Dinesh
D’Souza has been on numerous programs lately preaching his Manichaean political
gospel of an unsullied, unracist Republican North and a soiled, dirty, no-good,
racist Democrat South. Now, trying to
defend either of these parties is absurd on its face since both are controlled
by the same globalist corporate donors.
But D’Souza’s charges of racism do need to be dealt with. Thankfully, a new essay at the Abbeville
Institute has appeared that does so.
Among other things, the author writes,
. . .
As for white
supremacy in regard to blacks, it pervaded the exclusively Northern GOP every
bit as much as it did the Democrats in the 19th century. In fact, by
today’s standards of race, the whole country believed in white supremacy, save
a handful of racial egalitarians, but they were an extremely rare find.
Aside from Lincoln’s
oft-quoted racist views, the examples of Northern bigotry are numerous:
The French traveler
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s that racial prejudice was stronger
in the North than in the South. “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger
in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists;
and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never
been known.”
Republican Leland
Stanford, who, as a wealthy railroad magnate began Stanford University, said in
1859 in his campaign for governor of California, “The cause in which we are
engaged is one of the greatest in which any can labor. It is the cause of the
white man…I am in favor of free white American citizens. I prefer free white
citizens to any other race. I prefer the white man to the negro as an
inhabitant to our country. I believe its greatest good has been derived by
having all of the country settled by free white men.”
Republican Senator
Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, a good friend of Lincoln, also labeled the GOP a
party for whites. “We the Republican party, are the white man’s party. We
are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable,
which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with
it.” He also said, “There is a very great aversion in the West – I know it to
be so in my State – against having free negroes come among us. Our people want
nothing to do with the negro.”
Republican Senator
John Sherman of Ohio said on the Senate floor in 1862, “In the State where I
live we do not like negroes. We do not disguise our dislike.” Sherman also
admitted that the creation of a national bank was a greater cause than freeing
the slaves and to have the former he would gladly give up the latter.
Republican William H.
Seward, who would become Lincoln’s Secretary of State, said while still in the
US Senate, “The motive of those who protested against the extension of slavery
had always really been concern for the welfare of the white man, and not an
unnatural sympathy for the Negro.”
New York Senator John
Dix, who was a Democrat but became a Republican and served as a general in the
war, and was later honored with the naming of Fort Dix, said in 1848 during a
Senate debate over slavery in the territories that “free blacks would continue
to be an inferior cast and simply die out.”
Hearing Dix’s
remarks, a slaveholding Democratic Senator from Mississippi named Jefferson Davis
rose to counter his colleague:
With surprise and
horror I heard this announcement of a policy which seeks, through poverty and
degradation, the extinction of a race of human beings domesticated among us.
We, sir, stand in such a relation to that people as creates a feeling of
kindness and protection. We have attachments which have grown with us from
childhood – to the old servant who nursed us in infancy, to the man who was the
companion of our childhood, and the not less tender regard for those who have
been reared under our protection. To hear their extinction treated as a matter
of public policy or of speculative philosophy arouses our sympathy and our
indignation.
And it was because of
the racist attitudes prevailing in the North that segregation pervaded that
region throughout the 19th century and into the next. As C. Vann
Woodward has written in his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, it was
the North that began segregation, not the South. “One of the strangest things
about the career of Jim Crow,” he writes, “was that the system was born in the
North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force.” By contrast,
the South’s slave society by its very nature was integrated.
D’Souza credits
Republicans for launching what he calls the “original civil rights revolution”
in the 1860s and 1870s. At the end of the war, the Thirteenth Amendment
abolishing slavery garnered 100 percent Republican support, he reminds us, but
just 23 percent from Democrats. Congress then passed the Fourteenth Amendment in
1866 to overturn Dred Scott and grant citizenship to blacks, with
exclusive Republican support and not a single vote from Democrats.
The Fifteenth
Amendment, which would grant voting rights to black men, passed in 1868 by a
vote of 39 to 13 in the Senate, with all 39 coming from Republicans, while all
13 “no” votes came from Democrats. But D’Souza never mentions the significant
fact that most Northern states prohibited black voting, even during the same
period of Reconstruction when Congress was imposing it on the South, first with
the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, then the Fifteenth Amendment. In fact, only a
few Northern states allowed blacks to vote, and in the same year that the South
was being forced to grant voting rights to male freed slaves, the Northern
states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Connecticut rejected proposals to grant
voting rights to black men.
D’Souza also cites
Southern Democrats for their “infamous Black Codes,” approved by whites-only
state legislatures and state constitutional conventions to greatly restrict the
rights of newly freed slaves.
Fairly typical is the
code Democrats adopted in South Carolina. Blacks were permitted to work only in
certain professions, thus granting whites a labor monopoly in the remaining
ones. White masters could whip young black servants. Blacks could not travel
freely; if they did, they ran the risk of being declared “vagrants” in which
case they could be arrested and imprisoned. Sheriffs could then assign hard
labor or hire them out to white employers to work off their sentence. Black
children could be apprenticed to white employers against their will.
Blacks were also
prohibited from serving on juries, voting, carrying firearms, selling alcohol,
or marrying whites. “Indignant at what they perceived as a southern Democratic
attempt to nullify emancipation, Republicans struck down the Black Codes and
began the process of Reconstruction,” a plan “aimed at rebuilding the South on
a new plane of equality of rights between the races,” writes D’Souza.
But absent D’Souza’s
polemic is another crucial fact: the North also had their own version of black
codes which, in many cases, were worse than their Southern counterparts. In
fact, Professor Tom Woods, in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to
American History, states that the harsh Jim Crow laws were modeled after
the Northern black codes.
Of these severe
Northern “black laws” Robert Self Henry wrote that “there was hardly a feature
of the apprenticeship and vagrancy acts of Mississippi, and of the other Southern
states, which was not substantially duplicated in some of these Northern laws,
while many of the Northern provisions were more harsh in their terms than
anything proposed in the South.” Black vagrants in many Northern states could
get anywhere from ninety days to three years in prison.
Free blacks were also
prohibited from residing in several Northern states and, in the case of
Lincoln’s Illinois, migrant blacks, as well as those who brought them into the
state, faced stiff punishment, including whippings or being hired out as a
laborer for a year. And it was not until the end of the war that the law
forbidding free blacks from residing in the Land of Lincoln was repealed, an
act that fined free blacks fifty dollars if caught in the state. It should be
noted that Lincoln himself supported these Illinois black codes.
As for the
often-cited votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 78 percent of House
Democrats supported it, while 73 percent of Senate Democrats did. But the
percentages were higher among Republicans, and LBJ did credit Everett Dirksen
and the GOP with pushing it over the top, which has given modern pundits all
the political fodder they need.
. . .
Source: Ryan Walters, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/party-truths/,
opened 5 Sept. 2017
We
don’t have any particular axe to grind with Mr D’Souza. He seems to be your typical Washington City
insider, having worked in the Reagan administration. But we do hope he will restrain himself from
lying about the South and the North in the days ahead.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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