Posted on 06/08/2021 9:46:07 AM PDT by Heartlander
The official Donkey Party website, Wikipedia, and a hundred other prejudicial sources online such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, would never tell you what I am about to relate. It is not a secret; many noted historians have written about it at great length, but the Left does not want you to know it. They have obscured the facts or tried to rewrite their whitewashed version of history. Why?
The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 by the backers of General Andrew Jackson, a Southerner and ardent racist who owned slaves and thought nothing wrong with the practice. Jackson, who became the 8th president, earned his fortune in a cotton industry based entirely on slaveholding.
“Old Hickory” as his troops called him, was one tough son of a bitch. Compromise was not in his lexicon. Aside from his attitudinal superiority over blacks, Jackson is also famous for the “Trail of Tears” which forced Native Americans off their ancestral lands. These are the seminal beginning roots of the Democratic Party tradition in America.
Leading up to the Civil War, the Democratic Party had only one platform: Keeping slavery and the plantation economy intact.
In an attempt to settle sectional conflicts about the expansion of slavery, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Act stated that the residents of those states, rather than the federal government, would determine the legality of slavery in those territories. The Republican Party was created largely in response to the Act; their 1856 platform of “free labor, free land, free men” aimed to protect poor white farmers and laborers from competition with slave labor. In response, the Democratic Party took a position of non-interference with the institution of slavery, which they favored and defended.
The Democratic Party was founded in a racism that was intended to support the interests of the ruling class and its party grandees as its first political principle. It was the core tenant of their political philosophy, public policy, and actions for the better part of a century.
The Democrats controlled the South and fought the Civil War as “Confederates,” to protect and preserve slavery and their way of life. The Confederacy never had political parties because they were all Democrats. All of the governors, generals, and leaders of the South in its war of secession were, in fact, Democrats.
The Republican Party was formed to abolish slavery and maintain the Union. In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the “tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.
With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories, the Whigs disintegrated. When Lincoln, the first Republican president, was elected with a split vote in 1860, it took only three weeks for the states of the South, all Democratic, to secede from the Union and start the Civil War, the bloodiest tragedy in all of American history.
After the surrender of the Confederates, the Democrats were implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor, was a staunch supporter of slavery and the Southern Confederacy during America’s Civil War. On the night of April 14, 1865, three days after the war ended, he entered Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and shot Lincoln. The assassin shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis! [Ever thus to tyrants!] The South is avenged,” as he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Booth was funded and supported by the Democratic Party and the Confederacy, and his known plan was to reignite the Civil War and keep slavery.
The turbulent era of Reconstruction (1865-77) following the Civil War saw an effort to reintegrate Southern states and four million newly freed black people into the United States. The Democrats had a different plan for Reconstruction based on a reversion to their supremacist racist policies and ideology. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson (a Democrat from Tennessee) in 1866, new southern state legislatures passed highly restrictive and harsh “Black Codes” to control the labor and behavior of formerly enslaved people and other African Americans.
Outrage in the North over these racist measures eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 by Republicans, newly enfranchised black people gained an active voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—primarily the Ku Klux Klan—would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in a South that was still totally Democrat controlled.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, six Confederate veterans, all Democrats, gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, to create the Ku Klux Klan (Greek for circle), a vigilante group mobilizing a campaign of violence and terror against the progress of Reconstruction and the Republicans. As the group gained members from all strata of Southern white society, they used violent intimidation to prevent black people—and any white people who supported Reconstruction (namely, Republicans)—from voting and holding political office. All of the members of the Klan were Democrats; participation in the Democratic Party was explicitly mandated by the Klan, and the linkage between that political party and its extremist, violent terrorist wing is well documented.
In an effort to maintain white hegemonic control of government, the Klan, joined by other white Southerners in the Democratic Party, engaged in a violent campaign of deadly voter intimidation during the 1868 presidential election. From Arkansas to Georgia, thousands of black people were killed. Similar campaigns of lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes and other violent attacks on those challenging white supremacy became a hallmark of the Klan for decades. Again, this was informally sanctioned by the Democratic Party.
Jim Crow allegations are all the rage today, but the real thing originated with Democrats and included these abhorrent practices. These laws enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. (Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine that mocked black people. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for all African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.)
From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, totally controlled by the Democrats, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color” in public transportation and schools. Segregation was extended to parks, cemeteries, theaters, and restaurants in an attempt to prevent any contact whatsoever between blacks and whites as equals. Although the U.S. Constitution forbade racial discrimination, every state of the former Confederacy, all with Democratic governors and state legislatures, moved to disenfranchise blacks by imposing biased reading requirements, stringent property qualifications, and complex poll taxes. Jim Crow laws were a Democratic invention and lasted until the 1960s.
Democratic leaders like the late Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd (D-W.Va.), were high-ranking officials in the KKK. Byrd was himself a grand cyclops of the KKK. He actively recruited hundreds of members and bragged about it. He held political office as a Democratic leader for five decades and was the longest serving Democrat in Congress. In December 1944, Byrd wrote to segregationist Democrat Mississippi Senator Bilbo:
I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side . . . Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
During the Civil Rights Movement Democrats did everything in their power to forestall the rights of minorities and continue the subjugation of black voters. When all of their efforts to enslave blacks, keep them enslaved, and then keep them from voting failed, the Democrats came up with a new strategy: If black people are going to vote, they might as well vote for Democrats. As President Lyndon Johnson was heard to have said about the Civil Rights Act, “I’ll have them n—–s voting Democrat for 200 years.”
So now the Democratic Party prospers on the votes of the very people it has spent much of its history oppressing. And the names of those oppressors are well known.
Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor was an American politician and dedicated member of the Democratic Party who served as Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, for more than two decades. He strongly opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and was famous for his racist rhetoric and use of police dogs against protestors. He came to typify the Democratic attitude against equality and the 13th Amendment.
George Wallace, the fiery Democrat governor of Alabama was infamous for standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block integration in 1963. He attempted to keep his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stop the desegregation of schools and society. He came to personify the Democratic attitude to race relations and later went on to mount a losing run for the presidency.
Dixiecrat Democrats, formed in 1948, were opposed to civil rights, and bolted when Harry Truman took the Democratic nomination. Southern Democrats tried to forestall the signing of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964. If Republicans had not sided with certain Northern Democrats to end the longest filibuster in history by then-Democrat Senator Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.), the Act would not have become law.
People like then-Senator Joe Biden, (D-Del.) from the border slaveholding state, Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line, got elected on a segregationist banner and opposed integration and school busing throughout the 1970s and 80s. Biden worked closely for years with Democratic Mississippi Senator James Eastland and Democratic Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge, two demonstrably racist Democrats, who opposed civil rights legislation and all integration efforts. “We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done,” Biden said in his 2020 campaign, joking that Eastland “never called me ‘boy’; he always called me ‘son.'”
The tortuous history, when actually read and studied, demonstrates one abundantly clear fact; America has long had a racist political party.
They are called Democrats.
How is it that the “oppressed/subjugated” haven’t had it dawn on them yet that the dems are simply taking them for a ride?
How is it that the “oppressed/subjugated” haven’t had it dawn on them yet that the dems are simply taking them for a one way ride to hell without a return trip?
This is right on. The Democrats (and their RINO sycophants) are the real enemy of America
The problem with this theory is that there was political disarray after the War Between the States that sent all the parties scrambling for a new power base. So much so that by the start of the 19th Century, neither the Democrat nor Republican parties represented what they had in 1860.
In 1860 the Democrat party was the champion of States’ Rights, small national government, individual liberty and low taxation. The Republicans were the party of absolute federal supremacy, ever-expanding government control and high taxation. And both pretty much hold the opposite beliefs now.
Both parties have reinvented themselves enough times in the last 156 years that their present incarnation bears little or no resemblance to what it represented in 1860. Some of the statements made by Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates sound like they might well have come from the lips of Lucky Louie Farrakhan; others from David Duke. So any attempt to directly link either present-day party with their antebellum namesake is pure sophistry, regardless how much political hay you think can be made from it. It’s little apart from confirmation bias.
The Democrat hatred for black Americans far surpassed this superficial treatment.
But telling this truth is pointless now. Years ago, the Republicans should have aggressively made this history part of their daily speeches and educational efforts. They did not, instead allowing a completely fabricated history of America to grow unimpeded.
It is too late now. Minds could have been changed years ago, when people were still capably of being influenced by the truth.
But no, the Republicans stood by, almost as if they were OK with the distortion made of our history.
Good thread...thanks for starting it.
***Jackson is also famous for the “Trail of Tears” which forced Native Americans off their ancestral lands.***
Just for the record, these same tribes joined the Confederacy in the Civil War.
The tribes that made or were negotiating treaties with the Confederacy.
Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Comanches, Wachitas, Kiowas, Pottawattamies, Chickasaws, Osages,
Seminoles, Senecas, Shawnees, Quawpaws.
The South also had Indian agents operating all throughout the High Plains and mountain region stirring up other tribes such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Navajo and Apaches to make war on the Union at that time.
Their traditional enemies, Pawnee, Kaw, Osage (well, part of them) remained loyal to the Union.
“There is little doubt that the recent outbreak in the Northwest (Minnesota Uprising) has resulted from the efforts of secession agents operating through Canadian Indians and fur-traders.”—Mr Giddings, US Counsul-general in Canada
Bookmark.
The Democrats actually had THREE terrorist organizations. The KKK, Red Shirts and White League.
Will you please stop talking about race and let people be people. somw people are darker, some are ligher. Can we not stop there? I’d hug anybody who stepped forward. Would you do the same. If not, you are the problem!
What a great article! Yes, the Democrats are the party of racism and real Americans need to know the history of Democrats, Racism and the Klan.
A simplified version of the history of the Democratic Party. Definitely the Racist Party, but I thought they simplified the Jacksonian Presidency. It was a little more complex than what the author wrote. IMHO.
“Judas goats” among them.
It’s starting to.
divi$ivene$$= YUGE money for someone so there is an incentive to keep the separation going. People are to be categorized as:
1. NON a-holes
2. a-holes.
That’s about it as far as I’m concerned. Treat #2 accordingly.
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