Drenched in blood of slavery

[shagdrum]

Drenched in blood of slavery
by Roger Hedgecock

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously last week to adopt a resolution apologizing for slavery.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, lead sponsor of the resolution, said, "You wonder why we didn't do it 100 years ago. It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice."

Only after decades of public education ignoring and distorting U.S. history can such a huge lie be said with a straight face.

Senator, you didn't do it 100 years ago because 100 years ago you Democrats were enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws, poll taxes to keep blacks from voting, and riding around in sheets and pointy hats just in case blacks didn't get the message.

You say "It's important to have a collective response" because you want to bury the origins, purposes, and historical practices of your own party.

The worst part is, Republicans in the Senate let you get away with it.

Principled Republicans knowing their history would have authored a resolution reciting the facts that the Republican Party was formed, among other reasons, to oppose slavery and that the Republican Party and its first President Abraham Lincoln responded to Southern, Democrat-led secession with a successful war that preserved the union and freed the slaves.

After Lincoln's assassination (by a Democrat), the Republican-led Congress (over the objections of the Democratic Party minority) amended the Constitution to confirm the liberation of the slaves (13th Amendment: slavery abolished), and the 14th Amendment (freed slaves are citizens equal to all citizens) and the 15th Amendment (right to vote guaranteed to freed slaves).

Southern Democrats spent the next 100 years trying to keep freed slaves down with segregation laws, poll taxes to deny the right to vote, and lynching to enforce the social order. The KKK was formed by a Democrat; no Republican has ever been a member of the KKK. This is the heritage of the Democratic Party.

In fact, the Democratic Party was formed in the first place to defend and expand slavery.

In 1840, the very first national nominating convention of the Democratic Party adopted a platform which read in part:

Resolved, That Congress has no power ... to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several states ... that all efforts by abolitionists ... made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery ... are calculated ... to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the union.​

Got that, Sen. Harkin? Your party was born defending slavery as necessary for the happiness of the people and threatening secession and war if slavery were challenged.

The same party platform language was used in 1844, 1848, 1852 and 1856. In 1860, the Democrat commitment to slavery took a harsher tone.

The Fugitive Slave Law was passed by Congress in 1850. This monstrous law provided that, since slaves were the personal property of their masters, runaway slaves must be returned to their owners. The law required all law enforcement officers to assist in the recapture of runaway slaves or risk a fine of $1,000 (about $100,000 in today's dollars)!

The Republican Party was formed in the 1850s in part as a political reaction to this unjust law.

In their national convention of 1860, Democrats harshly responded to certain Northern (Republican) states that were passing state laws to evade the Fugitive Slave Law by adopting a plank in the Democratic Party Platform which read:

Resolved, That the enactments of the State Legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, are hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in their effect.​

Senator, your Democratic Party has much to be apologetic about on the slavery issue.

During the civil war, the Southern Democrats led the Confederacy out of the Union; Northern Democrats formed a separate party which opposed the war. The 1864 (Northern) Democratic Party platform adopted a "peace" plank which read in part:

... after four years of failure to restore the union by the experiment of war ... justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand ... a cessation of hostilities ... to the end that ... peace may be restored ...​

Here is the origin of today's Democratic Party "Peace at any Price, Better Red than Dead, Why Can't we all just get Along" foreign policy.

The war was started by Democrat secessionists, and just as President Lincoln was on the verge of victory, the Northern Democrats wanted to save the South and slavery with "peace talks"! Voters knew better in 1864 and re-elected Lincoln.

But the Democrats weren't through. In 1868, Sen. Harkin's party condemned the Republican Party in its party platform as the "Radical Party," and condemned Reconstruction in these unforgettable words:

Instead of restoring the Union, it (the Radical Party) has dissolved it, and subjected ten states (the former Confederate states) ... to military despotism and negro supremacy.​

And, senator, don't tell me this is all ancient history in a lame attempt to evade the true origins of your party.

As recently as 1964, when the Senate debated the Civil Rights Act, Southern Democrats (including Al Gore's father) voted no. While Northern Democrats voted yes, their votes were not enough. The deciding votes to pass this landmark bill were provided by Sen. Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., and the Republicans.

Republicans should be proud of their heritage of liberation of the slaves and civil rights voting record.

It's Harkin and the Democrats who should apologize and pay reparations.

 

[topher5150]

I refuse to apologize. My forefathers moved here after the civil war from the Netherlands and built their own community by their own hands my family had absolutely nothing to do with slavery so no apology from. Me

 

[Conti94]

I refuse to apologize. My forefathers moved here after the civil war from the Netherlands and built their own community by their own hands my family had absolutely nothing to do with slavery so no apology from. Me

DITTO, but my family came here from all over europe, very late 19th century into the early twentieth century.

Many from Ireland.

POTATO FAMINE!!!!!!!!!

 

[foxpaws]

And do you think Lincoln would be a Republican today?

And which party have the Southern Democrats aligned themselves with today – the Republicans… If you took the states that voted against Civil Rights in the 60s, they would be the current day Republican south. The people in the south didn’t change, the political parties changed, so the southerners abandoned the Democrats and embraced the Republicans as ‘like thinkers’

How would Lincoln vote today?

Everyone, from President Obama to the GOP, wants a piece of Honest Abe on his bicentennial. Here's where Abraham Lincoln really stood on the issues.

By Michael Lind

(Note – snips from the actual article, which seem to respond to the garbage that shag posted…)

…
What about economics? In his first campaign manifesto of 1832, the young Whig Party politician declared: "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank ... in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff." In short, Lincoln was in favor of a strong federal government that actively promoted American infrastructure and manufacturing.

Would a modern Lincoln denounce infrastructure spending projects as boondoggles? Unlikely. As an Illinois legislator, Lincoln promoted an ambitious infrastructure scheme that bankrupted the state. Undeterred, Lincoln led the federal government to lavish subsidies on the railroads, which as a result nearly doubled American track miles between 1860 and 1870.

Would a contemporary American sharing the values of Lincoln oppose "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus package? Lincoln was a lifelong economic nationalist who favored federal government support for American industry against foreign competition.

Would Lincoln join the fiscal conservatives who fret over the size of the national debt? Largely because of the Civil War, the federal budget grew from $63 million in 1860 to $1.2 billion in 1865. Following his assassination, his widow, Mary, explained that Lincoln had wanted to take a trip to Europe, after leaving office: "After his return from Europe, he intended to cross the Rocky Mountains and go to California, where the soldiers were to be digging out gold to pay the national debt." I don't think that today's deficit hawks would be amused by Lincoln's joke.

Would Lincoln join today's Republicans in calling for more tax cuts as the answer to every problem? President Lincoln signed the bills creating the IRS and the first U.S. income tax.

When he ran for Congress in 1846, Lincoln was accused by the religious right of the day of being an infidel; his reply was a classic of politically motivated equivocation: "That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or any denomination of Christians in particular."

Lincoln's speeches were deeply influenced by the King James Bible, and as the costs of the Civil War mounted he dwelled on the mysteries of Providence. According to his closest associates, however, he never became a Christian. "He had no faith in the Christian sense of the term -- had faith in laws, principles, effects and causes," observed David Davis, a longtime friend whom Lincoln appointed to the Supreme Court. His law partner John Todd Stewart wrote: "He was an avowed and open infidel and sometimes bordered on atheism ... went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard; he shocked me ... Lincoln always denied that Jesus was the Christ of God -- denied that Jesus was the son of God as understood and maintained by the Christian Church."

While Lincoln did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, he did believe in biological evolution. His law partner Herndon recalled that Lincoln took great interest in "Vestiges of Creation" (1844) by Robert Chambers, a book that popularized the idea of evolution even before Darwin published his theory of natural selection as its mechanism: "The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called 'universal law' -- evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine."

Can anyone believe that a contemporary Republican politician who refused to join a Christian church, who was described by friends as "an avowed and open infidel," who had written a book mocking the miracles in the Bible, who described evangelical voters as "priest-ridden," and was a "warm advocate" of evolutionary theory, could be nominated for president by today's Republican Party?

None of this means that someone with Abraham Lincoln's views today would be found on the left. Lincoln the wealthy railroad lawyer was too enthusiastic about business, industrial growth and the conversion of wilderness into cities for the approval of those contemporary progressives who despise capitalism and denounce sprawl. A contemporary Lincoln might find himself more at home among Democrats focused on technology and economic growth.

One thing, however, is clear: Nobody with Lincoln's religious and political beliefs could be a conservative Republican on the bicentennial of Lincoln's birthday. Until a generation ago, someone who thought the way Lincoln did could still find a home among the moderate Republicans of the Northeast and Midwest. But today Lincoln Republicans have been driven out of the Republican Party by an alliance of the religious right and free-market fundamentalists.

 

[XLRVIII]

I'm from Texas and I am NOT going to apologize because black tribesmen sold their conquered neighboring tribes to slave traders.

I nor my ancenstors benifitted in any shape form or fashion from slavery so they can KISS MY WHITE @ss!!!

My grandmother worked along side slaves in the fields and in the textile sweatshops.. ALONGSIDE, not above.

 

[taylor414ce2003]

By making an apology would this be an admission of guilt from the gov . opening the doors to lawsuits?

 

[TheDude]

Just an FYI, a quick internet search (first link) revealed that the "No Republican has ever been a member of the KKK" to be false. Randy Gray, elected in Michigan, also a member of the KKK. LuLz.

 

[TheDude]

But today Lincoln Republicans have been driven out of the Republican Party by an alliance of the religious right and free-market fundamentalists.[/I]

Colon Powell should really gather those Republicans not affiliated with the above and run for President. I do think a non-bible beating Republican would appeal to a majority of Americans on the Left, Right and Middle.

I'd likely vote for him over Obama.

 

[KD00LS]

I'm so fed up with this apologetic crap with the reparations and whatnot. Slavery is over, end the controversy. If you want to assimilate society and have equality (rights and mindset) you don't continue to bring up the past in an attempt to alleviate the burdens concerning a population that isn't alive anymore.