Lincoln never defended rich people. His Republican Party was not the party of the 1 percent. Rather, Lincoln defended upward mobility—the right to try one’s chances at moving up the ladder, at getting rich. Lincoln’s Republican Party sought to remove government obstacles to that process. In his time the main such obstacle was slavery. Slavery, Lincoln knew, hurt the value of people’s work because it placed them in competition with slaves who worked for nothing.
Today’s Republicans make a similar point about illegal immigrant labor. Illegal immigrants don’t have to pay taxes. For this and other reasons, they can price their labor markedly below that of citizens. Consequently, illegal immigration harms the upward mobility of American workers.
Today’s Democrats howl that such rhetoric is racist, but since there is no implication of racial inferiority, the charge is baseless. Democrats make it only because they derive political benefits from illegal immigration. In reality, the GOP is right that illegal immigration has held back the standard of living of many American workers, making it difficult for them to achieve the upward mobility that Lincoln knew epitomized the American dream.
For Democrats—then as now—these concepts of upward mobility and getting rich through one’s own efforts were anathema! The Democratic Party, then as now, is all about confiscating the fruits of other people’s labor. Consequently, Democrats in the North and the South attacked Lincoln with all the political weapons they could muster.
These Democrats, led by Douglas, accused Lincoln of seeking to destroy slavery in the South and of being a covert believer in equal rights for blacks, the black right to vote, and also miscegenation or the right of blacks to intermarry with whites. These—especially the miscegenation accusation—were incendiary charges in the mid-nineteenth century.
Interestingly, while Democrats in 1860 said Lincoln wanted to free all their slaves, today’s progressive Democrats today make exactly the opposite accusation charge—they claim Lincoln did not really care about slavery and fought the Civil War for reasons other than emancipation. They point to a famous letter to Horace Greeley in which Lincoln said his overriding goal was to save the union, not end slavery, and if he could save the union without freeing a single slave he would do it.
ARTFUL EVASIONS
So who is right, the old Democrats or the new ones? Actually, the Democrats of 1860 were closer to the mark than the Democrats of today. Lincoln did in fact believe not merely in ending slavery but also in extending the vote and equal rights to blacks. He also seems to have had no objection whatever to racial intermarriage.
Still, Lincoln realized that he could not admit to holding these positions in public. For Lincoln to make the election of 1860 about issues like the black vote or miscegenation—opposed by wide majorities of Americans of all political stripes—would be to assure his political defeat. If the Democrats defeated the Republicans in 1860, the South would not have seceded and American slavery would have continued.
Thus we have from Lincoln artfully evasive statements like, “I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.” Also, in response to Democratic proclamations of the inferiority of the black man, “If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.”
Lincoln is nowhere saying that blacks are inferior. He is not saying he rejects the idea of blacks marrying whites. He is simply refusing to go there. He is keeping the debate where it ought to be, on the simple question of whether people should be permitted to steal other people’s life and labor by enslaving them. Of the black woman he says, “In her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal and the equal of all others.”20
So today’s Democrats who fault Lincoln for his unenlightened views about blacks are being disingenuous. Lincoln’s views were not unenlightened. Rather, in statesmanlike fashion, Lincoln was simply refusing to admit his desire to do things that he could not in any case do. He was also refusing to let Democrats like Douglas change the subject from the extension of slavery—the main divide between the parties—to other peripheral subjects.
Similarly, when Lincoln insisted the Civil War was about the union, not about slavery, this is understood by competent historians to reflect Lincoln’s determination to keep border states—Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri—within the union. These states had slavery, and if Lincoln framed the war as one to end slavery, the border states would have seceded. If they seceded, Lincoln believed the union cause was lost. Once again, Lincoln acted in statesmanlike fashion to hold the border states, and he was successful in doing so, thus shortening the war and ending slavery more quickly.
The Democrats of the mid-nineteenth century didn’t just castigate the Republicans; at times, they physically assaulted them. A dramatic example occurred in 1856 when Republican senator Charles Sumner gave an especially stern denunciation of slavery on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In response, Democratic congressman Preston Brooks walked up to Sumner and struck him repeatedly with his cane.
Sumner was seriously injured and his health suffered for the rest of his life. This Democratic outrage helped persuade many Americans that there was no way to rationally resolve the slavery issue with pro-slavery Democrats.21
Democrats despised abolitionists like Sumner and John Brown, but most of all they hated the Republican Party. That’s because the Republican Party, unlike the abolitionists, was actually capable of winning a national election and preventing slavery from going into the new territories. Many Democrats feared that if slavery were not permitted to expand, it would inevitably decline. The relative power of free states would continually increase, and slavery’s tenure would soon be over. This fear is why the slave states seceded, thus precipitating the Civil War.
The firmness of Lincoln and the Republicans, from the time of Lincoln’s election through the conduct of the war, should be an example for Republicans today. Lincoln could probably have prevented the war by compromising his position that slavery could continue in the South but would be barred from extending into the new territories. Several such compromises—including the so-called Crittenden Compromise—were advanced to avert the danger of secession and war.
The Crittenden Compromise guaranteed the permanent existence of slavery in all states and territories demarcated by the Missouri Compromise line. It also affirmed popular sovereignty as the mechanism by which new territories could become slave states or free states. Historians recognize that perhaps the only way to avert the Civil War in that late stage was for Lincoln to embrace the Crittenden Compromise or something akin to it.
Yet Lincoln refused to do this, and in this sense he refused to do the one thing that could have avoided the war. Lincoln would not bend even one iota on his position—he refused to concede any ground to the Democratic doctrine of popular sovereignty. Lincoln argued that for him to do so would be to negate the very result of the 1860 election.
In effect, Lincoln would be allowing the very people who lost the election to win it simply by making their demands the necessary condition for them staying in the union. Lincoln would be selling out the American people in order to appease disgruntled Democrats. This he would not do.
In 1863, Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederacy. Solid Republican majorities in the House and the Senate supported this proclamation. The Copperheads or Peace Democrats opposed it, making it clear they favored maintaining the union but not freeing the slaves. The slogan of the Copperhead Democrats was, “The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is.” In other words, let’s keep the union and let’s also keep slavery.
Today’s progressives blast Lincoln and the Republicans for the limited scope of the Emancipation Proclamation, sarcastically noting it freed slaves not under union control, while at least for the present keeping in captivity slaves who were. Once again, Lincoln’s actions can be understood as preserving union power. For Lincoln to have freed slaves in the
border states would have risked further secession or at least widespread political division. Lincoln’s challenge was to keep the union forces together so that the war could be prosecuted to a successful conclusion. Winning the war was the sine qua non of permanently abolishing slavery.
Throughout the war, Lincoln’s Democratic opponents in the North—the Copperheads or Peace Democrats—sought to undermine him and the Republicans. The Copperheads sought to weaken Lincoln so that he could not be reelected. They called him a “nigger in principle” and urged Americans to defeat his “negroism.”22 This was the vocabulary in which the Democratic campaign of 1864 was conducted.
FIRE IN THE REAR
Lincoln recognized the threat from the Copperheads. He called these Peace Democrats the “fire in the rear” and he regarded them as just as dangerous as the armies of the Confederacy. If Lincoln had been defeated, the Copperheads would undoubtedly have sought to reconcile with the Confederacy, largely on Confederate terms. Lincoln’s reelection sealed the fate of the Peace Democrats, and also the fate of slavery.
But even after the surrender of the Confederacy—a surrender that presaged the final destruction of slavery—there were Democrats who refused to accept the outcome. One of them, John Wilkes Booth, decided to take action. Booth was a Confederate sympathizer from Maryland. Earlier Booth had joined a volunteer militia of Democrats in attendance at the hanging of abolitionist John Brown. Booth and the Democrats came armed to prevent abolitionists from rescuing Brown from the gallows.
Two days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln gave a speech at the White House in which he suggested that some blacks should get the vote. That did it for Booth, who gathered a group of likeminded Democrats who resolved to assassinate not only President Lincoln but also the vice president and the secretary of state. This was nothing short of an attempted coup.
The coup failed. Booth did kill Lincoln, who became the first president in American history to be assassinated. But the co-conspirators did not kill Vice President Johnson or Secretary of State Seward—although Seward was gravely injured. There was a national backlash against the conspirators. Booth was killed in a shootout with the authorities, and eight co-conspirators were tried and four were hanged.
Thus the last effort of Democrats to save the institution of slavery ended in ignominy. But the Democrats were not finished. They were down but not out. Soon, as we will see in the next chapter, the Democrats moved on to a new nefarious scheme of oppression and theft, one that was almost as despicable as slavery.
CHAPTER 4
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION FOREVER
HOW DEMOCRATS USED LAWS—AND LAWLESSNESS—TO KEEP BLACKS IN THEIR PLACE
This is a white man’s country—let the white man rule.
—Official Democratic Party slogan, 1868 presidential campaign
In 1969, twenty-one-year-old Hillary Rodham was selected to give the commencement address on behalf of graduating seniors at Wellesley College. Hillary came prepared with an address that included the familiar 1960s cocktail of left-wing idealism and pure blather. None of it is worth our attention. Here I want to focus on what Hillary said impromptu, once she had heard the speaker who preceded her.
The speaker was Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts and the first black senator to be popularly elected in American history. Brooke was a political moderate, as suggested by the title of his autobiography, Bridging the Divide. He had been chosen to receive an honorary degree by Wellesley that year.
Upon receiving the award, Brooke spoke briefly, expressing his empathy with the idealism of young people on issues such as the Vietnam War and civil rights. At the same time, Brooke cautioned them that they should stay within the law and not engage in “coercive protest” because that would risk alienating people otherwise sympathetic to their cause.
Brooke’s unobjectionable remarks stirred Hillary into high dudgeon and she ascended the podium. Attempting to speak for her generation, Hillary said, “We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.”
Responding directly to Brooke, she added, “Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything.” Hillary went on to say, “We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy.” Hillary didn’t say it but her implication was clear: we’ve heard enough from you, old black man!
Hillary added that her generation had been asked to wait for too long, and now it was feeling used. “We feel that too long our leaders have said politics is the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice making what appears to be impossible, possible.” Hillary didn’t say whether Brooke was a false friend using young people, or whether he was, as a supporter of Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam, himself a case of a black man being used. The audience could draw its own conclusions about that.
Hillary concluded her address by reading a poem that referred to “the hollow men of anger and bitterness” who must be left behind. Senator Brooke took offense to that, recognizing it as a reference to him. Hillary’s point didn’t escape anyone in the audience. She and like-minded young people were ready and willing to take over the country from the likes of Senator Brooke.
Hillary’s speech was met with a thunderous ovation by her fellow students, and her professors enthusiastically joined in. The Boston Globe reported the next day that Hillary had upstaged Brooke. Hillary was profiled that year in a Life magazine feature, “The Class of ’69,” that highlighted student speakers across the country. Clearly the young star had struck a chord, and her career was on its way.
Even today, young leftists claim to draw inspiration from what Hillary said more than thirty-five years ago. And Hillary herself has never repudiated her remarks; on the contrary, returning to Wellesley during her husband’s presidency, Hillary said that her original commencement speech “reflected the hopes, values and aspirations of my classmates.” Then she confessed, “It is uncanny to me the degree to which those same hopes, values and aspirations have shaped my adulthood.”1
LETTING THE BLACK MAN HAVE IT
Ponder the extraordinary spectacle that young Hillary created at her graduation address. Here was a white girl, scarcely in her twenties, delivering a public scolding and tongue-lashing to a highly accomplished fifty-year-old black man. Hillary lectured him with a tone of evident contempt and from a position of presumed superiority. Yet Hillary had no accomplishments that could compare with Brooke’s; her superiority was clearly not based on anything that she had done. Where, then, did it come from?
It came from history. Hillary placed herself squarely on the “right side” of history and, by implication if not outright assertion, placed Senator Brooke on the “wrong side.” Hillary didn’t quite say it, but both in her tone and in her remarks, she left the clear impression that Brooke was a kind of Uncle Tom. He was a sellout to the system—to the existing way of doing things—while she represented a moral challenge to the system.
Here Hillary did not merely assert the obvious, if tedious, truism that the future belongs to the young. Much more than that, she appealed to a progressive consensus that she could rely on. That consensus declared that left-leaning Democrats are the good guys and Republicans—even moderate Republicans—are the bad guys. Consequently, white liberals should feel no qualms about giving it to black Republicans, fully confident that academia will applaud and the media will cheer.
Let’s examine the main themes and story line of the progressive consensus. According to this story line, America has a long history of racism that was especially virulent in the South. Although Republicans may have played an important role in ending slavery, the South basically created new institutions of racism in the postbellum period. This southern oppression is epitomized by the Black Codes, segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Who—the progressive story line continues—fought to end this oppression? The progressive Democrats! It was a Supreme Court
dominated by progressives that ended segregation beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. The Democratic Party took Martin Luther King’s lead and championed the cause of civil rights, first for blacks, and then for women and other minorities. A Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Johnson administration also convinced a Democratic Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Bill of 1968.
Meanwhile, according to the progressive story line, conservatives and Republicans have proven themselves the consistent enemy of civil rights. The Republican South, in particular, is the home of American racism. No wonder blacks and other minorities vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers. African Americans and other persons of color aren’t stupid; they know who their friends are. Here, in sum, is the fund of moral superiority that Hillary Clinton drew on when she gave it to Senator Brooke.
The central issue, therefore, is which is the party of racism and which is the party of civil rights? This question cannot be answered simply by invoking the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement was itself parasitic on an earlier civil rights movement that took place a century earlier.
Didn’t know there were two civil rights movements? That’s because the progressives don’t say much about it. They focus on the later movement and pass over the earlier one. The earlier civil rights revolution is downplayed today because it has become politically problematic. It disrupts the progressive party line. Even in the second civil rights revolution, however, the roots of the first one are clearly apparent.
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