Protecting Slavery
As the new constitutional Republic took shape, worried plantation owners, including many Anti-Federalists, organized themselves as the core of an agrarian-based political movement that is commonly referred to as Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. The party presented itself as representing the interests of simple farmers, but -- in reality -- the base of Jefferson's movement was in the slaveholding aristocracy.
Jefferson himself was a deeply racist individual who made a mockery of the words he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal." He engaged in the pseudo-science of skull measurements to argue in Notes on the State of Virginia that African-Americans were inferior to whites. He also insisted that it would be impossible for whites to live in the same country with freed blacks.
But Jefferson proved to be a skilled -- if unscrupulous -- political leader. His party's success, in first demonizing the Federalist Party and then dethroning its leaders, led to a 24-year run of Virginian presidents, starting with Jefferson in 1801 and followed by Jefferson's neighbors and proteges, James Madison (a former Federalist ally of Washington) in 1809 and James Monroe (who had been one of the early Anti-Federalists allied with Mason and Henry) in 1817.
All three were slaveholders who defended the institution of slavery and opposed the manumission (or freeing) of slaves in the United States. As Virginia's governor in 1800, Monroe called out the state militia to brutally put down an incipient slave revolt known as Gabriel's Rebellion, with 26 alleged conspirators hanged. Jefferson and Madison pondered various schemes for deporting freed African-Americans.
Though slavery was always in the background, the chief political principle of Jefferson's party was to roll back the Constitution's empowerment of the federal government and to claim that the document's seemingly expansive powers were really quite narrow. The effect was to shield the interests of slaveholders who feared that their investments in bondage might otherwise be lost.
By the end of the Virginia Dynasty in 1825, the roots of slavery had dug down even deeper in America's soil with many Virginian plantation owners, who had exhausted their own land by overuse, starting a new industry: breeding slaves for sale to the new slave states to the west. The United States was on course for the Civil War. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Dubious Claim to Madison."]
The Demise of Slavery
Ironically, just as the Anti-Federalists had feared, the growing industrial power of the North and its swelling immigrant population tilted national power away from the South. But slavery was still defended by Jefferson's Democratic Party, which competed against the Whigs and then the Republicans, based primarily in the North.
The election of anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln was the final straw for hard-line slavers who then orchestrated the secession of 11 Southern states. With secession, the Democratic Party lost much of its representation in Congress.
Despite the centrality of slavery to the War Between the States, Southerners insisted then -- and some still do today -- that the conflict was not about slavery, but about "limited government," "constraints on federal power," "states' rights," and "contract rights." But the inconvenient truth was that the Confederacy quickly drafted a constitution perpetuating slavery and the South conditioned its later peace negotiations on slavery's continuation.
In the final days of the war in 1865, while the Southern states were still in rebellion, Lincoln engineered passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. After the South's surrender and Lincoln's assassination, the Radical Republicans pushed through the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law and the Fifteenth Amendment assuring the right to vote regardless of one's color.
After the Southern states returned to the Union -- and especially after Reconstruction ended in 1877 -- the pro-slave Democratic Party became the party of Jim Crow and made possible the brutal oppression of freed blacks, who faced lynching and other acts of terror. The solid Democratic South only changed in the 1960s when the national Democratic Party took the lead in passing major civil rights laws.
The so-called Dixie-crats were then welcomed into the Republican Party by opportunistic politicians such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Given the stigma of outright racism, Nixon, Reagan and other Republicans employed code words -- dog whistles -- that were heard by the white racists but could be explained away to more enlightened Americans.
Rebranding as Patriots
Thus, we were back to euphemisms about "limited government," "constraints on federal power," "states' rights," and "contract rights." One other cosmetic change in the new millennium was for the Right to "rebrand" itself from its overt love of the Old Confederacy to a supposed harkening back to the Framers' "originalist" view of the Constitution.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
2
