Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Read Free Page A

it was also good for the slaves.
    Today progressive pundits attempt to conceal Democratic complicity in slavery by blaming slavery on the “South.” These people have spun a whole history that portrays the slavery battle as one between the anti-slavery North and the pro-slavery South. This of course benefits Democrats today, because today the Democratic Party’s main strength is in the North and the Republican Party’s main strength is in the South.
    But I blow the Democrats’ cover by showing that the slavery debate was not mainly a North-South issue. It was actually a contest between the pro-slavery Democrats and the anti-slavery Republicans. How can I make such an outrageous statement? Let’s begin by recalling that northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas protected slavery, while most southerners didn’t own slaves. (Three fourths of those who fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side had no slaves and weren’t fighting to protect slavery.)
    Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery. Of course there werea range of views among Republicans, from abolitionists who sought to end slavery immediately to mainstream Republicans like Abraham Lincoln who recognized that this was both constitutionally and politically impossible and focused on arresting slavery’s extension into the new territories. This was the platform on which Lincoln won the 1860 election.
    The real clash was between the Democrats, northern and southern, who supported slavery and the Republicans across the country who opposed it. As Lincoln summarized it in his First Inaugural Address, one side believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, and the other believes it is wrong and ought to be restricted. “This,” Lincoln said, “is the only substantial dispute.” 10 And this, ultimately, was what the Civil War was all about.
    In the end, of course, Republicans ended slavery and permanently outlawed it through the Thirteenth Amendment. Democrats responded by opposing the amendment and a group of them assassinated the man they held responsible for emancipation, Abraham Lincoln. Over the Democrats’ opposition, Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving blacks the right to vote.
    DEFENDING THE CRIMINALS
    Confronted with these facts, progressives act like the lawyer who is presented with the murder weapon belonging to his client. Darn, he says to himself, I better think fast. “Yes,” he now admits, “my client did murder the clerk and rob the store. But he didn’t kill all those other people who were also found dead at the scene.”
    In other words, progressives who are forced to acknowledge the Democratic Party’s pro-slavery history promptly respond, “We admit to being the party of slavery, and we did uphold the institution for more than a century, but slavery ended in 1865, so all of this was such a long time ago. You can’t blame us now for the antebellum crimes of the Democratic Party.”
    Yes, but what about the postbellum crimes of the Democratic Party? My slavery chapter is followed by a chapter on segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats in the 1880s invented segregation and Jim Crow laws that lasted through the 1960s. Democrats also came up with the “separate but equal” rationale that justified segregation and pretended that it was for the benefit of African Americans.
    The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
    The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for