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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
(Sorry, no picture this week. Since Trump has appeared in this space so frequently, I would have gone with one of Gov. Haley, but, no luck --- the pic utility wasn't working.)
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Introduction
As the New York Times work "1619" very clearly demonstrates, race, racism, and their joint outcomes have been an integral part of the history of the United States since its beginnings in the first English colonies established in North America (south of what eventually became Canada) in the 17th century. Before the Revolution, slavery existed in every colony, and then persisted in certain Northern states after it. (E.g., slavery did not become fully illegal in New York until 1827.) And of course, the institution of slavery was in fact either the prime domestic political issue, or at the center of another one, for the nation, from the time of the Founding. That issue was Westward expansion, how it should be carried out, and should slavery be carried out with it. That state of affairs lasted right up until the Civil War, for which it was the central focus, that is until the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
Contrary to what the present leading candidate for the Republican nomination for the Presidency has said recently, President Lincoln could not, with the stroke of a pen (or ten pens, for that matter), have negotiated the nation's way out of the Civil War. (See further discussion below.) As pointed out above, it had been woven into the nation's fabric from the nation's beginnings. Indeed, it was fully recognized in the Constitution. Highly paradoxically, this was so despite the goals for the nation as defined by that document, as set forth in the (totally ignored, now as well as then) Preamble:
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
That is to secure the "blessings of liberty" --- except for certain folk. It was those folk who were so carefully described and defined in the famous "Cornerstone Speech" by the first Vice-President of the Confederate States of America (CSA), Alexander Stephens as, how shall we put it, less than "regular" (that is "White") people:
"Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race. Such were, and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's law. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Cain, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. Our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the White man; that slavery --- subordination to the superior race --- is his natural condition." [Emphasis added. You know, like "vermin."]
Negotiations over the Institution of Slavery
As it happened, former President Trump (who may not have, as an adult a least, read any other book besides some collection of Hitler's speeches, for example: "Lexis of Tyranny: Speeches of Adolf Hitler") got it wrong when he famously said that President Lincoln could have and should have "negotiated his way out of it." As it happened negotiations to deal with the institution of slavery itself, as well as its expansion into the Western territories, had been underway off and on since the time of the Constitutional Convention. The issue was negotiated beginning with the drafting of the Constitution itself, for example by the inclusion of the "3/5ths rule." That is, in order to give the Southern states more seats in the House of Representatives than they would have been entitled to if only "white" people were counted, each slave was to be counted a "3/5ths" of a person for the purposes of enumeration for the House. This was a concession made by anti-slavery delegates in order to convince the Southern states to join the new nation.Then there were, for example, the very extensive negotiations which led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, governing the beginning of major expansion westward, across the Mississippi River. (Actually, at the time of its adoption Thomas Jefferson described the Missouri Compromise as a "firebell in the night," warning of "future bloody conflict." [Indeed, in the infamous 1857 "Dred Scott" decision a Southern-tilted Supreme Court {does tilting to the Right sound familiar?} declared the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional.]) Following that compromise further negotiations which led to The California Compromise of 1850, and then to The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. (The new "popular sovereignty/let-the-voters-decide" provision in it brought only violence).
(One marvelous contradiction in Supreme Court history is that in the Dred Scott case Chief Justice Taney declared that Dred Scott, a person, is property. In our time, of course, Chief Justice Roberts declared that corporations, that are, in most people's minds property, are persons.)
And then we come to 1860, and the very consequential election of Abraham Lincoln in that year. The prime domestic issue in the nation at that time was still the one that had wracked it at least since the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (that had recently been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). The Slave States' primary aim (as it had been for at least four decades despite negotiation after negotiation) remained the unlimited expansion of slavery to the Western Territories which were not yet states. And the Northern states remained opposed.
Indeed, the Civil War came to the nation precisely over the issue of the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories, that no previous negotiated compromise(s) had been able to resolve. Why so? The Southern states desperately wanted it, not only to justify the existence of institution in the face of increasing abolitionist sentiment in the North, but also because, as it happened, in certain of the slave states, e.g., Virginia, more money was being made by their owners by having enslaved persons bear children who were then sold into slavery in other states, than was being made in using slaves to manage their crops. They wanted to broaden their markets, pure and simple. Indeed, Lincoln had vowed during his campaign to not attempt to restrict slavery where it already existed, but to limit its further expansion to the western territories. And so, this became the principal issue for Secession, and no further negotiations could resolve it.
As for Secession itself, it was South Carolina that was the first state to secede from the Union, on December 20, 1860, and it was from artillery on the shore in Charleston, S.C. that the first shots of what became the U.S. Civil War were fired, on Fort Sumter in Charleston's harbor, on April 12, 1861. (Despite that fact, some militant "Lost Cause" Southerners still refer to the Civil War as "Abraham Lincoln's War," and/or the "War of Northern Aggression.")
So Why Would Former Gov. Haley, a former Governor of that state, not Include Slavery in a List of causes of the Civil War? And why would former Pres. Trump blame the War on "Lincoln's Failure to Negotiate?" There is a long answer to this question, but there is also a short one: Xenophobia and Racism: They have been in theRepublican Party's DNA, sometimes more prominently, sometimes less so, since the time of its founding in 1856. (I have previously written on this subject, and will surely do so again.) Trump and Haley both know very well where their Party's white-working-class-without-a-college-education base is on the question of --- to put it politely --- "racial relations." Trump runs on it and Haley is now pandering to it. It's all as simple as that.
Postscripts:
A. .As an Example of Modern Republican Racism: Gov. Ron DeSantis
We now have Republicans like Gov. DeSantis of Florida (one of the states of the CSA, it should be noted) saying that under slavery, slaves learned useful skills like carpentry (which skills of course the overwhelming majority of them, who died as slaves, could never have used as free people). Further, there is his "War on Woke," in which "woke" is used as a code-word for equal rights, and [the awful] "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" policies for under-represented minorities in higher education, employment in general, and government employment in particular.
B. Is Trump Attempting to Provoke (that is the "bedlam" quote) a 2nd Civil War? Knowing him, hey you never know (as long as having one would keep him out of prison and might put him back in power).
C. What the efforts to keep Trump off the ballot will, and will not, accomplish (briefly)
In my view, in the Republican primaries, if doing were to lead to no-one getting a majority of the delegates before the Convention, at it Trump would most likely be nominated by acclimation (of course the Convention Chair would be hand-picked by the Trump forces to make sure that the cheers were "counted correctly") no matter what the delegate counts are. That enough Republicans just don't play by any rules whatsoever anymore, this could very well happen.
As for the General Election, if Trump is actually kept off the ballot in certain states, they will be Blue ones anyway, so for the Electoral College it won't matter.
BUT, as I have said previously, if Trump is not absolutely certain that a) he will get the Republican nomination, and b) that his plans to steal the election no matter what are rock-solid so that whatever the real vote counts are he will become President on Jan. 20, 2025, before the general election (if not sooner) he will flee the country with as much of his money he can manage to get out with him.
(Article changed on Jan 12, 2024 at 1:55 PM EST)
(Article changed on Jan 12, 2024 at 9:29 PM EST)
(Article changed on Jan 14, 2024 at 5:11 PM EST)
