Salutations and welcome to, or back to, the Gauntlet of Balthazar for
Part III of the revised "Republicans Versus the Race Party...I Mean the
Democrats (1854-1877).
I'm guessing that if you did read through the earlier post in this series,
you either fully take my point, or are in such a state of the current left-right
partisan denial that you either perceive the facts, yes facts, presented
here as "fake news" or "lies", or that you have rationalized that "it was all a
very long time ago", or that there was such a mythical political occurrence often
referred to as a "party switch".
I know that unlike real liberals, or I guess I should say, moderate Democrats - an ardent
Marxist
might even add that it all of this history stuff really doesn't matter
because it's all about the post-modern "now' and that all truths are
subjective, and besides, both of the major political parties of the
United States were founded on an oligarchic and exploitative racist
premise rather than a set of lofty philosophic and Constitutional goals,
so it's all moot, and the entire system should be destroyed a.s.a.p -
ideally replaced with a Socialist "utopia"...that they of course will
run.
Well, pull up a chair and stay a while because in this installment the march of history will take us from the founding of the
Republican Party
in 1854 till the end of reconstruction. Surely the same rebuttals to this overview can and will be logged,
but I believe that by the end of the series in total you will see that my
central thesis will be fully illuminated: which is, that the
Democratic Party
has for the most part consistently focused on a lurid race-based
platform through its history. I will show, and have shown, how from the
DNC's founding that Democrats sought to pervert a liberal aspect of
Thomas Jefferson's
Democratic-Republican Party in
order to bolster not only the continuation of African-American chattel
slavery in the south, but to encourage it's growth in newly acquired states.
In the aftermath of the Civil War we will see how this Anti-Republican /
Anti-Northern sentiment contributed to the founding of
ethno-identitarian movements such as the Klu Klux Klan, and the
diminished rights of free African-Americans under the Jim Crow laws
through the "Gilded Age". I will then show how the
Progressive Movement
in the early part of the twentieth century was forced to find a home almost
exclusively among Republicans due to the bane-fullness of the Democratic
platform, while contrarily in Great Britain, Progressiveness was
clearly a left-wing phenomena. Lastly, we will examine period movements
that the Democrats did indeed come to embrace and fuse into their
platform in the WWI era - these being namely
Trans-National Globalism and the highly questionable
Eugenics Movement - a precursor of
German National Socialist race theory.
Looking
forward to the next part of this article to the 1921-1974 time period,
we will look at Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and the emergence
of the Military-Industrial Complex, the so-called "party switch",
President Lyndon B. Johnson's "
Great Society" program and
Nixon's "Southern Strategy",
and eventually, we will look at the current year - where we can now all
plainly see the Democratic Party platform rife with the "woke" politics
of racial identity - wrapped in a nauseating veneer of
Socialist class, race and gender warfare.
Whether being hawkish on appropriating
Native American land after the
War of 1812, to seeking to keep
Catholic immigrants out of America, or oppressing blacks in the nineteenth century, enfeebling them in the urban ghettos in
Civil Rights era,
and plying Marxist race, class, and gender warfare theory in order to
exacerbate victim-hood identity and racial animosity - this, is par for
the consistent course of the left, or I should say, the Democrats.
So let's get started, shall we.
Part Three: 1854-1877 (The Civil War Era and Reconstruction)
As previously mentioned in the prior installment many
Southern Whigs, reflecting the adversarial underbelly of the party among
it's
Anti-Masonic constituents, rather than joining one of the two parties straight out opted to join the xenophobic,
anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic
American Republican Party (not to be confused with
National Republican Party of
John Quincy Adams).
Perhaps to forgo confusing the populace with a similarly named entity,
it was soon renamed the Native American Party - as in Native-born
Americans, not Native Americans as in indigenous Indians. The party was
soon after renamed the American Party (in 1855), but was commonly
referred to as the
Know Nothing Party (1844-1860). They even had a oath-bound secret wing know as the
Order of the Star-Spangled Banner created by
Charles B. Allen
in New York City. Conflicts involving the Nativist movement and their
adversaries took place in major US urban areas, and can be seen in
historical dramatic form in films such as Martin Scorsese's "
Gangs of New York".
I find it highly ironic (or is it a telling precursor?) that this
movement was based in otherwise free-wheeling, liberal New York. Perhaps
what is even more ironic was that the Know Nothing Party was founded by
a man who holds the distinction of being the first American Jewish
Congressman -
Lewis Levin; often referred to as "Uncle Sam's youngest son" and "Citizen Know Nothing".
Born in 1808 in Charleston, South Carolina, Levin was quite the unusual
character - an activist, a lawyer, a congressman for the First District
of Pennsylvania, a frequent duelist, anti-alcohol crusader, clearly not a
religious Jew who intermarried, and spawning from a family rife with
mental illness. While Levin himself did not seem to possess particular
personal animus toward Catholics, he nonetheless appealed to those who
despised them, and it was this ethno-religious identitarian constituency
that served as his power base. If I had to find a current parallel for
the Know Nothing's it would probably be the "Alt-Right", though
generally speaking, Alt-Righter's are not really best described as
"right" as they are anti-Constitutional, economically Socialist,
Ethno-Fascists.
But, carry on...
Of the somewhat collectively unremarkable mid-nineteenth century U.S. Presidents who served in the period following
Andrew Jackson up to the Civil War, their names, states of origin, and party affiliations are as follows:
Martin Van Buren 1837-1841 - New York (Northern Democrat),
William Henry Harrison - Virginia (Southern Whig),
John Tyler 1841-1845 - Virginia (Southern Whig),
James K. Polk 1845-1849 - North Carolina / Tennessee (Southern Democrat),
Zachary Taylor 1849-1850 - Virginia (Southern Whig),
Millard Fillmore 1850-1853 - New York (Northern Whig / Know Nothing Party after 1856),
Franklin Pierce 1853-1857 - New Hampshire (Northern Democrat), and
James Buchanan 1857-1861 - Pennsylvania (Northern Democrat).
As you may note, these officials were for the most part Southern Whigs
or Northern Democrats (and one Southern Democrat and Know Nothing
switcher) with not a single Republican in sight. On some level this only
made sense as Washington D.C. was firmly in Democrat establishment
territory (Virginia) since Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican
days, and as slavery was "their" issue, their base was fired up to hold
onto the institution. Republicans had been pretty much "pushed out", and
their increasing abolitionist sentiments garnered quite the adversarial
response from their Democrat opponents.
As I pointed out in Part One of this article, the Democrats did indeed
absorb many of the Libertarian notions that were part of Thomas
Jefferson's Anti-Establishment derived party, but while Jefferson held a
firm disdain for religious authority, Democrats of the mid-nineteenth
century period utilized their Protestantism to bolster the moral
justification of holding other humans in bondage. If you are unaware of
this phenomena, I'll explain just how they managed to do this,
philosophically. You see, in their reading of the bible, or more
specifically the "Old Testament", otherwise known as the Jewish Torah,
they observed that slavery among the Jews of ancient times was
sanctioned - as long as the Jewish slave-holder did not hold another Jew
as the slave. Islam later incorporated the same motif, and thus,
Muslims were quite eager about slavery in the Middle Ages, as long as
their slaves were culled from Pagan (Sub-Saharan African and Eastern
European) stock.
Anyway, in one tale (in Genesis 9, I believe) regarding the descendants
of Noah, his three sons - Japheth (the Aryans - such as Greeks,
Persians, Anatolian's, etc.), Shem (the Semites - such as Jews, Arabs,
Assyrians, the Ethiopians, etc.) and Ham (the Hamites - such as the
Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians, etc.) are catalogued. As punishment for a
frankly obliquely mentioned infraction of "mocking" his father's nudity,
God declares that the progeny of Ham (the Hamitic peoples) would be
forevermore forced to serve his brother Shem's progeny. As Christians,
the mantle of being a Semite through philosophical emanation or
transference via Jesus Christ was a common notion, and thus, Hamites
were destined to serve as slaves, by the order of God. As an aside I
feel I should mention that in a very real historical way this did indeed
become a truth in that the ancient Egyptians, after falling to the
Islamic conquest, had undergone the slow process of Islamization
starting in the eighth century, and could be views as a Hamitic
population "submitting" to a dominant Semitic language and religion.
Be that as it may, these post-colonial goyim were no Semites, nor were
their African slaves of Hamitic background, as they were prior to their
importation to the new world, predominately of West African (Bantu)
origin. Regardless, this was the applied religious thinking utilized to
philosophically fortify the institution of slavery, and thus, the more
religious the better. In fact, it almost goes without saying that
convincing your slaves to buy into this religious paradigm was ideally
the first order of business.
And so, with a bible in one hand and a sword in the other, this same
rational fueled the Indian Removal Policies of Andrew Jackson's
Democrats onward, and bolstered white ethno-identitarianism,
anti-immigrant xenophobia, and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was this
thinking, most earnestly expressed in the ranks of the Southern
Democrats, that urged those Northern Democrats and Southern Whigs who
sought to temper the slavery issue, to create a number of Pro-Union
parties that came about immediately predating the outbreak of the
American Civil War.
It should be noted that the abolitionists - embodied almost exclusively
in the ranks of the Republican Party (and their allies among
disenfranchised
"Barnburner" Democrats),
held the reins of state almost exclusively from the Civil War onward in
the 1861-1933 period. Turnabout being fair-play and all that. The only
exceptions to this golden age of Republican dominance was the National
Unity Party Democrat Vice-President
Andrew Johnson - who finished out and followed
Abraham Lincoln's term after his assassination (1865-1869),
Grover Cleveland's two interrupted stints (1885-1889, 1893-1897), and
Woodrow Wilson's two
terms (1913-1921). Needless to say this only made sense, as the Federal
government was after the war firmly Republican ground, and Democrats
had to slowly gain Republican trust in order to be part of the national
government and dialogue once again.
But let's get back to the years immediately leading up to the
Republican-Democrat / North-South fracture that broke the Union -
otherwise know as the American Civil War.
While many citizens aligned with either the Anti-Slavery Republicans or
the Pro-Slavery Democrats there were indeed many smaller parties that
hoped to forge a compromise between the two, or in some cases to push
the envelope further. One such third party came into existence solely to
push the extreme wing of blatant Pro-Slavery thought. Known simply as
the "
Opposition Party",
the OP was exclusively represented in the south from 1858-1860.
However, their fire was short-lived, and they, as well as the American
Party (or Know Nothing Party) soon fused with many Southern (Cotton)
Whigs and Unionist Democrats and became
know as the
Unionist Party (1852-1866).
Strange bedfellows they may seem, but as all were Pro-Slavery, but also
Pro-National government, and Anti-Republican, the old civic nationalism
of Thomas Jefferson persisted and molded all three into the core of the
the successor of the Unionist Party, know as the
Constitutional Union Party
(1860-1861). In many ways the CUP was the last entity that sought a
true compromise between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats in a
final effort to avoid the increasingly clearly forthcoming war between
north and south. However, it can't be mentioned enough that Jefferson's
libertine values were largely lost on these fallen Whigs, who had become
little more than slavery apologists. In fact, their party can only be
described as a Southern Unionist religious center-right party - far more
Conservative than a libertine like Jefferson could envision.
Perhaps members of the Constitutional Union Party thought that the
imminent war could be averted, and that tempers would cool and the
status quo of ignoring the slavery issue would be the order of the day
once more. After all, there was indeed a "stall" embedded in the US
Constitution deferring the legislature from confronting the contested
issue of slavery for fifty years from the signing, so perhaps they
weren't completely unrealistic, only if not for retrospect. But this
compromise codicil was specifically included by both sides as a balm for
the nation to come into existence as one unified entity, capable of
focusing on forging a nation free from the British yoke rather than
immediately fighting a Civil War at the founding. Surely, that would
have only supplied the means by which the British would re-take their
lost colonies.
As the war increasingly took it's bloody toll and compromise fell away,
the only third party to survive was the successor of the Unionist Party,
re-dubbed the
Unconditional Union Party
(1861-1866). Formed in Missouri, the UUP was ideologically Classically
Liberal as well as being both Federalist and Pro-Union, so it should
come as no surprise that in the aftermath of the Civil War their members
merged into, you guessed it - the Republican Party. Once again the push
and pull of Jefferson's Libertarian civic nationalism and John Adams'
Federalism was firmly represented an internal counter-point within the
Republican camp - not on the Democrat side of the aisle.
Thus,
as we can plainly see, the majority of those holding abolitionist,
pro-union thought invariably ended up Republican, while the majority of
Democrats through the nineteenth century firmly held to secessionist
thinking and race politics - endorsing the aggrandizement of slavery,
the diminishing of Native American territory, and thereafter adding a
pinch of Nativist anti-Catholic immigrant sentiment to their repertoire.
Obviously the war served to crystallize the Republican party, and ever
since the GOP has been referred to as "the party of Lincoln", but for
the purposes of this article, Lincoln's well-known life, and minutia
about Civil War combat is fairly superfluous. So, I'll just press fast
forward...
After the War, only the two familiar parties survived the once fractious
American political landscape - the Republicans and the Democrats. This
period, know as the Reconstruction
(until 1877), could easily be described as the "de-southification" of
the South. In essence the national government - almost entirely
dominated by Republicans, administered the South as a territory of
conquest. For thirteen years Republican's sought to mold the eleven
former Confederate states back into Union states, meanwhile insuring the rights of newly freed African-Americans.
The more radical the Republican Senator, the more extreme those rights
were sought to be insured and implemented. The more earnest the Democrat
the more those rights were sought to be undermined.
On July 9th, 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was
ratified as thousands of Northerners still flooded into the south in
order to build schools for the freed slaves, as well as to fill
government posts and Church pulpits, while others assisted the U.S. Army
administration and the Freedman's Bureau in re-shaping the
African-American community. These Republicans, often pejoratively called
"carpetbaggers" by the "occupied" Southerners, often promoted and
elected freed blacks to local and national government offices, much to
the chagrin of the humbled secessionists who lived below the Mason-Dixon
line. Boo-the freak-hoo!
Till next time.
