

This March Haley Barbour, who has a record of racially insensitive remarks, said in an interview: “Slavery was the primary, central cause of secession…abolishing slavery was morally imperative and necessary, and it's regrettable that it took the civil war to do it. But it did.” Mr Barbour wants to be president. His remarks not only directly refute the ancient argument that slavery was not the principal cause of the war; they showed that there is no longer political gain in pretending otherwise.

Some people have lamented the relative public indifference to the anniversary this year, compared with 50 years ago. But back then the war's fundamental question—whether all American citizens are equal, regardless of race—was not fully answered. Today it is. This is not to say that racism no longer exists, or that white southerners will not continue to oppose Mr Obama in greater numbers than any other demographic group. But their battle with him will be at the ballot box. In his last appearance, in 1889, Jefferson Davis told the young southerners in his audience: “The past is dead; let it bury its dead …let me beseech you to lay aside all rancour, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished—a reunited country.” His last wish now seems to stand fulfilled.

Read on:America's civil war in pictures and music