MSNBC's Daniels: 'Nightmarish' Founders Right In Building Relatively Small White House

On MSNBC's The Weekend, in a segment on President Trump's ballroom project co-host Eugene Daniels called the Founding Fathers "nightmarish" on some policies, citing slavery. Daniels acknowledged that the Founders got it right in creating a White House that was relatively small, the goal being to distinguish it from the palaces of royalty.

The original Constitution did not forbid slavery because the Southern states, whose economies were heavily dependent on slave labor, had made it clear that they would not join the United States if the Constitution had abolished slavery.

Daniels would apparently have preferred a United States composed only of the northern states, with the Southern states forming a separate nation. The ironic, likely result would have been for slavery to have persisted beyond Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.

As he saw it, industrial scale slavery was no longer economically viable, and would be phased out entirely within 10 - 20 years.

Where or what have you read that makes you think that? Do you understand that in 1861, there was no steel industry in the United States, just basic iron production. The oil industry was in its infancy with their only product being kerosene. Transportation was the rail road where they mostly burned wood. There was no telephone. The telegraph was still a new and unstable technology. Although there was some basic “ farm mechanization” that was mostly in wheat harvesting, not in planting or thrashing.

Who in 1861 thought that “ industrial scale” slavery would be fazed out in 10 or 20 years? From a strictly utilitarian standpoint, it would have continued for another 100 years based on farming needs in the south. Real mechanization in farming did not take place until the middle of the 20 th century. Until then, in much of rural America, from 1865 till 1865 there was share cropping that took the place of slavery.

Read some history about farming. There was widespread mechanization of farming by 1860, even though it was horse drawn.

Telegraphy was past infancy in 1860, was very widely used every day. The Union Army sent long telegraph reports from the field to DC every day. The first successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1866.

I have read several biographies of Lincoln. I have read a bunch of his speeches and letters. A large amount of his writings have been saved. There are many accounts of contemporary business people, north and south, writing about future economies of the nation. Not the politics, but the business futures.

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