Posted on 03/17/2012 4:12:31 AM PDT by BroJoeK
I doubt we disagree.
Certainly Southerners saw Republicans as a threat to slavery in the South.
But I would challenge you to look at the Republican party 1860 platform itself and find anything there which threatened slavery in slave states.
No, the issue for Republicans in 1860 was not rolling back slavery, but rather preventing the expansion of slavery into non-slave territories, plus the enforcement of fugitive slave laws in non-slave states, as directed by the Supreme Court's Dred-Scott decision.
Yes, of course, the old Southern Democrat Slave Power (S.P.) claimed that any legal restrictions on expansion were an attack on SLAVERY, just as today the new Democrat Secular Progressives (S.P.) claim that any restrictions on the Power of Government is a "war on women", or racism, or "throw grandma off the bridge," etc.
In short, the Constitution had survived for 70+ years recognizing the rights of some states to legalize slavery and others to outlaw it.
What changed by 1860 was not Northerners' intentions to attack Southern slavery, but rather the Slave Power's insistence that slavery should not be restricted anywhere.
Now, do you still say we disagree?
So would you with “your guys”.
Pretty much I guess we agree. But again, you have to see Huston’s book to see, regardless of what the Republicans said, how inevitable the fight over the definition of property rights was and how, eventually, this would force the Republicans to act. Hey, I’m not trying to argue that the North was at fault, but I do not think the South’s interpretation of the near future was wrong. When you say “we lasted 70 years,” well, that included a ban on doing anything about the slave trade for 20 of those years, then of the remaining 50, the Van Buren party system accounted for 42 of them. The surprise is not that it fell apart, but that Van Buren’s shenanigans actually kept it together so long.
Lincoln started a war of self-interest, not of Jeffersonian principles.
Fire Eaters had already split the party.
But Rusty, if you are hoping to convince me that historically Democrats are dishonest, underhanded and back-stabbing, I'm already sold -- don't need any convincing. ;-)
As to which one of those dirty-dealers was dirtier than the other, well, no way am I going to defend Democrats.
You may as well ask me about Obama versus Hill & Bill: one is the pot, the other kettles, as far as I'm concerned.
But... yes, no doubt that in 1860 Stephen Douglas felt "entitled" to the nomination, more-or-less the way a certain, ahem, candidate today runs as the "inevitable" choice.
Douglas had by far the most support and was willing to do whatever necessary.
That Southern Fire Eaters could not accept Douglas, and walked out of the April 1860 Charleston convention was their choice to split the party, and nominate their own candidate.
Whether Douglas could have, or should have stepped aside for a "compromise" candidate (and who might that be?), the split was initiated by Fire Eaters.
From my perspective, here's the key point: despite the split, the combined Democrat share of the popular vote increased from 45% in 1856, when they easily won electorally, to 48% in 1860, when they were defeated by the smaller Republican vote.
Further note that three normally Democrat slave-states, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, went for the 4th party, the Constitutional Unionists.
Combined, 60% of Americans voted against Republicans in 1860, so that should have been and would have been an easy Democrat victory, had not the Southern Fire Eaters walked out of their Democrat convention.
The equivalent today would be one or more of the non-Romneys suddenly claiming they couldn't accept the party's nominee, walking out, forming their own party, nominating their own candidate, then demanding Romney step aside.
Regardless of what Romney did, any such actions would only guarantee Democrats' victory in November.
Well, isn't this the same thing we see with anti-gay "hate speech?" Merely quoting the Bible is now considered a "hate crime" in Canada and Scandinavia when it comes to homosexuality.
By the way, when I argue that the South saw a Republican election as threatening slavery itself, even though the Republicans never said that, consider even then the power of appointment that a U.S. president had (You mentioned Stanton, for example): U.S. marshals (no more federal slave-catching possees), federal judges (might not look so favorably upon cases involving slaves that come before them), customs officials and port authorities (who might let free blacks off ships in southern ports-—something the Dem officials had prohibited), and postmasters (who might lift the ban on abolitionist materials).
Once is an accident.
Twice is a coincidence.
Three times is a pattern.
So the question is, what pattern are we looking at here?
I think LS named it precisely.
In the old days beginning with Martin Van Buren they said, "Northern men of Southern principles."
It was a winning strategy that elected Democrats to power for many decades before 1860.
In 1856 it elected a Northern Doughface from Southern Pennsylvania: James Buchanan.
The strategy only failed when Southern Fire Eaters refused to accept the "Southern principles" of 1860's leading Democrat candidate, Stephen Douglas.
Fire Eaters walked out of their convention and split their party.
Today all three remaining non-Romney candidates have both Northern and Southern roots, and all are highly sympathetic to the South's conservative values.
And if you stop to consider those who've already dropped out, none quite match those criteria.
Well, I think Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie fit that pattern, but technically they didn’t “drop out” as they never ran in the first place.
Something fundamental had changed between the Democrat victory in 1856 and their downfall in 1860.
What was it?
Answer: First of all, the Supreme Court's 1857 7-2 Dred-Scott Decision denying the rights of non-slave states to grant citizenship to people of African descent.
This decision, supported by Doughface President Buchanan was a huge victory for "Southern principles", and it fundamentally changed both sides:
To my knowledge, neither has serious Southern roots.
That makes them, in a sense, just "Romney lite".
I see you are still using insults instead of facts.
By the way, the Dred Scott decision also triggered the Panic of 1857. Guys in black robes can screw up an awful lot.
Well, they don’t have southern roots, but Christie and Daniels both are “northern men of southern principles” in the sense that they can be counted on not to rock the boat in terms of serious reform.
Here's an 'inconvenient fact for you to ponder..
I am not afraid to attack error, however deeply it may be entrenched, or however widely extended, whenever it becomes my duty to do so, as I believe it to be on this subject and occasion. John C. Calhoun June 27, 1848If he should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors. The proposition to which I allude, has become an axiom in the minds of a vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic, and is repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth; it is that "all men are born free and equal."
So he rejects the Declaration and therefore Jefferson, but he's still your buddy.
Want me to post some stuff on any other of your sainted ancestors?
http://www.indiana.edu/~kdhist/H105-documents-web/week14/CalhounreOregon1848.html
Thanks for the link. It oh so clearly shows calhoun to be the same sort of garden variety hair-splitting leftist democrat we’re all too used to suffering through in the Øbongo administration.
Considering that the Speaker of the House was a Republican, the Democratic splintering of the party was not the only cause for the Democratic loss. Slavery was failing, beating what is called an ‘up market retreat’ as free states were growing faster than slave states from immigration, and Texas’ demand to come in as a large state, and California’s demand to come in as a free state.
The situation was akin to IBM being chased out of the PC market. They withdrew to their server and mainframe markets, which are not bad markets, but market share is much lower.
So the slave owners thought, given their failure to spread over the wider country that they would just be rich in a smaller country. But there was no constitutional provision for them to break the preexisting union. They couldn’t convince enough people that they should do such a thing. They couldn’t get foreign countries to support them. So they lost.
Or if you prefer, Alabama would have to accept the property rights of Iowa. Southern slave holders would have to accept NY limitations on property rights when the slave holders brought their slaves to the Hamptons to get away from oppressive southern heat, and when they did that, their slaves would become free. That is what the owner of Dred Scott did: He took a slave to a free state, and wanted to overturn state limitations on property rights.
Too bad it took a war to correct that bad court case.
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