FOLLOWING ON SEVERAL RECENT POSTS
I want to advert to the passage below, in the context of the accomplishments of the Republican Party, and of Lincoln.
"...In the last half century, many, though not all, historians, other academics, and now, journalists and op-ed writers, have gone in a different direction, arguing that hypocrisy was really the defining feature of what the American revolutionaries accomplished, and that none of it had (or will have) any real meaning until it has been extended to everyone on a fully equal basis...." DK
In the long transformation of the contagion of liberty, fallout from the Reformation, in 17th through 19th Century British politics, emancipation of this or that minority became expeditient, in a struggle between aristocratic factions and commons, neither of a majority of whom were either Catholic, or later, Jews. The Reform Acts, etc.
This to some extent is background.
Douglas went over in the First Debate the outline of background to creation of the secret abolitionist Republican party out of some Whigs and some Democrats.
Neither Whig nor Democrat majorities wanted a much stronger federal government.
Neither wanted to see much of a decline in the several states' individual rights and prerogatives.
Neither Whigs nor Democrats wanted to see the institution of slavery nationalized, or either mandated, or prohibited ab initio for new territories by federal fiat over existing states' rights, or territories existing or emerging wishes, even though there had been precedent for federal exclusion of slavery in territories, as distinct from states.
Only handfulls of abolitionists of either party objected to states' rights, and mainly only on the issue of slavery and trade.
Let's just put it this way: Other than for that, they mostly were, and would have remained, as good states' rights Whigs or Democrats as any other manjack wanton white grifters in Congress ever were.
Moving on to the issue of sectional strife, that had existed for a long time, but it had been mediated in a bi partisan way since there were some members of Congress from both sections.
Neither party majority, or its constituents, wanted or had voted for war to settle the slavery or any other issue.
They certainly did not think, and had certainly not been told, that they were in fact voting Republican in order to start, one way or another, immediately, an abolitionist war with seceding Southern states over the issue of slavery.
Furthermore, if they had been asked, a large majority of them, they also would have said that they believed that Southern states, or any states, had a right to secede from the USA if their people (the ones that counted) properly so chose.
There had been examples already in American history of a threat of secession by Northern states, and it was opposed but the balance of opinion probably favored the right to secede as well.
Turning to the Supreme Court, Justice Taney set out at length in Dred Scott the well established existing situation regarding the legal and constitutional position of negroes, a quite complex one, having to do even with counting and balancing inhabitants for Congressional representation, and characterized also in other contexts by racial inferiority and subordinate status in white society, none of which was the slightest bit reactionary or contentious for most all of those whites with some knowledge, regardless of the state they inhabited, except the few extreme abolitionists in either party.
The Court, no less than most congressmen of both parties, was merely towing a powerful states' rights theme struck in the Constitution, and as modified by existing legislation, and it had been mostly quite properly adhered to by the Court since 1787 in Dred Scott and before.
When scholars such as Foner join Lincoln's chorus dubbing Dred Scott an abominable decision, they expose either their ignorance, their guile, or both.
So, taken together, not only Congress, but also the Supreme Court, had generally viewed abolitionism with abhorrence, states' rights as the norm, and secession as legitimate.
It is only once the existing background of this separation of powers stage has been set, and it is seen that Lincoln's Republican secret society then upends by underhanded political manoeuvres the main positions, and so called checks and balances of all three branches of government at the same time, that the enormity of this electoral coup d'etat by fraud can finally be brought into high relief.
The conspiring Republicans could never have come to power legitimately by open admission of their actual agenda. They all knew that.
I want to return to Foner's account, not the nonsense high sounding parts about Lincoln gradually coming to abolitionism or toward radical republicanism, or the even more nonsense passages where Foner calls Lincoln on the racist carpet, of which there are plenty, but rather those passages, sometimes heartbreaking, sprinkled here and there throughout the book, some early experiences, see also late, p. 223, 224, (his full White House meeting with free negroes account is online, and posted elsewhere here) 225, 256, 257, where Lincoln's actual experiences and feelings, or lack of feelings, (I am not suggesting he need have actually had any) for negroes, early and late, in various contexts, shows through again and again, the pathos of these passages, of his superior and dismissive attitude toward those whom he publicly claimed should be treated as equals according to the Declaration, but denied it to the audiences who rejected it. Condemning Dred Scott but equivocating when convenient.
But in reality, behind even all of that dissembling rhetoric, he did not hesitate, as a very cold blooded politician, to use them mainly, one might almost say, exclusively, as his personal political pawns and later as cannon fodder, for his own political purposes, as one might use an old broken rake, a bent but usable shovel, or a dependable expendable farm animal.
Had some benevolent God of Negroes offered to pay the bill for them to all be returned, against their will, to Africa, free and slave, trust me, he would have jumped on it.
Lincoln's white only Immigration Act followed closely his negro Emancipation Proclamation, both during the Civil War.
So, in concluding, at least for the night, i have to say that DK's term hypocrisy hardly captures what Lincoln's secret society accomplished.
Rather, it was an actual Republican coup d' etat, a traitorous and fraudulent abuse of the electoral system, used to bring them, a radical fringe group, to power under totally false pretenses, so that they could then foment a civil war with the slave holding states and share the spoils among themselves under our spoils of office system. And that is exactly what they did, holding power from 1860 until 1932, 72 long years.
The secession of Deep South states, upon Lincoln's electoral victory, ironically, itself had the Republican party's desired effect, among many Northern racist but hardly abolitionist whites, of confirming his prior and extensive false claims that Southern whites intended to nationalize slavery not merely into new territories but into the Northern states themselves, so that the very Northern fears that Lincoln had previously fraudulently stoked to get elected now seemed to be being confirmed on the ground.
As we see even today, sometimes arguably routinely legitimate actions, so called non violent protests, sometimes government sanctioned, although now often interspersed with subversive elements both domestic and foreign, can play into the hands of radicals on the other side, espousing concepts of law and order and national unity not so very different from Lincoln's radical abolitionist program itself.
Think of the Democrats as a more diverse group of Douglas' moderates, but also now some radical and secessionist STOKELY ANTIFAS and BLM Black Power negroes espousing the original sin of the white West and white male America, confronting a stalwart unionist white Republican now in the White House.
In certain ways, Lincoln's coup was not so different from what Hitler had done to Weimar Germany, and was conducted by politicians in broad daylight only slightly less cynical or hypocritical.
This post is dedicated to DK's friend, Thomas Childers, whose Teaching Company lectures on Hitler I most enjoyed.
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