The Trump Administration has angered historians and other critics by planning to restore two Confederate statues and a painting of Robert E. Lee to places of prominence. These critics object that honoring Confederates is really celebrating noxious symbols of slavery and white supremacy.
The problems with such memorials go deeper still than that. Such statues also symbolize Southern enslavers’ distinct “rule or ruin” politics. This home-grown tradition is an essential historical precedent—every bit as salient as 20th-century fascism and authoritarianism—for explaining the politics of 2025. President Donald Trump’s defiant revival of Confederate iconography signals, implicitly at least, his affinity for enslavers’ reckless, destructive tactics, as it works to justify his own brand of “rule or ruin” politics.
Before the Civil War, America’s richest men were Southern enslavers who insisted that they—by virtue of their racial superiority, wealth, connections, and hereditary descent from America’s founders—were the rightful leaders of the nation. They dominated American politics, holding commanding power in the Democratic Party and the three branches of government. To guarantee their rule in perpetuity, pro-slavery Southerners wielded federal authority against their opponents and brazenly attacked any institution, law, practice, or norm that did not serve their purposes. For example, in 1822, South Carolina passed the plainly unconstitutional “Negro Seaman Act,” which imprisoned and threatened to enslave free Black sailors who docked at any port in the state, lest they spread the “contagion” of liberty to the enslaved.
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Enslavers saw threats everywhere: in the activism of abolitionists, in the growth of Northern cities, in encroaching industrialization, and even in the nascent women’s rights movement, all of which challenged traditional power structures.
And Southern defenders of slavery stopped at nothing to neutralize these new threats as they emerged. No rhetoric was too overheated. In 1830, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina declared that he would rather see the Union shattered “into a thousand fragments” than submit to an antislavery government.
To enslavers, the stakes justified a plethora of extreme measures. They completely did away with the right of free speech in the South. They destroyed abolitionist literature and sicced violent mobs on suspected abolitionists. They revoked the basic right of citizens to petition their government, by enacting a “gag rule” in Congress to stifle antislavery petitioners.
Institutions also came under fire. Southern enslavers left the national conferences of the Methodist and the Baptist churches in the mid-1840s to protest antislavery sentiment in those bodies. They condemned Northern universities for being too “radical” and pushed for the founding of Southern schools, where students would be steeped in pro-slavery orthodoxy.
In 1850, enslavers even voided the writ of habeas corpus and its due process protections against unlawful detention by pushing through a national Fugitive Slave Law. It unleashed slave catchers on Northern communities to round up and terrorize suspected refugees from slavery.
Pro-slavery Southerners also manipulated the electoral system to make one-party rule permanent. As Virginia state legislator and future Confederate brigadier general Richard L.T. Beale put it in 1851, “Inequality in, or restrictions upon, suffrage may be properly resorted to for the purpose of protecting property”—meaning the interests of enslavers. That meant using gerrymandering to give disproportionate power to plantation districts in Southern states, ensuring that wealthy planters controlled state legislatures (which selected U.S. Senators as well). By the mid-1850s, electoral fraud by pro-slavery advocates was particularly egregious in the Kansas territory. Pro-slavery politicians in Missouri sent armed thugs into Kansas to steal elections there by stuffing ballot boxes and violently suppressing the votes of the “free soil” majority.
It horrified Northerners that white Southerners broke the “bonds of Union” so callously. Of the vicious beating of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner by pro-slavery politician Preston Brooks in the Senate chamber in 1856, Frederick Douglass wrote, “No one act did more to rouse the North to a comprehension of the infernal and barbarous spirit of slavery and its determination to ‘rule or ruin.’” Meanwhile, White Southerners saw Brooks as a hero, sending him canes as gifts and praising him for beating Sumner “like a slave.”
By the eve of the Civil War, pro-slavery Southerners had even fractured the Democratic Party, which had long done their bidding. When Northern Democrats would not agree to militant pro-slavery demands such as passage of a federal slave code guaranteeing slavery’s westward expansion, Southern Democrats walked out.
All the while, enslavers insisted that abolitionists’ agitation on slavery was to blame for the growing national strife. When Lincoln was elected on an antislavery platform, 11 slave states rejected the results, choosing to leave the Union rather than recognize Lincoln’s authority. A republic they could not “rule” they would “ruin.”
After the Civil War, the Northern victors behaved with magnanimity, professing “malice toward none.” But the defeated Confederates hadn’t changed their stripes. They rejected the hand of cooperation and waged a new war on Reconstruction and its goals of Black citizenship. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terror groups acted as a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, intent on driving the Republican Party out of Southern politics. As the historian Kidada E. Williams has written, “soldiers in the expanding shadow army attacked and assassinated Black voters and their white allies before or during elections, using the same tactics enslavers had” embraced to forestall emancipation.
Reconciliation was acceptable only on the white South’s terms. That meant perpetuating a repressive labor system that was, “slavery by another name,” and holding the South morally blameless for secession.
Most of the Confederate statues that sprang up across the South did so in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the Jim Crow era, to symbolize the ultimate vindication of the “Lost Cause” — the idea that the Confederacy was a noble endeavor, not a last ditch attempt to perpetuate slavery — and the South’s “rule or ruin” tactics.
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Donald Trump’s philosophy of governance has eerie echoes of the “rule or ruin” style of antebellum Southerners. He routinely attacks voting rights. When he lost the 2020 election, he rejected the results and at his behest, on Jan. 6, 2021, his followers rebelled. Then on Trump’s first day back in power, he pardoned the insurrectionists.
Recently, Trump commented that unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas is justifiable because the Republican party is “entitled” to control the state’s congressional delegation. Such sentiments echo the way enslavers promoted some of the very same mapping tactics to maintain power. His reliance on troops from Southern red states to patrol Washington, D.C., and his threat to use such coercion in other cities, mirrors how enslavers projected their power into free states and territories, in defiance of state sovereignty.
Meanwhile, “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” as Trump put it in a March 2025 executive order, necessitates restoring statues of Confederates. The two statues he has slated for reinstallation represent the unrepentant defense of insurrection. One depicts Albert Pike, an enslaver and Confederate general who transformed the popular song “Dixie” into a martial anthem. His lyrics proclaimed that death was preferable to an “accurs’d alliance” with antislavery Northerners. The other statue, the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, is even more incendiary. At the memorial’s dedication ceremony in 1914, Lost Cause orators cast Confederates as the “saviours of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” who owed the nation “no apologies or regrets” for fighting the Civil War or violently overturning Reconstruction.
Similarly, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have restored the names of military bases back to ones that originally honored Confederates. To comply with a new law, they’ve simply chosen new honorees whose names conveniently match the old ones. As in the case of the statues, those namesakes symbolize “rule or ruin” politics: Fort Benning in Georgia was originally named for the rabid secessionist Henry L. Benning, who declared in 1861 that he would prefer “pestilence and famine” to the prospect of Charles Sumner or Frederick Douglass one day becoming president.
Trump’s latest move brazenly flouts congressional directives. The Pentagon will restore to the West Point Library a painting of Robert E. Lee in his Confederate gray (with an enslaved man in the background). This scuttles a compromise, whereby paintings of Lee in his prewar blue Army uniform could remain while the portrait of Lee the secessionist and enslaver came down.
Trump’s insistence on honoring these Confederates implicitly venerates their politics — and provides a justification for his own rule and ruin tactics, which so often echo them.
In this light, the stakes of the battle over Confederate iconography are higher than ever. It is imperative that Americans committed to democracy renew their fight against resurgent “Lost Cause” propaganda. Trump’s embrace of Confederate symbols is not only a petulant effort to “own the libs” and demonize “wokeism.” It is symbolic of a rule or ruin brand of politics, with a long, bloody history, that we underestimate at our own peril.
Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history at the University of Virginia. Her latest book is Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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