A Teachable Moment: Dinesh Dsouza Refuses To Take Back False Claim About Republicans Owning Slaves In 1860
– See below the post for an update.
For Dinesh D’Souza watchers, this headline is as shocking as proclaiming that water is wet. I post this incident because it is a clear and convincing demonstration that D’Souza shows zero interest in academic integrity. Let me lay out the basics. First, D’Souza claimed in a speech that no Republican owned slaves in 1860. Here is the speech:
Do you know how many Republicans owned slaves in 1860, the year before the Civil War started?
The answer may surprise you if you listen to progressive historians.
— Dinesh D’Souza June 10, 2019
He said one Republican who owned a slave in 1860 would require him to take back his claim.
Historians on Twitter, led by Princeton’s Kevin Kruse, quickly rose to the occasion and found ten. Follow the thread below for the receipts.
We’ve provided clear evidence that at least ten Republicans owned slaves in 1860, and yet D’Souza keeps retweeting this video insisting there weren’t any and promising he’d “take it back” if anyone proved otherwise.https://t.co/rbLnQDdMCM
— Kevin M. Kruse June 10, 2019
To go directly to the thread with the breakdown of the ten found thus far, .
In essence, the method of finding Republican slave owners involves an examination of those who attended the Republican convention as delegates and then comparing that list with registries of slave owners.
For his part, D’Souza said the instances offered by the historians are “invalid” and he repeated his claim this morning.
Horace Greeley Proceedings Of The First Three Republican National Conventions Of 1856 1860 And 1864 78
Kim Kardashian Talks Kanye West’s Twitter Return Says He Played Connect Four During Chicago’s Birth
Again, that’s a very simplified version of the story, but that’s the gist of it. You should also check out John Legend’s version of the story — equally helpful, and apparently already shaping Ye’s political awakening.
Now if Kanye slides into G-Chat with Michael Bay, maybe he’ll be convinced the Transformers also helped end slavery.
The Claim: Historians Do Not Teach That The First Black Members Of Congress Were Republicans
A viral meme, posted on Instagram, features a well-known lithograph of the first Black members of Congress, with a bold statement.
“History not taught,” it says. “The first 23 Black congressmen were Republican.”
“You won’t be taught this,” wrote Ryan Fournier, the co-chair of Students for Trump, whose watermark appears on the meme, on his Instagram account. “The Republicans were the anti-slavery party.”
It is mostly accurate that the Republican Party formed to oppose the extension of slavery, although up until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans pledged not to interfere with slavery in states where it existed. And the first 23 African Americans in Congress did belong to the Republican Party, due to the GOP’s support of voting rights and the Democratic Party’s embrace of white supremacy.
But the idea that Reconstruction-era historians hid those facts – key to understanding the period – is false.
“This is just front and center in what we teach all the time,” said Kate Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern University who has written extensively about Reconstruction. “It’s not a big secret.”
A message seeking comment was sent to Fournier on Wednesday.
Fact check:Photo shows Biden with Byrd, who once had ties to KKK, but wasn’t a grand wizard
Republicans Revise The History Of Slavery To Make Themselves The Party Of Equal Rights
Historical revisionism is a Republican and religious right practice regarding the illegitimate distortion of the historical record so certain events appear in a more favorable light to substantiate their backward positions. One of the most recent phenomena in revisionist history is the insane notion that the Founding Fathers were directed by god to form America as a Christian nation, and that when he wrote the U.S. Constitution he told them there was no need for a federal government because states were the supreme law of the land. Recently, a staunch religious right conservative attempted to revise history again and asserted that people of faith are the true advocates for equal rights to bolster his claim there is no need for a federal government to ensure every American is treated the same.
The stealth reason for the Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence was to position the slave holder dominated Continental Congress as central to the rebellion, and the major form of independence they were seeking was independence from the British legal system, foremost because of the Somersett Decision in 1772 by British Law Lord Mansfield in which he declared that any person/human being setting foot upon English soil would have the full rights and privileges of a native born Englishman. Look it up.
Republican Elites Try To Back Immigration Reform But Get Backlash From Their Voters
After the 2012 election, Republican leaders began to view the demographic changes in the country as a political crisis for their party. When Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency, he got blown out among Hispanic voters — exit polls showed that 71 percent of them backed Barack Obama.
With Hispanic voters becoming a larger share of the electorate every year, GOP elites feared their chances of winning back the presidency would plummet. Their party looked like a party for white voters in an increasingly nonwhite country.
So they came up with a plan. The party would change its tone on immigration, adopting more tolerant rhetoric, and it would also embrace immigration reform. In the Senate in 2013, old hands like John McCain and rising stars like Marco Rubio collaborated with Democrats on a bill that would give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal status.
The final Senate roll call vote was 68-32 — with all 32 no votes, plus 14 yes votes, coming from Republicans. But a huge backlash from the Republican Party’s predominantly white base, which views the bill as “amnesty” for people who broke the rules, ensued. As a result, the bill died in the House of Representatives, never even being brought for a vote.
What Matters: Yes Republicans Freed The Slaves They Were Not These Republicans
Republicans tried to claim their political ancestors at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, casting back to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, to argue they deserve more credit from Black voters.
The problem is that the Republicans and the politics of 1860 bear almost zero resemblance to the Republicans of today.
Back then, Republicans were, generally, a party of Northerners and Democrats were, generally, the party of the South.
Today, it’s pretty much the opposite.
Back then, a Republican President, Lincoln, tried to hold the union together after Southern states, led by Democrats, seceded.
How Republicans Made Common Cause With Southern Democrats On Economic Matters
Map: Vox. Data: Barry Hirsch, David Macpherson, Wayne Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State.”
Roosevelt’s reforms also brought tensions in the Democratic coalition to the surface, as the solidly Democratic South wasn’t too thrilled with the expansion of unions or federal power generally. As the years went on, Southern Democrats increasingly made common cause with the Republican Party to try to block any further significant expansions of government or worker power.
“In 1947, confirming a new alliance that would recast American politics for the next two generations, Taft men began to work with wealthy southern Democrats who hated the New Deal’s civil rights legislation and taxes,” Cox Richardson writes. This new alliance was cemented with the Taft-Hartley bill, which permitted states to pass right-to-work laws preventing mandatory union membership among employees — and many did.
Taft-Hartley “stopped labor dead in its tracks at a point where unions were large, growing, and confident in their economic and political power,” Rich Yeselson has written. You can see the eventual effects above — pro-Democratic unions were effectively blocked from gaining a foothold in the South and interior West, and the absence of their power made those regions more promising for Republicans’ electoral prospects.
Usmb: Where Did The Conservative Republicans Who Freed The Slaves Come From
- Thread starterrdean
Zone 2″: Political Forum / Israel and Palestine Forum / Race Relations/Racism Forum / Religion & Ethics Forum / Environment Forum: Baiting and polarizing OP’s , and thread titles risk the thread either being moved or trashed. Keep it relevant, choose wisely. Each post must contain content relevant to the thread subject, in addition to any flame. No trolling. No hit and run flames. No hijacking or derailing threads.
Again and again I’ve heard USMB Republicans insist it was liberal Democrats who kept slaves in the south and it was conservative Republicans who marched into the south and freed the slaves.It was liberal Democrats who started the KKK.Lincoln was a conservative Republican.Now, even though Republicans say President Obama is a Marxist, communist, liberal, fascist, Kenyan, Mau Mau, man child, boi who is so weak and girly he has become a strong arm monarch like totalitarian dictator, some, a few, realize he can’t be all those things at once.Do they really believe conservative Republicans marched into the deep south and freed the slaves? You bet your 6,000 year history of the universe they do.But how is that possible? We refer to the North as the “liberal north”. So where did all those conservative Republicans come from?I’m fascinated by Right Wing history. Perhaps USMB Confederate Republicans who freed the slaves could explain their involvement in the Civil War and it’s “true” history. Educate me. I’m all “ears”.
After The War Radical Republicans Fight For Rights For Black Americans
When states ratified the 14th Amendment. Republicans required some Southern states to ratify it to be readmitted to the Union.
For a very brief period after the end of the Civil War, Republicans truly fought for the rights of black Americans. Frustrated by reports of abuses of and violence against former slaves in the postwar South, and by the inaction of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a faction known as the Radicals gained increasing sway in Congress.
The Radicals drove Republicans to pass the country’s first civil rights bill in 1866, and to fight for voting rights for black men at a time when such an idea was still controversial even in the North.
Furthermore, Republicans twice managed to amend the Constitution, so that it now stated that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, that all citizens should have equal protection of the law, and that the right to vote couldn’t be denied because of race. And they required Southern states to legally enact many of these ideas — at least in principle — to be readmitted to the Union.
These are basic bedrocks of our society today, but at the time they were truly radical. Just a few years earlier, the idea that a major party would fight for the rights of black citizens to vote in state elections would have been unthinkable.
Unfortunately, however, this newfound commitment wouldn’t last for much longer.
Black People Kept Civil Rights At Gop Forefront In Late 19th Century
African Americans remained active in the Republican Party and, for a time, kept voting and civil rights at the forefront of the party’s agenda. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act in 1883, several Northern state governments controlled by Republicans created their own civil rights laws. John W.E. Thomas, a former enslaved person who was the first African American elected to the Illinois General Assembly, introduced the 1885 Illinois Civil Rights Act.
But white Southern intransigence made it impossible to enact any meaningful protections at the federal level. That, combined with the rise of a new generation of white Republicans more interested in big business than racial equality, cooled GOP ardor for Black civil rights.
“Republicans started taking the Black vote for granted, and the Republicans were always divided,” Foner said. “There were those who said, ‘We’ve really got to defend the Black vote in the South.’ And others said ‘No, no, we’ve got to appeal to the business-minded voter in South as the party of business, the party of growth.’”
Fact check:Devastating 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre wasn’t worst U.S. riot, isn’t ignored in books
The Great Migration of African Americans from the South, which began just before the United States’ entry into World War I, brought many Black people into cities where they could vote freely and put them in touch with local Democratic organizations that slowly realized the potential of the Black vote.
Kanye West Doubles Down On Pres Trump Support: ‘he Is My Brother’
So when did things start to change? When Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat from New York, instituted the New Deal to fight the Great Depression in the 1930s, the parties shifted in a big way. The Democratic Party were now supporting a movement marked by mass job creation, checks on big business, and overall workers’ rights. Those are all “big government” sorts of things, which shook the Democrats from their roots.
In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, wanted to pass sweeping civil rights legislation , including the end of segregation in the South. After his assassination, Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. This was essentially the final nail in the coffin; the majority of white Southerners — resistant to the changes enacted by the Civil Rights Act — abandoned the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party, establishing a link between big business favoritism and backwoods racism that endures to this day.
Yes Republicans Freed The Slaves They Were Not These Republicans
Republican Partyracismcivil rightspolitical historyDemocratic PartyDonald Trump
– Republicans tried to claim their political ancestors at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, casting back to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, to argue they deserve more credit from Black voters.
The problem is that the Republicans and the politics of 1860 bear almost zero resemblance to the Republicans of today.
Back then, Republicans were, generally, a party of Northerners and Democrats were, generally, the party of the South.
Today, it’s pretty much the opposite.
Back then, a Republican President, Lincoln, tried to hold the union together after Southern states, led by Democrats, seceded.
The Clinton Years And The Congressional Ascendancy: 19922000
Newt GingrichHouse SpeakerBill Clinton
After the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992, the Republican Party, led by House Minority WhipNewt Gingrich campaigning on a “Contract with America“, were elected to majorities to both Houses of Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994. It was the first time since 1952 that the Republicans secured control of both houses of U.S. Congress, which with the exception of the Senate during 2001–2002 was retained through 2006. This capture and subsequent holding of Congress represented a major legislative turnaround, as Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for the forty years preceding 1995, with the exception of the 1981–1987 Congress in which Republicans controlled the Senate.
In 1994, Republican Congressional candidates ran on a platform of major reforms of government with measures such as a balanced budget amendment and welfare reform. These measures and others formed the famous Contract with America, which represented the first effort to have a party platform in an off-year election. The Contract promised to bring all points up for a vote for the first time in history. The Republicans passed some of their proposals, but failed on others such as term limits.
Pietistic Republicans Versus Liturgical Democrats: 18901896
Voting behavior by religion, Northern U.S. late 19th century| % Dem | |
|---|---|
| 90 | 10 |
From 1860 to 1912, the Republicans took advantage of the association of the Democrats with “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Rum stood for the liquor interests and the tavernkeepers, in contrast to the GOP, which had a strong dry element. “Romanism” meant Roman Catholics, especially Irish Americans, who ran the Democratic Party in every big city and whom the Republicans denounced for political corruption. “Rebellion” stood for the Democrats of the Confederacy, who tried to break the Union in 1861; and the Democrats in the North, called “Copperheads,” who sympathized with them.
Demographic trends aided the Democrats, as the German and Irish Catholic immigrants were Democrats and outnumbered the English and Scandinavian Republicans. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Republicans struggled against the Democrats’ efforts, winning several close elections and losing two to Grover Cleveland .
Religious lines were sharply drawn. Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Scandinavian Lutherans and other pietists in the North were tightly linked to the GOP. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians and German Lutherans, looked to the Democratic Party for protection from pietistic moralism, especially prohibition. Both parties cut across the class structure, with the Democrats more bottom-heavy.
On This Day The Republican Party Names Its First Candidates
On July 6, 1854, disgruntled voters in a new political party named its first candidates to contest the Democrats over the issue of slavery. Within six and one-half years, the newly christened Republican Party would control the White House and Congress as the Civil War began.
For a brief time in the decade before the Civil War, the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and his descendants enjoyed a period of one-party rule. The Democrats had battled the Whigs for power since 1836 and lost the presidency in 1848 to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor. After Taylor died in office in 1850, it took only a few short years for the Whig Party to collapse dramatically.
There are at least three dates recognized in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, built from the ruins of the Whigs. The first is February 24, 1854, when a small group met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to discuss its opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The group called themselves Republicans in reference to Thomas Jefferson’s Republican faction in the American republic’s early days. Another meeting was held on March 20, 1854, also in Ripon, where 53 people formally recognized the movement within Wisconsin.
On July 6, 1854, a much-bigger meeting in Jackson, Michigan was attended by about 10,000 people and is considered by many as the official start of the organized Republican Party. By the end of the gathering, the Republicans had compiled a full slate of candidates to run in Michigan’s elections.
The Republican Party Was Founded To Oppose The Slave Power
For the first half-century after the United States’ founding, slavery was only one of many issues in the country’s politics, and usually a relatively minor issue at that. The American South based its economy on the enslavement of millions, and the two major parties — which by the 1850s were the Democrats and the Whigs — were willing to let the Southern states be.
But when the US started admitting more and more Western states to the Union, the country had to decide whether those new states should allow slavery or not. And this was an enormously consequential question, because the more slave states there were, the easier it would be for the slaveholding states to get their way in the Senate and the Electoral College.
Now, the issue here wasn’t that Northern politicians were desperate to abolish slavery in the South immediately, apart from a few radical crusaders. The real concern was that Northerners feared the “Slave Power” — the South — would become a cabal that would utterly dominate US politics, instituting slavery wherever they could and cutting off opportunity for free white laborers, as historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in her book .
The Republican Party Becomes The Party Of Rich Northerners
All this while, economic issues were growing more important to Republican politicians. Even before the Civil War, the North was more industrialized than the South, as you can see from this map of railway lines. After it, this industrialization only intensified.
And during the war, the federal government grew a lot bigger and spent a lot more money — and that meant people got rich, and owed their wealth to Republican politicians. The party’s economic policies, Cox Richardson writes, “were creating a class of extremely wealthy men.”
Gradually, those wealthy financiers and industrialists took more and more of a leading role in the Republican Party. They disagreed on many issues, but their interests — rather than the interests of black Southerners — increasingly started to become the party’s raison d’etre.
Juneteenth The Day Republicans Freed The Democrats Slaves
Our history and our heritage are being shoved by rioters, looters, and anarchists down the memory hole. This is year zero on their calendar. Everything that came before and every struggle for freedom and human dignity by patriots of all colors is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is now. The only thing that matters is what they tell you. How we got here and what makes us who and what we are may not be pretty or politically correct but it is important. We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t remember where we’ve been.
The canceling of American history by anarchists, encouraged by cowering Democratic governors and mayors is necessary if they intend on propagating the lie that America is and always has been irredeemably racist. The Republicans are labeled white supremacists and it’s being pushed that only liberal progressive Democrats can create social justice, which means the absence of resistance to groups like Black Lives Matter, which among other goodies on its website endorses the elimination of the nuclear family. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with the progressive police state they are hoping to establish on Nov. 3, 2020.
The day after Sen. Elizabeth Warren was rebuked while making a speech critical of Sen. Jeff Sessions , Sen. Ted Cruz blasted Democrats, saying their party is the one rooted in racism.
He also happens to be a former card-carrying member of the KKK. In fact, he created his own chapter along with 150 of his friends and colleagues.
The Obama Years And The Rise Of The Tea Party: 20082016
John BoehnerHouse SpeakerBarack Obama
Following the 2008 elections, the Republican Party, reeling from the loss of the presidency, Congress and key state governorships, was fractured and leaderless.Michael Steele became the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, but was a poor fundraiser and was replaced after numerous gaffes and missteps. Republicans suffered an additional loss in the Senate in April 2009, when Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic Party, depriving the GOP of a critical 41st vote to block legislation in the Senate. The seating of Al Franken several months later effectively handed the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, but it was short-lived as the GOP took back its 41st vote when Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in early 2010.
Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives in the November general election, with a net gain of 63 seats, the largest gain for either party since 1948. The GOP also picked up six seats in the Senate, falling short of retaking control in that chamber, and posted additional gains in state governor and legislative races. Boehner became Speaker of the House while McConnell remained as the Senate Minority Leader. In an interview with National Journal magazine about congressional Republican priorities, McConnell explained that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for Obama to be a one-term president”.
Juneteenth Recalling End Of Slavery Is Marked Across Us
Selena Quinn, from left, LaVon Fisher-Wilson and Traci Coleman perform during a free outdoor event organized by The Broadway League as Juneteenth’s celebrations take place at Times Square Saturday, June 19, 2021, in New York.
Parades, picnics and lessons in history were offered Saturday to commemorate Juneteenth in the U.S., a day that carried even more significance after Congress and President Joe Biden created a federal holiday to observe the end of slavery.
Political Parties And A Complicated History With Race
Black people who could vote tended to support the Republican Party from the 1860s to about the mid-1930s. There were push-and-pull aspects to this. Republicans pledged to protect voting rights. African Americans viewed the party as the only vessel for their goals: Frederick Douglass said, “The Republican Party is the ship; all else is the sea.”
And the sea was perilous. The Democratic Party for most of the 19th century was a white supremacist organization that gave no welcome to Black Americans. A conservative group of politicians known as the Bourbons controlled Southern Democratic parties. For instance, well into the 20th century, the official name of Alabama’s dominant organization was the Democratic and Conservative Party of Alabama.
Fact check:U.S. didn’t reject an earlier version of Statue of Liberty that honored slaves
The Bourbons called their Republican opponents “radicals,” whether they warranted the label or not, Masur said.
“The Democrats were often called conservative and embraced that label,” she said. “Many of them were conservative in the sense that they wanted things to be like they were in the past, especially as far as race was concerned.”
“In consequence of this intolerance, colored men are forced to vote for the candidate of the Republican Party, however objectionable to them some of these candidates may be, unless they are prevented from doing so by violence and intimidation,” he said.
Never Trumpers Will Want To Read This History Lesson
In the 1850s, disaffected Democrats made the wrenching choice to leave their party to save American democracy. Here’s what happened.
Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, is the author of . Follow him @joshuamzeitz.
“I was educated a Democrat from my boyhood,� a Republican delegate confided to his colleagues at Iowa’s constitutional convention in 1857. “Faithfully, I did adhere to that party until I could no longer act with it. Many things did I condemn ere I left that party, for my love of party was strong. And when I did, at last, feel compelled to separate from my old Democratic friends, it was like tearing myself away from old home associations.�
As often seems the case today, American politics in the 1850s were nearly all-consuming and stubbornly tribal. So it was hard—and bitterly so—for hundreds of thousands of Northern Democrats to abandon the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy.
Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts.
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Republican Voters Turn Against Their Partys Elites
Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights
The Tea Party movement, which sprang into existence in the early years of the Obama administration, was many things. It was partly about opposing Obama’s economic policies — foreclosure relief, tax increases, and health reform. It was partly about opposing immigration — when Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson interviewed Tea Party activists across the nation, they found that “immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern” those activists expressed.
But the Tea Party also was a challenge to the Republican Party establishment. Several times, these groups helped power little-known far-right primary contenders to shocking primary wins over establishment Republican politicians deemed to be sellouts. Those candidates didn’t always win office, but their successful primary bids certainly struck fear into the hearts of many other GOP incumbents, and made many of them more deferential to the concerns of conservative voters.
Furthermore, many Republican voters also came to believe, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, that their party’s national leaders tended to sell them out at every turn.
Talk radio and other conservative media outlets helped stoke this perception, and by May 2015 Republican voters were far more likely to say that their party’s politicians were doing a poor job representing their views than Democratic voters were.
Compensated Emancipation: Buy Out The Slave Owners
The thirteenth amendment to abolish slavery, which Lincoln ultimately sent to the states provided no compensation but earlier in his presidency, Lincoln made numerous proposals for “compensated emancipation” in the loyal border states whereby the federal government would purchase all of the slaves and free them. No state government acted on the proposal.
President Lincoln advocated that slave owners be compensated for emancipated slaves. On March 6, 1862 President Lincoln, in a message to the U.S. Congress, stated that emancipating slaves would create economic “inconveniences” and justified compensation to the slave owners. The resolution was adopted by Congress; however, the Southern states refused to comply. On July 12, 1862 President Lincoln, in a conference with Congressmen from Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri, encouraged their respective states to adopt emancipation legislation that gave compensation to the slave owners. On July 14, 1862 President Lincoln sent a bill to Congress that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds at 6% interest to states for slave emancipation compensation to the slave owners. The bill was never voted on by Congress.
In his December 1, 1862 State of the Union Address, Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment that would provide federal compensation to any state that voluntarily abolished slavery before the year 1900.