Michael Zak interviewed about the importance of Republican Party heritage

Out of all the statements made in this fantastic interview, I think the one folks who are uninformed will find the most surprising is that not the entire South was pro-Confederacy and that the original voter base of the Republican Party could be found in the South in the form of a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites, particularly in the mountainous regions such as Appalachia, the Smokies, and the Ozarks.

I can verify the truth of that assertion based on the history of my own family: I am very much a Southerner who comes from a historically Republican family and which carries our forebears Republicanism today. My great-great-great grandfather was a Southern Unionist who supported the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860s. His family had consisted of Southern Whigs who opposed the Democratic Southern plantation aristocracy.

He fought in an Eastern Tennessee regiment for the Union and was part of a movement to separate Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina from Tennessee and North Carolina into a new state known as Franklin or Frankland. Other movements included the State of Scott in Tennessee, the Republic of Winston in Alabama, and Nickajack, which encompassed East Tennessee and North Alabama. Great-great-great grandpa and his youngest son were murdered by Red Shirts, leading my great-great grandpa to go on a Wyatt Earp-esque vendetta ride against the Red Shirts of the Democratic Party.

The contrast between Southern Appalachia and the rest of the South goes back to the mid-1600s with the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, including the English Civil Wars, in which the ancestors of Southern Appalachia Scots-Irish folk were the Lowland Scots and Northern Irish Covenanters who were of a Calvinist Puritan faith and Anglo-Celtic ethnicity and in favor of individual freedom whereas the ancestors of the Southern plantation aristocracy were English Royalists known as Cavaliers who were of Anglican faith and Anglo-Norman ethnicity and in favor of divine right of kings.

The Northeastern Puritans' ancestors were the English Roundheads and, by contrast, they were Parliamentarians who opposed the divine right of kings in favor of individual freedom and were of a Calvinist Puritan faith and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. For a long time, Southern Appalachia had more in common culturally, ethnically, and religiously with the Northeast than with the rest of the South. This was also true of the 1770s and 1780s, when Scots-Irish descendants of Covenanters and English descendants of Roundheads were strongly in support of independence, whereas most opposition to it came from English descendants of Cavaliers who were still very connected to the British aristocracy.

Even in the 1860s, these patterns continued: Southern Appalachia continued to align with the Northeast in culture, politics, and religion against the opposite Southern aristocracy, and this continued for an entire century. It was only in 1928, 1952, and 1956 that Southern gains outside mountainous regions began to be made for the GOP, not because of a fake party flip or the myth of the Southern Strategy, but because the South itself was changing: the Dixiecrat politics of segregation, poll taxes, and literacy tests were being replaced with the Republican politics of pro-God, pro-gun, and pro-life.

If one analyzes demographic maps of the South compared to a century and a half ago, the South has gone from majority English, Anglican, and Democrat to majority American, Baptist, and Republican; this is indicative of the spread of Scots-Irish biology, faith, and politics throughout the South. We've essentially replaced the Anglican aristocracy of plantation owners who vote Democrat with Southern Baptist down-home simple country folks who vote Republican. Flag-waving down here went from the Southern Cross to the Star-Spangled Banner. We took the South away from those who'd fought against our freedom since the 1600s.

The South has risen again, but it's on the right side this time. God bless you and your foks, Dr. Zak, and thank you for what you are doing to keep the legacy and heritage of the GOP alive! Like you always say, the more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs!

Fantastic interview about an equally fantastic book. Well worth the read, especially since most of Republican Party history is written by devout leftists and taught by left-wing teachers. It was refreshing to get an honest history of the GOP!