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To: wasp69
Nineteenth century Democrats believed in the government enslaving one-third the population and whipping them to pick cotton. You can't get much more Big Government than that!
14 posted on 04/14/2003 1:17:50 PM PDT by Grand Old Partisan (You can read about my history of the GOP at www.republicanbasics.com)
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To: Grand Old Partisan
Nineteenth century Democrats believed in the government enslaving one-third the population and whipping them to pick cotton. You can't get much more Big Government than that!

The government enslaved one third of the population? Wow! When did the government do that? And here I thought all along it was private property owners.

No, they decided it was up to the STATES how to handle that issue not a centralized government. They decided it was up to the states, both North and South, to make up their minds what to do and how to handle it. On the other hand, it was the nineteenth century Republicans who decided to force a conflict and enslave eleven states for ten years via the power of the central government; nevermind that it did not have the power to do it to begin with.
15 posted on 04/14/2003 11:55:05 PM PDT by wasp69 (The time has come.......)
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To: Grand Old Partisan
Nineteenth century Democrats believed in the government enslaving one-third the population and whipping them to pick cotton.

...as opposed to the alternative desired and enacted by the North, that being a political slavery of the entire population resting upon the doctrine of the sword...

"The pretense that the "abolition of slavery" was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of "maintaining the national honor." Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general --- not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white. And yet these imposters now cry out that they have abolished the chattel slavery of the black man --- although that was not the motive of the war --- as if they thought they could thereby conceal, atone for, or justify that other slavery which they were fighting to perpetuate, and to render more rigorous and inexorable than it ever was before. There was no difference of principle --- but only of degree --- between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve; for all restraints upon men's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree." - Lysander Spooner, 1870

22 posted on 04/16/2003 1:03:03 AM PDT by GOPcapitalist
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