Don't laugh off the left's attempts to change history

American Thinker ^ | 26 May, 2022 | Blaine L. Pardoe

[17th Miss Regt]

Then we must insist that all references to the past be destroyed. That means that referencing a period of slavery is no longer permissible. So the 'legacy of slavery' meme goes away. That also means that Jim Crow and separate but equal go away as well so the basis for affirmative action goes away.

Hmm. This intellectual dishonesty may have some utility!

[jjotto]

Readers might be interested in the actual short text of the first Republican Party Platform:

Opposition to the extension of slavery, by force if necessary.
Building the transcontinental railroad.
Improvement of rivers and harbors.
(No mention of tariffs.)

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1856

[airborne]

Is it any wonder they were in such a hurry to tear down statues that honored the Democrat Party’s past of slavery and segregation.

[eeriegeno]

Attempt? It is not merely an attempt! It is actual! Our once proud nation, according to the democrats, never has been great and therefore can never be great again! It is now unpatriotic to be patriotic!

[Keb]

The emancipation proclamation was issued under the war power of the president. In war, there are few things the president can’t do, but that only applies to where we are at war. Lincoln held (correctly, as far as I know) that the federal government did not the authority to alter the institution of slavery within an extant state. The federal government did have authority over the territories, and over the admission of new states. If Lincoln had anything to say about it, there would be no slavery in the territories, and there would be no new slave states. He advocated the abolition of slavery everywhere, but only tried to abolish it where he had some authority to do so.

He did push for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery everywhere, but he didn’t try to do that on the authority of the president.

[teeman8r]

lincoln did have a say in it with the Emancipation Proclamation and it only freed the slaves of the states in rebellion, correct?

[cockroach_magoo]

I read the Republican Party was founded to prevent slaves from entering into U.S. territories and competing with free white labor.

Nope.

The slaves that could not leave Alabama and go into Oregon were still slaves in Alabama.

Are you suggesting all 19th century fights against slavery were illegitimate because they didn't immediately attempt to end slavery worldwide?

Didn't a lot of Republicans vote for the Corwin Amendment, or am I thinking of something else?

What does the Corwin Amendment have to do with the founding of the Republican Party?

[FLT-bird]

Its rather rich to complain about others' attempts to rewrite history to suit their politics and then turn around and try to rewrite history to suit your own politics as the writer here has done.

For the next three years, the North was fighting to put an end to the institution of slavery and to bring the rebel states back into the fold.

No it wasn't. The EP was strictly a war measure. Lincoln went miles out of his way to ensure that it freed not a single slave. He even went so far as to make clear that this did not free any slaves either in the slave states which remained in the Union or in Confederate territory that was then occupied by Union forces.

Let's not forget that the South initiated the secession because of the fear that President Lincoln and the North would abolish slavery in the first place.

Let's not forget that this is false. Of the original 7 seceding states, only 4 issued declarations of causes. Of those, 3 listed reasons other than the Northern states' refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution which was actually unconstitutional and which did provide the seceding states with a sound legal argument that it was the Northern states which had violated the compact between them. Those reasons given were overwhelmingly the economic exploitation of the Southern states by the Northern states via partisan sectional legislation.

The 5, arguably 6, states of the Upper South did not secede until Lincoln chose to start a war to impose a government upon the seceding states which they did not consent to. They obviously were not seceding over slavery.

Lest anybody be confused, the Northern dominated Congress passed a resolution explicitly stating that they were not fighting over slavery. The Northern dominated Congress also passed and the president signed and several states ratified and Lincoln endorsed in his inaugural address, the Corwin Amendment which would have expressly protected slavery by constitutional amendment effectively forever. The original 7 seceding states rejected this express protection of slavery forever. Enough with the false propaganda that either secession or the war were "about" slavery.

[FLT-bird]

PC Revisionists from the 1960s who made their way into Academia have pushed the “all about slavery” myth starting in the 1980s to suit their Leftist politics. It just isn’t so, and does not stand up to scrutiny.

[Keb]

It only freed the slaves in the areas that were in rebellion at the time the proclamation was issued. That was where the United States were at war, so that was the only area where the president could act under his war powers.

[x]

History rewriting and history erasing have been going on forever. Confederate flags went up at state capitols in the 1950s and 1960s to symbolize opposition to integration and started coming down in the 1980s.

[central_va]

Your contention is the entire civil war was fought only to “preserve the union”? I see the war shifting gears to an anti slavery war (crusade) around the beginning of 1863.

[teeman8r]

to preserve the union, then free the slaves, then punish the south, then...

i have no contention with the fact that preserving the union was why the war was fought... all the added extras was to justify preserving the union? no?

[BobL]

“Don’t laugh off the left’s attempts to change history”

Not just the Left, but Neocons here who claim that the Ukrainian Nazis don’t exist...and then ignore all the prior articles on these same Nazis.

[FLT-bird]

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln threatened to invade the Confederate states if they didn't pay federal tariffs or if they refused to allow the federal government to occupy and maintain federal forts in Confederate territory ". . . the President's inaugural address. . . . he left the South no alternative but to return to the Union, or else fight to stay out. He declared it his intention to execute the federal laws in all states, to 'hold, occupy, and possess the property and places' belonging to the United States, and to collect as usual the duties and imposts." (Hicks, The Federal Union, p. 557)

3 days before Lincoln took office, the Congress passed and Buchanan signed the Morrill Tariff which jacked up tariffs from 17% to 36% (more hikes in the tariff were soon to follow til it was raised to 47%).

[jjotto]

Yep.

Almost like bait and switch.

The Republican Platform of 1860 endorsed robust tariffs, and redoubled limits on slavery.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860

[Cronos]

BobL -- the Nazis are on Putin's side

Pavel Gubarev is a Ukrainian pro-Russian activist who proclaimed himself the "People's Governor" of the Donetsk Region at the Regional Assembly on 3 March 2014, after separatists seized the building. Gubarev had earlier declared himself leader of the Donbas People's Militia.

Putin's followers cultivated ties with OB88, the most powerful skinhead gang in Russia. - which expanded in the aftermath of Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004. To insulate Russia against the contagion of pro-democracy protest, the Kremlin transformed Moving Together into a more ambitious project called "Nashi", or "Ours".

As part of its preparations to confront a potential democratic uprising in Russia, Nashi enlisted football gang members, whose subculture overlapped with the neo-Nazi underground.

In 2008-2010 Putin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny's efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. In response, the Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz ("Russian Image", or "RO" for short), a hardcore neo-Nazi group

RO's leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, the skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000s. The authorities turned a blind eye to RO's production of a two-hour internet "documentary" titled Russian Resistance, which celebrated these killers as patriotic heroes and called for armed struggle against the regime. here's a link to Putin's neo-Nazis killing what they considered "untermenschen"

Anna Bogacheva, on the US sanctions list for running Prigozhin's troll factory in St Petersburg, was previously linked to the neo-nazi group Russky Obraz, the political wing of the murderous group known as BORN.

[Keb]

Trying to quote Bruce Catton from memory: “The Union and the Confederacy disagreed about a lot of things, but one thing they did agree on was that, whatever the civil war was about, it was not about slavery.

“Except, of course, it was.”

(From The Coming Fury, if I’m remembering it correctly.)

The original seceding states did try to leave the union specifically to try to preserve slavery. With the free states dominating the House of Representatives, and gaining a majority in the Senate, they viewed the election of an abolitionist president as one crack too many in the wall, and felt the slavery within the United States was doomed.

One legislator, arguing against secession in Georgia (if I’m remembering it right) did say something like “Let us not break the constitution because, forsooth, he may.” This view did not prevail; Georgia was not going to wait for an unconstitutional action by the new president. They figured that the writing was on the wall. To preserve slavery, they needed to leave. Everyone tried to talk about other issues at the beginning of the war, but I don’t know that anyone was actually fooled by them. It is true that, once the “gulf squadron” enacted their bills of secession, that added another issue to the table. Once secession was attempted, the question of state versus federal power became a live issue. You can fairly say that the second wave of secession was launched by states which wanted to preserve their own freedom to leave if they wanted to later on. It was not a coincidence that they were all slave states, though. They were mainly concerned with having the right to leave, in case anti-slavery laws became too onerous. No free state even considered leaving to preserve state independence, and not all slave states did.

In the real world, the free states actually were enforcing the fugitive slave laws, and the clause of the constitution that allowed one state to extradite from another. That’s why escaped slaves did not stop when they reached a free state. They kept going to Canada or Mexico, which would not generally extradite escaped slaves.

Many people in the free states were sympathetic to the escaped slaves, and looked the other way as they passed. That reduced the ability of law enforcement to recapture the slaves. Every law is less effective among people who are opposed to that law; this was not a valid ground for breaking the constitution.

By the way, Lincoln did not choose to start a war. The civil war started when South Carolina enacted her ordinance of secession, just as an invasion starts when the first soldier steps across the border. In both cases, the fighting may come later, but as soon as someone tries to slice off part of a sovereign power’s territory by force, that’s war. Under the constitution, both the states and the federal government are sovereign. For a state to try to remove part of the territory of the United States from United States law, is war. It would also be war if the United States tried to remove part of a state’s territory from the state’s law. (With the overreach of federal power since the Roosevelt days, an argument can be made that we are already there, but that’s another topic.)

[BobL]

So you’re denying that Azov (maybe was, LOL) was part of the Ukraine government?

[FLT-bird]

I disagree with all of that. Neither secession nor the war were “about” slavery.

The original 7 seceding states....at least the 4 that issued declarations of clauses did list the violations of the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution as well as the Northern states’ obvious bad faith in refusing to prosecute those who financially supported John Brown’s terrorist attack on Harper’s Ferry among other causes.

That they went way out of their way to go on at length about how the Northern states had been economically exploiting them via high tariffs to protect Northern industry, via Northern states gobbling up the lion’s share of federal money for internal improvements (railroads, canals, dredging for harbors, etc) and how they got practically all of the corporate subsidies makes it clear how upset they were by all of this. That is particularly so since none of this was unconstitutional unlike the Northern states’ refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution.

By the way, Neither Lincoln nor the Republicans in 1860 were abolitionists. They made it quite clear publicly and repeatedly that they were against abolition.

State vs federal power had been a hotly contested issue along with the tariff for well over a generation. The Tariff of Abominations and the Nullification Crisis of the late 1820s through 1832 were a dry run at this. Secession and the war were over the same issues bubbling up again a generation later.

Another factor here is that “slavery” in this time in America was also shorthand for the economy. That is, the states that still had it were mostly agricultural and most of their economy was focused on producing cash crops for export. Far more of the states that no longer or had never had slavery had their economies focused on industrialization. That meant they first needed and then merely wanted high protective tariffs which were horrible for the agricultural export based states. They also wanted more centralized government to pay for things like the building of canals and railroads to facilitate their industrialization. The Southern states again objected that they were not only paying most of the tariffs and paying higher prices for manufactured goods, but they were also not getting their fair share of federal infrastructure money.

Its true that the underground railroad did run to Canada and an escaped slave could not be 100% safe unless they made it all the way out of the country but several Northern states did both enact laws as well as have multiple instances of local people work to thwart the slave catchers. Morally laudable to a modern audience but this is not the deal they made with the Southern states when they ratified the Constitution. The Southern states had a very legitimate gripe about this.....and the economic grievances they cited.

It was not the case that it was just individual action in the Northern states. They enacted laws to that effect too. How many of the financiers who openly provided money for very expensive Sharps rifles to equip John Brown’s terrorists knowing full well they intended to launch an attack on Virginia were ever prosecuted in New England? The answer is zero. Think how America would have reacted had say, the Saudis refused to prosecute or hand over wealthy people inside the kingdom who had openly financed the 9/11 terrorists. People would have been absolutely apoplectic here about that. That’s how Southerners felt.

By the way, Lincoln did choose to start a war. He sent a heavily armed fleet to invade South Carolina’s sovereign territory. The one trying to invade a sovereign power’s territory was the Union under Lincoln. South Carolina had a perfect constitutional right to unilaterally secede as do all states.