Posted on 07/04/2003 6:01:08 PM PDT by Mn. Black Republican Coalition
If "by that time" you mean Reconstruction and the post 14th & 15th Amendment era, probably the majority of many southern states were Republican. That would include virtually all freed slaves and a sizable percent of white Unionists who never supported the Confederacy. Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and other deep-south states that had majority or near majority black populations and also had Unionist sentiments sent Republicans to congress and elected Republican majorities to state legislatures, etc. That is why the KKK was founded --- to keep blacks away from the polls and return Democrats to office. The function of the KKK and related groups from the late 1860s until the 1960s was as the enforcement arm of the Democrat party, and they did their job with exceptional, if brutal efficiency.
Even today, you will still hear of elections in southern states that mark "the first Republican since Reconstruction or some such wording. (I think the current Texas legislature is the first Republican majority since Reconstruction.) If the current crop of race hustlers really wanted to sue an institution for support of slavery and civil rights abuses, they should sue the Democrat Party instead of some Insurance company or railroad that had some remote tie at best to past slavery and discrimination. The Democrats have a documented, totally non-interrupted 160 year history of championing both slavery and racial discrimination.
To Joe Stalin
The Republican Party was formed around 1858, out of the ashes of the Whig Party. The Whigs, were pro national bank, pro tariff, and in favor of supremacy of the Federal government over the States. The Republicans, garnered most of the Whigs, and the abolitionists as their base
Fractured history in the flavor of your namesake. The Republican Party was formed in 1852 in the Midwest as a Free-Soil party who's platform was entirely opposition to the expansion of slavery to the West. They were not necessarily abolitionists although some abolitionists (not all) were attracted to their platform as more politically realistic in the pre-Civil War days. (just as many Libertarians register and vote Republican today -- a more realistic vote as opposed to the Lou Rockwell no-chance party)
Whigs could come down either way on slavery with the general divide being that Northern Whigs were likely anti-slavery and anti-expansion while southern Whigs were pro-slavery and pro-expansion. That divide is what killed the Whig Party in the 1850s with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Act. While the Whigs were divided on slavery, the Democrats were united. There was no such thing, North or South, as an anti-slavery Democrat! As the Whigs collapsed, Southern Whigs like CSA V.P. Alex Stephens became Democrats while Northern Whigs like Lincoln became Republicans. But there was no such thing as an anti-slavery democrat. North or South, they all actively supported it or were not opposed to it and would vote for those who did support it.
The fight for civil rights came down to northern Democrats agains southern democrats. In 1964, congressional Republicans in both houses voted for the bill in higher percentages than the Democrats, due to opposition from their southern wing.
I'm not sure what "supremacy issue" you think was there, (I'm not aware of one) but the split, totally engineered and premeditated at the Charleston convention by the fire-eaters, broke the dems along anti-secession Douglas Democrats and pro-secession Brackenridge democrats. Other than secession, their platforms were nearly identical and aside from slavery expansion, the Republican party platform in 1860 was not radically different than either of those two. All the party platforms, for instance, supported Federal monies for a trans-continental railroad. The only disagreed on what state the Eastern terminus would be in. The only significant issue in the 1860 election was the question of the expansion of slavery.
The fire-eaters engineered the split to assure a Republican victory that would virtually guarantee the secession of the deep-south. Not even they would have gone along with secession if a Republican had not won. The "Black Republican" propaganda broadcast by the fire-eaters in the years before 1860 sufficiently terrified enough of the non-slaveholding population of the south to go along with the secessionist slaveocracy. Read the "Black Republican" propaganda of the day and you will see that the Jessi Jackson/Paul Bugala/DU lies and hate mongering we see today are among the oldest traditions of the Democrat Party. They have always preyed on the uninformed and ignorant. It’s what Democrats do best.
I'll second that welcome. Very good research. I wasn't taught anything about this when I was in school.
You might even become addicted like I am.
FR isn't addictive. I can quit anytime I want to. (Really, I can; I just don't want to.)
Joe, start reading some history instead of the demented revisionist time-travel stuff that seamlessly projects attitudes of the 1890s guilded age on people of the 1860s. The Radical Republicans of the 1860s were a sub-set of the Republican Party, not the party itself. The Radical Republicans did not support Lincoln!!! Lincoln was not a Radical Republican. The majority of the Republican Party was not Radical. There was nothing "radical" in 1860 about supporting a National Bank. There was nothing "pro-corporate" about supporting a National Bank. There was little or no "corporate world" in 1860 to run the government. The industrial revolution in America was still in its infancy. Most manufacturing interests were small, family operations. Very few corporations had as many as 100 employees. The largest enterprises of the day were railroads, and they were mostly small, point-to-point operations, that regularly went bankrupt. There was nothing "radical" in supporting internal improvements -- i.e. harbors, canals, roads and rail --- all made commerce easier and were especially to the benefit of small farmers who made the vast majority of the electorate in 1860. These ideas were not especially sectional. Support or opposition broke down along economic interest lines with the wealther and money interests generally opposed and smaller less wealthy interest supportive.
The Radical Republicans were given that name for one and only one reason --- they supported what was then a very radical agenda --- that slavery should not only be ended immediatly, but that blacks were entitled to every right (voting, equal access to public facilities such as schools, property ownership rights, jury duty, office holding, even the right to marry outside their race) that a white man was entitled to. Those ideas remained "Radical" to many for 100 years after the Radical Republicans started. Bobby Byrd and some few others likely still consider those ideas to be radical even if they try not to mention it in public.
BTW. The Radical Republicans also supported the trade union movement and even in the 1860s, supported the 8-hour day and worker rights to organize. Tell me exactly how that was furthering any "Corporate Interests"?
Had the Dems not split, pro-slavery Northern Democrat, Stephen Douglas, would have been elected president. He was the only "non-sectional" candidate. With Douglas, it's doubtful that even South Carolina, a hot bed of secessionist fire-eaters, could have gotten enough support from their non-slaveocrat population for secession. But just supposing they had pulled of secession anyway, I doubt Douglas would have acted much differently than Buchanan or Lincoln in the events leading up to the firing on Sumter.
After Sumter was fired on, only a President who wanted to be impeached immediately would have refused to respond. The outrage in the North was too great and Douglass would have called out the state militias just as Lincoln did. Probably the one big difference is that the Upper South States would have remained loyal had Douglas been president (he had very large, even majority support in all of them) and they would have likely joined the Northern states in forcing South Carolina and the other deep south states back into compliance with the Constitution. Another difference is that clowns like Ruffin and the other secessionist leaders would have likely meet the same fate as John Brown in his attempted 'secession' at Harpers Ferry.
Define the "North"? The Republicans, as the Free Soil Party were formed and had their largest base in the Upper Mid-West, not in the East which the neo-confederate revisionists typically characterize as representing the entire "North. In the 1860 elections, Lincoln barely squeaked out victories in the East --- New York and Pennsylvania were complete toss-ups. He lost New Jersey. To portray either the "North" or the "South" as a single political entities with unified goals or political agendas is simplistic to the point of distortion. It was a very complex and volatile political map.
There was already a disparity on Federal revenue collected and where the monies got spent in favor of the North.
Well there was a disparity, but surely not in the North's favor. The primary source of Federal revenues collected then were from import tariffs, and well over 70% of those tariffs were collected in the Northern states while approximately 50% of the Federal budget was spent in the South. That is logical when you consider that only around 40% of the population lived in Southern states and 30% of those were chattel slaves who had no money to purchase imports while the Southern states comprised about 50% of the land area of the states.
Read Alexander Stephens speech to the Georgia assembly in Dec. of 1860 where he lays out the figures on where tax money came from and where it was spent. Just on the post office, the Federal Government's largest single outlay in those years, Northerners subsidized Southerners to the tune of $9 million a year --- a sizeable chunk of change in those days. Moreover, the total Federal Government revenue in those times was piddling and amounted to no more than a $2 or 3 dollars a person per year. No one would go to war over that amount of money.
With the election of Lincoln, and with the North having more votes in Congress, and with said disparity only to increase with the moratorium on new slave states allowed to join the Union. The nation was already divided, culturally, economically, and with Lincoln, politically.
The "North" had more votes in Congress for decades. The election of Lincoln had no impact on that factor. As for the "divide" from a purely economic standpoint, the interests of the agricultural states of the west and the south were not significantly different but with one major exception --- slavery. The southern slave states and the western farm states could have formed coalitions in Congress to block or pass anything they wanted. Combined, they out numbered the East. But slavery prevented that collation from forming. The primary political interest of the "Western States" was blocking the expansion of slavery into new territories while the primary interest of the deep-south states was to assure the expansion of slavery. Lincoln's political base in the West has economic reasons for their position of anti-expansion and the south, especially the deep south had economic reasons for their pro-expansion position. We can go into those reasons if you like, but the point is that Lincoln aside from blocking expansion of slavery to the West threatened none of the Southern states in any way. The issue was not their political influence in Congress, but the economic well being of a small, but very powerful class of men in the deep south who's future relied primarily on maintaining the long term value of slave property.
The solution was for the South to peacefully secede from the Union, just as the 9 original ratifying States did when they seceded from the "perpetual Union" of the Articles.
Then where was their call for a convention to modify or dissolve the previous form of government as the men of 1787 had done? And if they expected a "peaceful" separation, why was their first action (in some cases even before the states approved secession) to raise an army more than 10 times the size of the Union army and to engage in acts of violence against Federal institutions and Federal officials?
No one at that time believed secession would be peaceful. They all expected war to be the result and both sides deluded themselves into believing they would win it quickly and easily. Such is human nature.
The guy was the Vice President of the Confederacy for crying out loud. He is the one who delivered the famous "Cornerstone" speech that defined to reasons and objectives of the confederacy.
A fundamental reason that the neo-confederates always avert their eyes from. Slavery where it existed was not the issue -- Expansion of slavery was the issue! Lincoln never in any way threatened slavery where it existed but vowed to keep it isolated there. If you can't comprehend why expansion was so important --- important enough to go to war --- I suggest you study the basic laws of supply and demand. The slave population continued to double every generation while the available amount of prime cotton, rice and sugar land in the south had just about reached it's peak. Without expansion, (i.e. new markets for slaves) the value of all slaves would have plummeted once supply outstripped demand. They needed new markets to keep their Ponzi game going and with the ascendancy of the Republican party, that was not going to happen as long as they remained part of the United States.
Now you think Mississippi was the "wealthiest" state in the nation. Granted, there were some very wealthy individuals living in mansions along the Gulf coast --- likely many of the wealthiest people in the country. But what did that wealth consist of? Two things --- land and slaves and of the two, the slaves were the most valuable. On the typical plantation the slaves were worth more than all the land, buildings and machinery combined. Their wealth was in the form of people.
The entire population of the state of Mississippi was less than a quarter of the population of either Pennsylvania or New York and over 50% of that population were chattel slaves who had no money to buy anything. The majority of whites were small, hard-scrabble farmers and poor as dirt. More than half couldn't even read, but you somehow would claim that small number of white people, the majority of who were poor, consumed more imported goods that the vastly larger populations of New York or Pennsylvania where a viable middle class had already developed. The fact is that the Port of Philadelphia collected more tariff revenue that all southern ports combined! And Philadelphia only collected half of what the Port of New York collected. Do you want us believe that European merchants were stupid enough to ship their good to Philadelphia when the primary market for their goods was New Orleans or Biloxi? Why on earth would they pay the extra transportation costs to send goods over a 1000 miles of torturous roads and rail lines with weeks of delay and potential damage when they could simply spend a few more days at sea and take it directly to those consumers? The fact is that the majority of customs houses in the southern ports did not collect enough revenue to cover their own operating costs. Southern ports were primarily export centers and the vast majority of European ships came loaded with ballast, not goods.
A point on protective tariffs the neo-confederates always seem to skip when they whine about how "unfair" tariffs were, is that tobacco, cotton, rice and sugar also had high import tariffs to protect the main industries of the south just as iron and manufactured goods were protected to nurture the industries of the north. It was very much a two-way street that generally worked to the benefit of both sections.
BTW. If the Missouri Compromise "defined" the North and South, what was bleeding Kansas about? Why did the south demand the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
Gads, what a black mark on my beloved heritage. I was unaware of that, even if it didn't start out as what it later became.
Take that whiney tone to the innumerable civil-war threads wouldya??
Do you drive always looking in the rear-view mirror and still complain about your favorite team losing a game 20 years ago as well?
Gads, what a black mark on my beloved heritage.
Yes. I have often thought that those of us with Scottish ancestry should form a class action suit against the present "Klan" and restrain them from using the name. It's PC, I know, but it's also insulting as hell when you are aware of its origins.
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