Posted on 06/19/2006 6:35:38 AM PDT by since 1854
Today, Americans celebrate “Juneteenth” – when in 1865 slavery finally ended throughout the entire United States. Sadly, few people know that Juneteenth was a high water mark for African- Americans. Soon after that great day, the Democratic Party defeated the Reconstruction policies of the Republican Party, postponing the civil rights movement until the 1950s.
An important fact which most history books ignore is that Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 running mate was a Democrat, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. And so after Lincoln’s assassination, it was a Democrat who would be President of the United States for the first four years after the Civil War. That first President Johnson did all in his power to prevent African- Americans from experiencing Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.”
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Good thing we whipped those damn rebels.
Could be, I dunno. If he did, good on him. Federal antilynching laws seem to me to be an affront to federalism, not that something like that would be a consideration for FDR.
Don't get me wrong, lynching was a worse problem than a lot of people appreciate and the majority of the victims were Blacks in the South. It's just that riding roughshod over the Constitution weakens all the other protections which it once afforded us.
Good grief. Denial or head in the sand?
The 13th Amendment applied to all states, even those which had not ratified it.
Passed no segregation laws between 1865 and 1957.
1957: Barred public accommodations segregation
Source: The History of Jim Crow
Neither. It's just that I'm old enough to realize that most laws are fraught with unintended consequences that are often worse than the problem they are intended to solve, but usually only worsen. John Stossel talks about this in his book, "Give Me a Break!". As a young reporter he championed laws to solve problems, the laws were enacted, the problems got worse or the laws caused more and worse problems than they solved. In the meantime he and his journalistic colleagues had moved on.
I remember from high school Latin, Caesar's Gracine (?spelling?) oration, words to the effect: "These are honorable men and they mean well, but we should cautious in these times of turmoil, lest we set a precedent that less honorable men in future times may abuse."
Lynching is not just another law. It's good to know you're pro lynching.
I tried to explain, I'm not pro-lynching, I'm pro-Constitution. The U.S. constitution does not give the Congress any authority to outlaw lynching in the several states.
Much expansion of Federal authority in the last century has been accomplished under the "commerce clause", i.e., something that Congress wanted to legislate was tarted up as in some remote way a regulation of interstate commerce. As a young boy I was offended by pictures of "Whites Only" drinking fountains in Life Magazine. As a middle-aged man, I dispair of over reaching Federal authority.
There are like, 54 Blacks in Vermont today. Suggests that there never was a large Black or Slave Population in Vermont. There were slaves in Massachusetts, but Massachusetts ended slavery the same way it instituted gay marriage, by judicial fiat. Maybe with more justification, since a judge found that since Massachusetts didn't have any laws supporting slavery, a woman who had been held in bondage was owed two years back wages and was free to seek her own employment.
Which is what I stated in my post. Slavery was still legal in some Union States until the ratification of the 13th ammendment in December of 1865. Juneteenth was not the end of slavery in America.
With some 200,000 blacks in the U.S Army in 1865 (3/4 from the South), slavery was pretty much dead everywhere -- legal or not -- under control of the U.S. Government, which by then was the entire country except Texas, which was not reached by U.S. troops until June 19th -- the day celebrated as Juneteenth.
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