The Democratic Party’s History of Anarchy: 1800-1918 – Part 2

The Democratic Party’s History of Anarchy: 1800-1918 – Part 2

“I want Cuba, I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason – for the planting and spreading of slavery.” – Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi.

 

Following 1800 election, the issue of slavery would drive a wedge in the country not seen since the American Revolution. As their power waned, the Southern Democrats began to threaten violence and secession from the union as non-slave states threatened their “particular institution.“ While slavery was not the only issue the Southern Democrat was willing to go to war over, it was certainly the most prominent.

 

Several petitions were delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives in February, 1836 from residents of Massachusetts stating that they were praying for the abolishment of slavery. Debate arose as to whether or not to allow the petitions into the Congressional Record. Democratic South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond responded: “What, sir, does the south ask next? She asks, and this at least she has a right to demand, that these petitions be not received here and recorded on your journals. Is this demanding anything unreasonable, unjust or unkind? Sir, we cannot endure it. If these things are permitted here, you drive us from your councils. Let the consequences be upon you.”

 

“But, Mr. Speaker, even if this House should refuse these petitions, I am not one to trust that this conflict will be at an end. No sir, we shall have to meet it elsewhere. Our State Legislatures have to pass laws regulating our police with a stricter hand. They will have to pass and enforce laws prohibiting the circulation of incendiary pamphlets through the mail within their limits. We may have to adopt an entire non-intercourse with the Free States and finally sir, we may have to dissolve this Union. From none of these measures will we shrink as circumstances may make them necessary. Our last thought will be to give up our Institutions (slavery). We were born and bred under them, and will maintain them or die in their defense. And I warn the Abolitionists, ignorant infuriated barbarians as they are that if chance shall throw any of them into our hands, they may expect a FELON’S DEATH. No human law, no human influence can arrest their fate. The superhuman instinct of self-preservation, the indignant feelings of an outraged people, to whose hearth-stones they are seeking to carry death and desolation, pronounce their doom, and if we failed to accord it to them, we are unworthy of the beings whom it is our duty to protect, and we should merit and expect the indignation of an offended Heaven. ”

 

The answer to the petitions by Senator Hammond clearly shows the pattern for Democratic Party behavior; censorship, boycotting, and violence to those with opposing points of views.

 

Democratic South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun said the following in an 1837 speech: “But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good. I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.”

 

The 1852 Democratic Party platform stated: “That Congress has no power under the constitution to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States, and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs not prohibited by the constitution; that all efforts of the abolitionists or others made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.”

 

In 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner gave a speech before the Senate that caused US Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Caroline to nearly beat him to death:

 

“Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech with great care, and with as much impartiality as I am capable of, and I feel it my duty to say to you that you have published a libel on my State, and uttered a slander upon a relative, who is aged and absent, and I am come to punish you.”

 

The increasingly bitter partisanship crept closer to open war as Jefferson Davis (the eventual president of the Confederacy) threatened secession by the State of Mississippi should a republican be elected as US President: “I say to you here as I have said to the Democracy of New York, if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we shall have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barrier of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through the process of revolution.”

 

The reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln was immediate as stated by Democratic Louisiana Senator Judah P. Benjamin in a 1860 Senate speech right before the South seceded from the union: “It is a revolution; a revolution of the most intense character; in which belief in the justice, prudence, and wisdom of secession is blended with the keenest sense of wrong and outrage, and it can no more be checked by human effort for the time than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.”

 

Was this sentiment not clearly displayed before the entire world on January 20, 2017, as thousands of democrats and leftists destroyed property and spread violence in Washington DC? Then the following day millions assembled to hold “Women’s Marches“ all over the US. Though these would remain peaceful, the message was the same as the previous day as fading when pop star Madonna mused about blowing up the White House and called for revolution.

 

“Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill every damned one of the ni**er race and burn up the cradle.” Democrat Memphis City Judge John C. Creighton

 

THE DEMOCRATS’ KLU KLUX KLAN

 

Following their defeat in the Civil War, Democrats in the South simply shifted their priorities from defending slavery to the suppression of Republicans and African-Americans, by forming the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. The KKK operated as a loosely structured group of political and social terrorists. Their goal was the political defeat of the southern Republicans and the complete domination of the newly liberated African-Americans.

 

In order to do this, the KKK used lynchings, beatings, shootings and intimidation to keep the African-Americans and Republicans from voting and being elected into office. Started by former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1866, the KKK was so successful in dominating the southern African-Americans that the southern states would remain a Democratic stronghold until the late 1960‘s.

 

In an interview with a Cincinnati Commercial correspondent, General Nathan Bedford Forrest said of the KKK in 1868: “It is a political military organization, it was found that political matters and interests could best be promoted within it, and it was then made a political organization, giving it’s support, of course, to the Democratic Party.” So the lynchings, shootings and other terror tactics were done to promote the Democratic Party.

 

In 1871 Shaffer Bowens, a white former KKK member gave testimony in court about the goals and activities of the KKK. “My understanding was, to advance the Democratic Party and put down the radical party. … By killing, and whipping, and crowding out men from the ballot-boxes. “

 

Wilmington, North Caroline in 1898 was a prosperous town with a largely African-American population and led by a predominantly Republican leadership that supported their rights. The former democratic heads of the city however were determined to retake the city in the upcoming election.

 

Prominent Democratic leader Daniel Schenck, warned: “It will be the meanest, vilest, dirtiest campaign since 1876. The slogan of the Democratic Party from the mountains to the sea will be but one word … Ni**er.”

 

The day before the election, U.S. Congressman Alfred Moore Waddell spoke to his fellow Democrats: “You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared, and you will do your duty. Be ready at a moment’s notice. Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the Negroes out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses kill shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns” In the same speech he also stated: “that they should, if necessary, “choke the Cape Fear with carcasses.”

 

Following the election, Waddell formed a mob of over 2,000 people to terrorize every African-American and Republican they could find, eventually killing somewhere between 25 – 300 people (no accurate count has been established), banishing hundreds and burning down a large section of the town. Not content with the murders and destruction, Waddell would oust the mayor and all Republican’s City office holders in what was really a coup d’état.

 

In the aftermath, thousands of African-Americans and Republicans left the area giving control of the city back to the Democrats. The Democrats then altered the voting requirements in the state preventing African-Americans from voting again until the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alfred Waddell became the new mayor of Wilmington, a position he held until 1905.

 

Democrat Governor of Georgia, Hugh M. Dorsey wrote a letter to the NAACP in 1918 defending the lynchings of Hayes Turner and his eight-month pregnant wife, Mary. Writing: “I believe that if the Negroes would exert their ultimate influence with the criminal element of their race and stop rapes that it would go a long way towards stopping lynchings.”

 

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