Why was the mid to late 19th century Democratic party (apparently) so racist and equivocal (at best) on the issue of outlawing slavery?
This page, its hyperbolic presentation notwithstanding, enumerates many instances of what can only be called racism originating in, and permeating through, the 19th century Democratic Party. I will assume that what is listed there is, by and large, factually correct. If you know that not to be the case, please do elaborate.
Bottom line is that it seems as if there was not only an absence of a strong anti-slavery sentiment in the 19th century Democratic Party, but there was, quite separately, an overt and unapologetic racist core.
Was this simply the price to be paid for allegiance to, and advocacy of, ‘States Rights’? Did the Democrats tolerate, or even, condone slavery and unmitigated racism simply to uphold the rights of the several states to control their own destinies? Or, were there other reasons and rationales for the Party to embrace such abhorrent positions and views?
“States Rights” is nothing but window dressing for slavery and racial discrimination.
I’m not entirely sure what your question is. The (southern wing of the) Democratic Party was a pro-slavery party because its members were pro-slavery.
Major American political parties are not top-down organizations. They don’t determine the party’s policies at the top and wait for people to sign on to them. The party’s policies are the policies that are supported by the people who support the party.
Republicans used to be the liberal party, the Democrats the conservatives. That link is nothing more than trying to condemn modern liberals using their origins over a hundred and fifty years ago
The Democratic Party by the time of the Civil War had already broken into a northern and a southern wing. Obviously, the Southern wing existed to preserve slavery and, post-war, to preserve white dominance. The northern wing wasn’t especially pro-black, but hardly anybody in the entire United States outside of a handful of abolitionists were.
The winner-take-all system in the U.S. means that third parties are unstable. Their issues will either be taken up by a majority party or they will vanish. After the war, the two halves of the Democrats united to be the opposition party to the Republicans. This was an odd pairing: the northern wing tended to be ethnics and immigrants in large urban areas who banded together to form political machines while the southern wing remained rural and nativist. They didn’t have much success putting together a coalition that could win the Presidency - only Cleveland and Wilson won between 1868 and 1932 - but they could dominate individual states and so maintain a rough equality in Congress and that was sufficient to keep them together. The terms liberal and conservative as we use them today don’t have much meaning at all in the 19th century.
So it’s true that the Southern wing of the Democratic Party did all the awful things toward blacks that are listed in your link. But it’s also true that it was the Democratic Party that led the battle for Civil Rights in the 1960s. This is where reality stops:
The Southern Strategy was for Republicans to adopt all the Democrats who break with the party over Civil Rights. There is no getting around it. The Republicans didn’t have to do this; they did so knowingly and for short-term political advantage. Now they are stuck with the consequences.
Fact is, anti-black racism is firmly rooted in our history. While some people saw black slavery as a moral evil, for the most part, it was readily accepted by white society, regardless of what we now call party affiliation.
I still don’t understand why the ‘northern wing’ of the party would have been so obstructionist to the 13th amendment, i.e. wasn’t Democratic opposition to the amendment “coordinated” and zealously championed by representatives from New York and New Jersey?
Why are the Republicans so obstructive to the Democrats today?
The Democrats actually had more cause then. The entire prosecution of the war had pitted the Republicans against all opposition. Anti-war sentiment could literally get you jailed. As stated in the Lincoln movie, which I assume you’re making some reference to, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, closed newspapers, jailed subversives, and generally behaved as all wartime presidents do. Why should the Democrats support anything he wanted? Ending slavery wasn’t a principle of the party before the war; it wasn’t anything any segment of the public wanted except for the Radical Republicans. Despite what Lincoln is given to say in the movie, it wasn’t going to end the war even one day sooner. New York City was one of the centers of anti-war sentiment and virulent black bigotry. The draft riots of 1863 were so vicious that troops had to be brought in from Gettysburg to subdue the mostly Irish mobs who hated blacks as competitors. It was the center for southern plots against the union. That was the Democratic constituency. They had every possible reason to obstruct.
Today’s obstructionism is rooted in the basics of electoral politics. The Republicans who are staunchly resisting compromise in the current setting are those who were elected to take precisely that approach. They are not concerned with the larger issues, but rather, with their own continuing membership in the “deliberative” body. As Nate Silver said just today, “One of the firmest conclusions of academic research into the behavior of Congress is that what motivates members first and foremost is winning elections.” They are voting the way their constituencies want them to.
Well, mostly yes. States’ Rights was at that time 98% about a State’s right to maintain slavery. But in northern and especially border states that were not dependent on slavery, therefore not as devoted to racism, the issue of States’ Rights was a fundamental one. The United States was formed by armed revolution against a strong central power, as such before the Civil War we were more of a loose confederation of independent states. Whenever you read about military units in The Civil and The Revolutionary Wars it’s always *"The 22[sup]nd[/sup] **Massachusetts *or the 11[sup]th[/sup] Virginia" etc. IOW people totally identified with their state, much more so than this somewhat ethereal concept of The United States of America. Slavery was the catalyst, but the real issue was to what degree could a Federal Govt impose its will on individual states. Lincoln himself said that if preserving the Union “…meant freeing all the slaves, or freeing some of them, or none of them, I would do it”. Although I firmly believe that in his heart Lincoln felt that slavery was evil, I also don’t doubt for a second that he also felt, just as deeply, that blacks were an inferior race. Back then it was just plain common sense. I also firmly believe that the morality of The Emancipation Proclamation was very much second to its political pragmatism. Lincoln only issued it after it was pretty clear that the North would win, and he did so primarily to make it impossible for any European power (all of whom had already renounced slavery earlier) to recognize & aid the South.
Point is, you absolutely *cannot *directly compare American political parties today to their roots 150 years ago, any more than you can directly compare a typical Americans’ ethics & beliefs back then to today’s.
And absolutely political parties are not formed from the top down, but from the bottom up. And just like the society that formed them, they mutate & change over the decades, often radically.
Mark Lieberman did a long column on this at Language Log and gives some preliminary evidence that it was much more complicated than that. But psychologically, it’s a good point because of the numerous threads that were leading to it, the telegraph, the gold rush, the transcontinental railroad, the rise of perception of federal power, as well as the solidarity of needing to think across state borders to a whole nation moving as one.
Lincoln was a pragmatist riven by morality, which surely contributed to his mental anguish. He did hold those beliefs before the war and even into the beginning of it. The *Lincoln *movie suggests that events during the war made him far more conscious of blacks as people. I’d say this is probably true, and another reason why the link in the OP is willfully idiotic.
I’d say this is certainly not true. Lincoln read the first draft to Congress on July 12, 1862. The North was not obviously winning the war. This was just after what is known as the Seven Days, a technical victory, but one in which McClellan did so poorly that Lincoln kicked him out as general-in-chief. And it comes during a long stretch of Congressional action against slavery:
And the Lincoln quote you give, to Horace Greeley, was written while he was waiting to issue the EP at the best political opportunity, so it was a pure BS letter to gain leverage, not a revelation of his innermost beliefs.
I already said that, so I’ll continue to agree to it.
To the extent that “States’ Rights” genuinely were an issue in the run-up to the Civil War, it was the South that opposed them. Northern states claimed the right to free slaves brought into them, and Southern states denied that right. It wasn’t enough for the slave states to remain slave states, because most of the new states that were being added were free states, and the South saw that they’d soon be far outnumbered. Rather, the South needed it not to be possible for new free states to be added, for it to be impossible for a new state to be a “free state”.
The relationship of the Parties towards Civil Rights, esp. Black civil rights completely reversed in 40 years, and can be very neatly defined by two events:
The 1948 walkout of the Democratic National Convention by the so-called Dixiecrats (see: Strom Thrumond). This was where the hard-cord racists were informed that their votes were appreciated, but their politics were not. Point of interest: It was Hubert Humphrey’ speech exhorting the convention to leave behind the “dark shadows” of “State’s Rights” and walk into the “bright sunshine” of Civil Rights.
In 1968, Richard Nixon (running against Hubert Humphrey) devised the “Southern Strategy” by which the GOP picked up “State’s Rights” with all the racist baggage intact as its position, thus getting the White South to vote GOP for the first time since 1860.
Of side note: LBJ, son of the South, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Upon doing so he remarked that the South would not vote Democratic again for 50 years.
Whatever else you may think of those three men, they were all quite brilliant and very shrewd politicians.
It is going to be interesting to see how the GOP reacts to the loss of its two big bases - the wealth whites are declining as a % of wealthy Americans, and the Southern Rednecks are getting education. They are so far out of touch that they couldn’t even prevent what most people in the world thought impossible - the election of a black man as President - twice.
And do we need re-hash just how incredibly out-of-touch their last candidate was? ON Election DAY approx. 4 hours before the polls would start closing, he is bragging that he needs only one speech ready for that night. The man who was losing BIG time after assuring “his people” (rich whites) that he wasn’t going to give a rat’s ass about 47% of the population - it never even occurred to him to have a concession speech “just in case”.
And let’s not forget the thread on these boards opining how long it would take for Obama to concede.
Nixon won five former Confederate states in 1968, one more than he won in 1960. Eisenhower also won four in 1956. Not to say that the Republicans didn’t or don’t race-bait, but the “Southern Strategy” is a myth.
The Southern Strategy worked, but it took a while for it to take effect. Southern Democrats were turning into Republicans, but it was only over several decades. It wasn’t until into the 1980’s that it became clear that it worked.
One of the worst and most bald faced lies that has been perpetuated through the ages. Liberal/Conservative in the modern American sense simply can’t be easily applied to either the antebellum Republican or antebellum Democratic party.
The Republicans back then certainly wouldn’t be Democrats today, the GOP has been a pro-business, pro-industrial growth party literally since its founding. The Democrats have always been focused on populist principles. When the whole country were farmers (and even by the 1850s, we were still a majority-farming population) populism is going to be tied into agriculture.
Since the Democrats had effectively ran a one party state for many years, and were tied into agricultural interests, it only made sense the plantation class in the South were Democrats. They certainly would not have aligned with Federalists or later Whigs or later still Republicans, because even aside from the issue of slavery those parties had always supported tariff, banking, and trade policies that the plantation class viewed as tantamount to economic warfare being waged against the agricultural interests in the South.
In the South, and especially at the State government level, the plantation owners were basically able to set up an oligarchical State in which policies that benefitted the few mighty oligarchs were instituted and the poor people were basically fed ignorance and propaganda to think somehow it served their interests.
