Major Republican leaders who supported segregation: Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott.
Major Republican leaders who opposed Civil Rights laws: Ronald Reagan, George Bush pere, Barry Goldwater.
You can’t very well vote for someone who’s against your having the right to vote in the first place.
About Reagan and Bush: by the 1970s, both had changed their minds about their opposition to the civil rights acts of the 1960s, and admitted they were wrong. In both cases, though, their original oppositions were not racial positions but positions on the powers of the federal government.
As for Barry Goldwater, he did vote against the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but note what an FBI memo from 1953 said about the young senator: “The Progressive Party might influence Senator-elect Goldwater and cause him to support the program and aspirations of the Progressive Party since he was supported by a large percentage of Negro people in the Phoenix area.”
Goldwater never missed an opportunity to say that he felt the goal of the Civil Rights legislation was beyond reproach. His opposition to the legislation stemmed from his fundamental belief in restricting the size, scope, and reach of federal power.
Before my post was eaten by the frickin’ server when I posted yesterday, I pointed out that one of the biggest reasons emancipartion, slow as it was, went off so smoothly and at all was that the CSA lost badly. The South American slave-holders could read English newspapers and their own well enough. Theys aw the kill counts. They did not want to become fodder for another Covil War, this time in Brazil, or Columbia, or whereever.
There is a distinct possiility that slavery would still be there today, if the Civil war had not taken place, or if the South had won. Particularly so if it were at a Northern Concession.
No, I find this to be totally false.
There were very small numbers of illegally imported slaves, but the amount was trivial. Slave population growth came from the existing population of America. And it didn’t grow at all like the massively one-sided populations of Barbados, Haiti, or some former African colonies.
Many slaves did have skills and such, but it didn’t force out existing craftsmen and so forth. The use of slave labor for repetitive factory work is a strong possibility, in the somewhat rural South. Yet the South wasn’t looking to indistrialize, and slaves already did some of these tasks. The South nevertheless offered many opportunities for Whites. People weren’t emigrating to the North then, and if anything, whites would have been less welcome in the immigrant-heavy and job-short North.
You need much, much more evidence for this.
True, it was under LBJ, but if you accept the adage that “all politics is local” then the vote breakdown on the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have had the opposite affect:
In the US Senate:[ul][li]82% Republican Support (27/33)[]69% Democrat Support (46/67)[/ul][/li]In the US House of Representitives:[ul][]80% Republican Support (138/172)61% Democrat Support (152/248)[/ul]
In 1960 Nixon and Kennedy were fairly even in Black support until Martin luther king was jailed udring a Civil Rights protest. Kennedy publicly supported King, Nixon did not. That and Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights bills of the time were enough to generate mistrust among the African-American community, which was proven when Nixon enacted his “Southern strategy” in 1968.
The likelihood that slavery could still exist today, anywhere in the Americas is about zero. It ended everywhere else, and it would’ve ended in the South, eventually, for the same reasons.
In the long run, the South would have industrialized or found itself left behind, weak and impoverished.
It’s clear that in cities like Charleston and New Orleans, white artisans felt threatened by slave artisans, whose skills were often rented out by their masters. White artisans made the exclusion of slave workers a key demand in the nascent labor movement. It’s also clear that immigrant artisans, especially Germans, specificly avoided the South because so much of its labor force was not free.
As to the illegal slave trade, we can’t really be sure what the numbers were. The trade was, of neccessity, secret. The slave holding upper classes didn’t uniformly oppose re-opening the slave trade, in fact, some of them advocated re-opening it. An unknown number participated in the illegal trade.
No longer facing Northern opposition, the Southern slave holders could renew the trade to their economic advantage. Free labor would become less and less competitive, and society’s wealth concentrated in a small number of large holders. A handful of rich whites, a large number of poor blacks, with perhaps a small, mixed race artisan class.
Sen. Robert Byrd is from West Virginia not Virginia.