Review: 'Founding Brothers' is a television landmark

No, Delaware was buffered on the south by Maryland. It could only have been called a border state before the war when the Mason-Dixon line was the dividing line and not the southern border of Maryland. There was never any question at all of secession for Delaware and it went totally for the union in the war. How can you say that Delaware was not a northern state when the only standard that can really be used is the standard of the war; union or Confederate state? The border states like Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri were actually Confederate states prevented from secession by force of arms. That was never the case in Delaware. By your standard wouldn't Ohio have been a border state as well? Talk about being disingenuous, look in the mirror. Nice little veiled insult there, too, as though anyone who disagrees with you on this isn't even semi-reasonable.

The Jim Crow laws were passed by Delaware first. Jim Crow was invented by Delaware legislators, in fact. There was no "reconstruction" in Delaware at all, just a small population of freed slaves and the beginnings of an influx of freedmen from Maryland, where there was also no reconstruction. Therefore, having no excesses of reconstruction to deal with, the good people of Delaware were reacting to something else, and the most obvious new condition they had confronting them was freed slaves. Guess which was the second state to pass Jim Crow laws. Better still, go look it up for yourself.

Where is the union that Lincoln saved? I hate to see a fellow conservative groping in the dark. Here I've put the light switch right under your hand and you won't turn it on. Go do some real research, buddy. You're letting a handful of marxist college professors tell you what to believe. You're getting close to the truth, but your blind worship of Lincoln will keep you from ever finding it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you. You aren't the typical lying, Southern hating bigot found among the republicans on FR.

How many states passed true Jim Crow laws? I don't know, so I am asking you. In those which did, when and how were they repealed? If you have this data, I strongly suspect you will discover that Jim Crow laws (and perhaps even more importantly, the associated social norms and violence used to enforce them) were overwhelmingly located in the former confederate states.

Delaware is a southern or border state in approximately the same way Kentucky is. Although it remained in the Union, its former slave status gave it many southern characteristics and attitudes, perhaps especially towards race. I'm not terribly familiar with the state, but I assume that it is (or was) similar to Maryland, which certainly was a southern state. Like Kentucky and Missouri, the primary reason Maryland didn't secede is because of questionably legal federal actions in the early days of the War.

I find it peculiar that you seem to think the southern states were somehow compelled by the example of tiny Delaware to institute segration laws. That a practice originated in a certain location is not nearly as important as where it was enthusiastically adopted and made an integral part of the culture.

Something I have never found much about is the fact that there was a delay of approximately a decade between the end of the military occupation of parts of the South and the institution of the most flagrant anti-black segregation laws. Why the delay? What happened during this period? Was it a period of relative racial peace, or did what happened during this period precipitate the adoption of segregation?

I really don't know. Possibly you do.

I don't know how many states passed Jim Crow laws and who kept them longest. You can research that for yourself if you like. If you don't want to, then I trust you're intellectually honest enough for it to bother you until you find out about it for yourself.

I know a little more about Delaware than you do since I lived there for almost five years. What I stated about Jim Crow laws originating there came directly from the state legislative researcher I knew from my neighborhood. Delaware is an odd case because it has only three counties and two of them are rural with some of the finest farmland I ever saw anywhere while the northermost county contains the only city, Wilmington. Wilmington is like a miniature Philadelphia, yankee to the core. New Castle county is the home of the DuPonts, who have never been regarded as anything other than a Northeastern blueblood family dynasty.

There are still people living in Wilmington who remember having to use "colored" rest rooms and water fountains. The last of the "civil rights" era race riots happened in Wilmington in '72. Try getting anyone from Wilmington to admit to being a Southerner.

Note that I never said the Southern states passed Jim Crow laws to follow the example of Delaware. The Southern states were following a national trend by passing those laws, though. Illinois and other union states had black codes which limited the amount of time a black person could stay in the state, what they were permitted to do, etc. but when the Southern states passed similar codes after the war, the radicals responded with military occupation. Odd that they didn't hold Chicago to the same standard they used for Charleston.

Not having read the legislature's debates, I can't say why or even whether or not South Carolina passed racial laws that long after the thieves left. Do you know of laws passed a decade or so after the deal was cut exchanging a presidency for an end to military occupation?

If you do some research on this subject you may be surprised at just what a pack of lies has been foisted off as "historical fact" about the South. I hope you do pursue a little research. You seem honest enough to admit when you've learned something new which contradicts what you believed before.

It was indeed a fascinating series, and it once again raises the same old questions about the true nature of the American political spectrum.

The "left wing" of the time was among the "pure republicans" such as Jefferson, Madison, and their fellows. And indeed, it was among this camp that the French Revolution found its friends. However, their domestic philosophy of government--strict constructionism, laissez faire and states' rights--have for most of US history since then been associated with the right. Similarly, the Federalists were the conservatives of their era--horrified by the freethinking of the Jeffersonians and by the atheist revolution in France--yet they believed in loose constructionism, implied powers, and federal supremacy. Furthermore, the rightwing Federalists championed the national bank, the bete noire of rightwing conspiracy theorists for much of the past two centuries. How does one explain this?

The show also stressed the simple fact that George Washington was not the proto-confederate proto-Calhounian that our neo-confederates and Lincoln haters make him out to be. I am willing to consider the correctness of their position, but I do wish they would stop misrepresenting Washington as one of themselves and the Republican philosophy of goverment as totally unprecedented in American history.

But this spectrum raises even deeper questions. It is obvious that the genuine Left of the time (what there was of it) looked to the Jeffersonian loose-constructionists as their comrades, yet the Jeffersonian philosophy of a government so small as to barely be noticeable is blatantly opposed to the Left's own domestic philosophy since the French Revolution. How could it be that the American Left espoused a philosophy so totally at odds with what the Left eventually developed? Why is it that Jefferson's ideological colleagues in Europe all espoused some form of socialism?

Could it be that the Jeffersonian party represented the Left frozen at a very early stage of its development--after the American but before the French Revolution, when the Left was espousing mere Republicanism and the overthrow of monarchs, and before its ideology had developed fully? It is a manifest fact of history that the American Revolution (irony of ironies) was the first trendy cause celebre of the International Left. But the American Revolution, unlike the French which followed it, was not a social revolution. Thus Jeffersonianism in the early federal period perhaps represented the early, pre-social revolution Left.

The passing of time rendered the American spectrum even more anachronistic. Many of the ultra-conservative Federalists of the early period later became radical abolitionists, though there were radical factions in both the Jacksonian and Whig parties. Perhaps it is not as strange as it at first seems that Jeffersonian/Jacksonian democracy eventually became early leftist socialism (of the populist/progressive tradition), and that the descendants of these people later became the "xenophobic right wing extremists" of the Heartland. Conversely, one could ask if contemporary northeastern liberalism is merely Hamiltonian Federalism with a slightly different ideological justification.

For whatever reason, today's "conservative L" on the American political map was the "progressive L" of a century ago. And just as today's heartland conservatives oppose socialism, the income tax, the federal reserve, and similar things because these are plots of the Rockefellers, their "progressive" ancestors supported these measures and more (such as nationalization of the railroad and a limit on the amount of property a person could own) in the name of opposition to the same family!

Meanwhile, while conservative descendants of populists criticize socialism (populism that benefits "the wrong people"), the Elite Left demonizes "regressive populism" (socialism that benefits "the wrong people").

The American political spectrum over the past two centuries is one of the world's mysteries.

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