Posted on 04/16/2008 5:14:19 AM PDT by bmweezer
Today, the nation's capital celebrates “Emancipation Day” –- commemorating the Republican Party's abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, on April 16, 1862. That’s right, the Republican Party freed the slaves in DC, despite fierce opposition from the Democrats. Of course, none of the Democrats running the DC Government dares mention that fact.
During the Civil War, one of the nation’s leading abolitionists was U.S. Senator Henry Wilson (R-MA), who would later serve as Vice President during President Grant’s second term. In December 1861, Senator Wilson introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District. The measure met with parliamentary obstacles from the adamantly pro-slavery Democratic Party....
Continued at http://grandoldpartisan.typepad.com
Republicans today would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party.
Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the country, showing office-holders, candidates and activists how they would benefit tremendously from appreciating our Party's heritage of civil rights achievement. Back to Basics for the Republican Party is his acclaimed history of the GOP from the Republican point of view. Each day, his Grand Old Partisan blog -- http://grandoldpartisan.typepad.com -- celebrates 154 years of Republican heroes and heroics. See www.republicanbasics.com for more information.
Look at the Fourteenth Amendment.
True, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t demand that they pay reparations of their own money. Seems like we’d have a pretty good argument for it.
What about it?
The book, “Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters”, by George Fitzhugh (1857), was one of the last great works of proto-socialism, before it was called “socialism”.
It was not just a racist and passionate defense of slavery, but heralded slavery as being such a “good” institution, that 9 out of every 10 people should be slaves. (The book, of course, is to be read with the assumption that the reader is one of the “1 in 10” who is good enough to be a master.)
Otherwise, it is a bitter and hate-filled attack against capitalism, for “keeping down” the masters who would otherwise “naturally” ascend over the slaves with their inherent superiority. (The capitalists “winning life’s lottery”, as Al Gore would say.)
In the book you will see all sorts of oft-repeated themes found in proto-socialist and socialist writings, such as “the return to the state of nature”, essentially mankind giving up on “the knowledge of good and evil”, and returning to the garden of Eden.
From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Dave Foreman of Earth First!, there is the idea of destroying civilization and the vast majority of humanity, and returning mankind to slavery or feudalism in isolated villages in the wilderness. The masters, or as Emerson called them “Orphic poets”, would travel about between the villages as itinerant leaders.
The purpose of the master is both to elevate and enjoy nature, and to keep the slaves, slaves, by preventing them from having historical knowledge, by corrupting it (history being one of the greatest enemies of socialism), or from technological advance that would allow them to ascend from their slavery.
The slaves, for their part, are so grateful to their masters for doing this, that they reward them with food, sex, and any other pleasures the masters want.
But add it all together, and such writings really appeal to the Democrat-Leftist-Liberal-Socialist. It justifies their burning hatred of those better than themselves, it stimulates their greedy hopes of getting something for nothing and having it all to themselves, and appeals to their idealistic hope of living in paradise and being waited on hand and foot by those they despise.
It explains their intense dislike of morality and ethics, their embrace of herd-like ovine conformity for everyone but themselves, and their endless hypocrisy in demanding that everyone else give and only they can take. An extreme and neurotic inferiority complex, masquerading as a superiority complex.
And their great disdain for rewards being a consequence of hard work, instead of being theirs out of the grace of their being better than the rest of us.
You see it in their elitism, their pseudo-intellectualism, and their fawning admiration to people that they see as vastly inferior, like minorities, but only as long as the “act” inferior. (Example: humble, downtrodden, stereotypical Tracy Chapman good, Condoleeza Rice bad.)
What we typically think of as socialism, such as socialized medicine, are efforts to force conformity in the slaves, and to take away their extremes of success and failure. Above all else, the life of a slave must be mediocre.
In any event, if you can find a copy of Cannibals All!, do so, as you will learn much about what propels leftist-liberals today.
The entire bogus concept of "states' rights" was invented during the 1828 nullification crisis as a rhetorical device to defend South Carolina's legally indefensible nullification.
And you are absolutely right: the reason why the Southern states seceded was for one reason and one reason only - their inability to expand slavery to the federal territories.
One of the greatest fallacies regarding the Civil War is that there would have been no war if the Union had just allowed the Southern confederacy to secede on its own terms. The leaders of the Confederacy had been clamoring for twenty years or more how essential it was for slavery to spread into the federal territories, how the free states' insistence of keeping slavery out of the territories was a great injustice and dishonor to the South, how the slave states deserved equal access to the Pacific trade routes, etc.
Before they attacked Sumter the Confederacy had already been making alliances with the Indian nations in the territories to use them as a proxy army against federal troops in the West in order to expand slavery westward.
Eugene D. Genovese wrote a couple of excellent books: The Slaveholders' Dilemma and The World The Slaveholders made describing the ideological framework used by pro-slavery apologists to defend their system and worldview. He goes into great detail regarding Fitzhugh's theories.
In his book Sociology For The South, Or The Failure Of Free Society Fitzhugh said: "Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."
The concept of state’s rights goes back to the founding of our nation, despite your erroneous statements to the contrary.
“When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
Thomas Jefferson
Then you should have no trouble finding explicit reference to "states' rights" in the 1789 timeframe.
And yet your Jefferson quote is devoid of any notion that governments possess rights.
The fact remains that the federal government has powers, and the state governments have powers, and the questions regarding federalism rest on the allocation of these powers.
The notion that the state governments have "rights" the way citizens have rights remains pure foolishness.
The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.
Typical Democrat double standard.
Which double standard is that?
Di the Northern states encourage slavery in their own borders while discouraging expansion of Southern slavery?
No. No double standard there.
Did the Northern states pass ordinances of secession while denying the constitutionality of Southern ordinances?
No. No double standard there, either.
Really? Article X of the Constitution provides that certain powers are reserved to the states or the people. Therefore, a state has a right to ensure that its powers are not infringed under the Constitution.
This proves my point that the Southern States really used a strong federal government via Dred Scott and the Kansas Nebraska act to constitutionalize slavery and make it the law of the land. When they saw a rising anti-salvery party gained power, they pulled out of the Union and proclaimed state rights.
Since the US Constitution has no tenth Article, I will proceed on the assumption that you are referring to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.
provides that certain powers are reserved to the states or the people.
The word "certain" does not occur in the Tenth Amendment, by design.
Therefore, a state has a right to ensure that its powers are not infringed under the Constitution.
That's manifestly not what the Tenth Amendment says.
Again, states do not have rights by definition, and our Founders do not make such a basic - and confusing - terminological mistake in the Constitution or in the Federalist.
Rights are inalienable. Powers are not.
Therefore, the states, by ratifying the Constitution, forfeited their power of conducting diplomacy and regulating trade, among other things.
Ah, but it did.
The federal government sent in federal marshals to Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts to enforce the fugitive slave acts.
The SC Secession Ordinance and Declaration is propaganda, not fact.
This proves my point that the Southern States really used a strong federal government via Dred Scott and the Kansas Nebraska act to constitutionalize slavery and make it the law of the land.
Correct. The slave states had no problem with sending armies of federal marshals into free states to recover fugitive slaves using a process that was directly violative of both the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
"States' rights" was an empty rhetorical slogan, not a serious program. The Confederacy proved this by not adding any significant new powers for the states in its constitution, by instituting a national draft, by instituting a national income tax, and by instituting a national welfare program.
When they saw a rising anti-salvery party gained power, they pulled out of the Union and proclaimed state rights.
Indeed.
And the fact is that Lincoln, who had not even taken office, had pledged that he would enforce the fugitive slave acts once in office.
Here was the real issue: given the election results in the Congress, the Democrats would have retained a majority in both houses - but if they had proposed the extension of slavery into the federal territories, Lincoln would have vetoed it and their majority would have been too small to override the veto.
No longer could 20% of the white population dictate terms to the other 80%. A Lincoln administration would admit one more free state, and the ability of the slave states to exercise a de facto veto on every aspect of national life would be gone.
The deck had so long been unfairly stacked in their favor, they could not handle a level playing field.
I agree that it reserves powers to the states. I do not agree that powers are rights, because they aren't.
the states’ Eleventh Amendment “right” not to be sued in federal court
There is no right for defendants not be sued. It is a question of whether or not the complainant has standing to sue. States can be sued in federal court.
Individual citizens do not have the standing to sue states. But the federal government has the standing.
The Southern Democrats came up with the "states rights" spin after the war to try an convince people the war was some noble cause and slavery only incidental. My own father's been peddling me that crap for 40 years and the sales pitch is getting old. The war was about slavery. The Republicans were against slavery, the Democrats were for it. The South was in the wrong and they lost.
Nice reply- but I think you help support our point...
In what way, exactly?
Correct.
And the underpinning of the dilemma is this: since the passage of the Constitution, the modus vivendi had been that the free states were free and if a Southern slaveholder visited the free states, his bringing along of a personal slave or two was winked at even if slaveholding was illegal in that jurisdiction.
But in the case of Dred Scott, you had a man whose "owner" was a Northern resident of Southern extraction, who held Dred Scott in bondage in IL and WI for twelve years.
When Roger Taney ruled that Northern states were required to countenance the more or less permanent residence of slaveholders and slaves within their borders, he essentially abolished the free state/slave state distinction.
Following the principles of the Dred Scott decision, a Mississippi planter could buy a farm outside Boston and then import five thousand slaves there to work the fields if he wished - and if anyone complained, he could call out the federal marshals to protect his little concentration camp.
The laws passed in free states of which South Carolinians complained were basically laws passed by free state legislatures objecting to Taney's judicial activism and legislation from the bench which had overturned almost 70 years of legal precedent.
The war was about slavery.
Indeed. To be exact, it was about the extension of slavery. If the slave states had accepted the fact that slavery was not welcome in free states or federal territory, they would have legally been able to perpetuate slavery in their own borders without federal intervention.
They seceded and initiated war on the grounds that the amount of slavery they already had was not good enough - they had to have more, and if the federal government wouldn't let them expand slavery legally, they would forget the Constitution and do it illegally instead.
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