Last weekend marked a proud milestone for Republicans.
For the past century-and-a-half, the Republican Party has proven to be the most effective political organization ever to champion equality and human rights in the United States and around the world.
– Michael Zak
Last weekend marked a proud milestone for Republicans, the 150th anniversary of the first Republican National Convention.
Founded in 1854, the Republicans, distinct from Democrats, grounded their party on two noble convictions: that America was truly one nation, not a polyglot of regions, races, or classes, and that American identity was based not on blood or soil, but on its founding ideal — the dignity, worth, and fundamental rights of each person in the eyes of their Creator.
At first, the GOP's main cause was to oppose slavery, the most depraved institution of their day. Indeed, Democrats were so vehemently pro-slavery that just four years later they split the nation and went to war; and despite Republicans’ victory, those same Democrats established and maintained segregationist “Jim Crow” regimes in the Southern states for another 100 years.
But opposing slavery was just one aspect of a deeper principle.
Abraham Lincoln put it best:
[E]ach individual is….entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights.
This is another way of stating Jefferson’s formulation — from the Declaration of Independence — of man’s inalienable rights. To be truly free, man must own property; he must not be property himself. Without economic freedom, political freedom cannot exist. And while an equality of results is impossible — indeed, such “equality” would actually defeat the idea of freedom — it is certainly the job of government to make opportunity as nearly equal as possible.
For this very reason, Lincoln's Republicans weren't anti-government. They believed strongly in a government that promoted and protected freedom, responsibility and enterprise for all.
What they did oppose was government's pitting American against American, the left’s chief strategy to this day. Or as Lincoln put it:
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself…..
Unfortunately, for a time — roughly calculated from Herbert Hoover till Barry Goldwater — Republicans badly lost their way.
And as Americans rejected the semi-socialist Hoover for the charismatic FDR, a “consensus politics” emerged in which Republicans became sort of “Democrats-lite,” proposing mostly the same things, just slower and stingier. When Nixon claimed in 1971 that “we are all Keynesians now,” he meant it.
But he was wrong. And leftist rule proved ruinous for America.
By the 1970s, Democrats’ traditional reliance on regional and ethnic separatism had opened the door to a far-left counterculture attacking everything American, myriad ethnic and class-based special interests asserting their priority over the nation or any individual’s liberty, and crazed, Orwellian courts conjuring a “Constitutional right” to kill the innocent unborn alongside a prohibition against executing convicted murderers.
Abroad, these Democrats embraced “moral equivalence”, the idea that America is no better — and perhaps far worse — than its enemies, particularly the tyrannical (but left-wing) Soviet Union. At home, their Keynesian economics unraveled in a mire of stagflation, double-digit unemployment and inflation, amid calls for greater and greater centralization reminiscent of that same USSR.
Have they changed? Not at all. The hippies are still running the show, horrified that President Bush would harm Iraq’s butcher Zarqawi, clamoring to hand over 25 million Iraqis to a couple thousand al Qaeda terrorists, demanding that government confiscate 55% of your assets when you die. Even their racial separatism remains: Democrats tried — and failed — this week to pass legislation creating an ethnic-separatist regime in Hawaii, openly encouraging it to secede from the Union.
This is bemusing, even annoying, in a minority party. It would be suicidal in power.
So when Republicans found their way again under Ronald Reagan’s banner, Americans flocked to them in droves. They haven’t stopped since.
To borrow from Tocqueville, Republicans are great when Republicans are good. It’s not enough to win elections, or “have a seat at the table.” They must stand for something; and not just anything, but those core values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; of an overarching national identity; of equal opportunity for all; and of a God-given freedom and human dignity for every person which cannot be compromised or legislated away. This is conservatism, and these are the values which make us who we are.
When Republicans have abandoned these things, they’ve descended into utter irrelevancy. When they have stood strongly upon them, at home and abroad, they have won the greatest triumphs of our time.
So happy 150th, GOP. May you be good — and great — for centuries yet untold.
I understand and agree with a lot of your argument against the Democrats however, as an historian and former “neo-con”, who now finds himself a member of the Old Right”, I take issue with your statement that “Democrats were so vehemently pro-slavery that just four years later they split the nation and went to war…” for the following reasons:
1. It gives the impression that all Southerners were fighting for slavery, when in reality only 4% of the 880,000 men who fought for the Confederacy owned slaves. The other 96%, including free blacks were fighting for States’ Rights. Even Robert E. Lee opposed slavery, considered it evil, and freed those whom he inherited. Interestingly though, U.S. Grant owned slaves.
2. The real fight prior to the war was between the North and the South over control in congress. The wealth of the South had borne the financial weight of the united States since the end of the Revolutionary War. The only way the South could keep from being “milked” of its money from federal tariffs was to maintain a balance in the legislative branch. Hence she fought to have slave states come into the Union, not for the sake of slavery,( what good is slavery in New Mexico, Arizona, or the Great Plains?) but for the sake of maintaining an equal footing in the federal government. Lincoln’s platform did not include the abolition of slavery, just the containment of it. Southerners saw this as limiting their ability to maintain the status quo and an unfair disadvantage on the federal level. Thus they had no other alternative than to secede.
3. Your statement also gives credence to the falsehood that the “Civil War” was fought to free the slaves. It was not. Lincoln’s purpose was to preserve the Union. If the end of slavery had been the reason, why did Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, all slave states, remain in the Union? Their slaves were not freed until 1866, a year after the war, with the 13th Amendment. The slavery issue was a political maneuver to keep Britain from aiding the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation freed no one. It freed the slaves in “the states in rebellion.” It had no effect because those “states” were, at that time, another country.
4. Your statement also assumes that this was a black-white issue. Not true. Free blacks owned slaves also. I suggest you read DIXIE’S CENSORED SUBJECT
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS By Robert M. Grooms. A well-written book that debunks the falsehood that whites only owned slaves. let us not forget the black Confederate soldier. Between 64,000 and 120,000 blacks, free and slave served the Confederacy. Frederick Douglass was also befuddled by this. Nelson Winbush, a retired black Florida Educator is one of many members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He also speaks on this topic.
5. The first national monument dedicated to blacks was the Confederate War Memorial, commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and sculpted by Moses Ezekiel, a Jew and former Confederate officer. It is in Arlington Cemetery. A black Confederate soldier, along with a black woman receiving into her arms the baby of a Confederate soldier as he leaves to war. It would not be until the Vietnam War Memorial when blacks would be depicted in a national monument.
6. As for Jim Crow laws and post-war, Reconstruction racism in the South, I suggest you read The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem by Thomas Nelson Page published in 1904. It gives the Southerners’ side of Radical Reconstruction. How the North used the blacks against the whites in the South to control it.
I hope I don’t sound like I’m preaching, I just wanted to shed some light on this subject.
To be conservative in America is not to cast a ballot every once in a while for a guy or gal that may be a conservative. It is a way of life that means to work hard and not feed from the government handout programs.
To be conservative is to push back against a biased news machine bend on the United States becoming a socialist country. To teach your kids about the true history of America because they won’t learn it in school. To pray to God (yes the same one the founding fathers prayed to) that America will be protected and to help others on this world less fortunate than we are. To hold on to tradition when so many others are hell bent on following a new world order. To be conservative is to believe that we are special and above the creatures of the Earth and we have soul. To be conservative is to believe in right and wrong, good and evil, with very little grey area. To be conservative is to be ridiculed by college professors who believe that ants and humans have equal status on this planet.
Republicans: do not forget Margaret Tatcher´s influences.
My hat is off to David Sanders. Most Americans don’t know the facts or the truth of the Civil War because of the revisionist history taught in our government herding pens; commonly know as Public Schools. Many of those who do know the facts and the truth are afraid to publicly state the truth for fear of being labeled racist.
Mr Lincoln could not free the slaves of this country. He had neither the Constitutional authority nor the desire to free them. I would suggest that everybody in the United States read the entire Emancipation Proclamation, find any website containing Lincoln’s quotes and visit the Lincoln Museum in Illinois. What you will discover will surprise you.
Mr Lincoln’s personal beliefs, based on the Bible, were that slavery was wrong. But for those who think Lincoln was by driven by some great moral intent to be the great liberator of Negro slaves lets take a look at Lincoln’s own words.
“Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, “Letter To Henry L. Pierce and Others” (April 6, 1859), p. 376.
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, (August 1, 1858?), p. 532.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, “Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois” (September 18, 1858), pp. 145-146.
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume V, “Letter to Horace Greeley” (August 22, 1862), p. 388.
In addition to free black men fighting for the Confederacy one more thing that most Americans don’t know is that in the “Old South’ there were 20,000 slaves owned by men of color. That is owned by black men and American Indians. Don’t believe me. Check our American history…if you can find it.
Mr Lincoln’s sole intent was preservation of the Union.
George Rasor
Where would someone find a copy of DIXIE’S CENSORED SUBJECT
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS By Robert M. Grooms?
I think that those who hold that slavery was the chief (and some say, only) cause of the Civil War are dreaming. Slavery was a moral issue for many, but we have seen many moral issues bypassed for the sake of unity before.
The truth was that, slavery or no, the Constitution had been weakly interpreted, and the powers of the Federal government were not sufficiently strong to maintain loyalty among the states when the interests of certain states were, for better or worse, threatened. Slavery was merely the first log on what grew to become, over time, an enormous bonfire. Buchanan, Honest Abe and the splitting of the Democratic party were the matches. We saw the same thing in Ancient Rome, where the Constitution failed to exclude the rise of certain aristocratic Dictators, leading to the assassination of Caesar and one of the bloodiest wars of the ancient world.
It is admirable to insist that the morally bankrupt system of slavery was the cause of the war, but history is rarely made by such black-and-white divisions.
Sorry, “Dixie’s Censored Subject” was a 1997 “well written” article that was originally from the Barnes Review. He quoted from the book, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (University Press of Virginia-1995) which was written by Ervin L. Jordan Jr., an African-American and assistant professor and associate curator of the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia library. According to Groom’s article it contains a lot of untold slave history. Grooms also quoted from Black Masters published 1984,by Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark(available from amazon.com).