In reality, this type of Democratic Party corruption and election-rigging was and is a thorough perversion of the democratic process. Even more, the whole basis of Tammany and the Democratic urban machine is a usurpation of the political system that the founders created. I don’t mean this in the sense that the founders failed to create a party system and Van Buren did. The party system was not anticipated by the founders but by itself is not incongruent with the founders’ novus ordo seclorum.
Nor do I mean it in the sense that the founders created a nation with a homogeneous population and Van Buren’s machine was based on organizing ethnically diverse people. Yes, Book 2 of The Federalist declares that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion . . . very similar in their manners and customs.”26 It was not to be. Yet ethnic diversity by itself can be accommodated in the founding scheme.
As Lincoln recognized, the founders wisely framed their arguments in universalistic terms: not “all Englishmen” or “all Anglo-Saxons” are created equal, but rather “all men.” In 1858 Lincoln said, “Perhaps half our people” have “come from Europe—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian.” These people did not, Lincoln admits, have anything to do with writing the Declaration of Independence, ratifying a Constitution. In this sense, they might feel excluded from the founding bargain of their new country.
Yet when they read the Declaration, Lincoln said, they see that it applies also to them. Then they recognize that “they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” The Declaration’s teaching that all are created equal, Lincoln said, is the “electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.”27
So ethnic diversity can be integrated within an inclusive American nationalism. The real perversion lies elsewhere. We can see it by consulting Book 10 of The Federalist, where Madison considers what he calls the problem of faction. Madison, like the other founders, worried about subgroups or factions motivated by particular interests conspiring against the public treasury and the public interest. Madison considered factions of this sort incompatible with the republican form of government. How, he asked, can America protect itself against them?
Madison’s solution was the constitutional republic itself. Minority factions, he said, would be voted down by a majority. Moreover, in a large, extended republic like America, Madison predicted that while there may be a multiplicity of factions, organized perhaps around regional claims or occupational interests, none would be strong enough to steal the public purse or achieve its particular good over and against the public good. Madison was confident that any faction that attempted such “sinister designs” would surely be thwarted by other factions that would see through its nefarious scheme.28
Working at the state level rather than the federal, Van Buren showed how Madison’s “republican remedy” could be defeated. Van Buren demonstrated how factions could indeed prevail, how particular goods could in fact vanquish the public good. The solution involved rigging the democratic process through ethnic stooges—suckers really—who would deliver the vote on behalf of helpless, dependent populations.
These populations would be courted through favors and then, when they did what was expected of them, rewarded through nepotism and patronage. The key was to keep these ethnic populations so dependent that they would continually retain the corrupt Democratic machine in power. The Democratic machine would then work assiduously not for any public good but rather for the particular good of the ethnic constituencies under its sway.
Van Buren went on to an undistinguished presidency marked by economic depression and what even progressive historians now concede is the disgrace of supervising the notorious displacement of the Cherokee, an event otherwise known as the Trail of Tears. Perhaps repenting of his previous Faustian pacts with slavery, Van Buren joined the Free Soil movement and made an abortive third run for president in 1848. He was soundly defeated. In his later years, while no longer a partisan for the plantation, he refused to follow the Free Soil Democrats who left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans. Van Buren stayed a lifelong Democrat.
The Tammany system was challenged by reformers in the late nineteenth century and finally routed by progressives in the early twentieth century. Working through a Republican ally, Fiorello La Guardia, FDR finally crushed Tammany and in general brought down the urban machines. As Jay Cost shows in his recent book A Republic No More, FDR’s motives were hardly pure. Rather, his intention was not to get rid of the machine but to substitute a national machine for the various local ethnic machines, not to eliminate corruption but to legalize it and make it a “permanent feature of our government.”29 FDR replaced several local scams with one big national scam.
Much has changed. The Democrats gave up their system of ethnic mobilization under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, then took it up once again under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. Today Democrats don’t bother to mobilize white ethnics anymore; they have moved on to other groups: blacks, Latinos, feminists, homosexuals. Yet as Plunkitt says, “The Democratic Party . . . can’t die while it’s got Tammany for its backbone.”30 In a sense, Tammany remains the backbone of the Democrats. The old Tammany regime is gone, but what Tammany represents—the dehumanizing system of Democratic ethnic exploitation that Van Buren created—is still very much with us today.
5
The Plantation in Crisis
How Democrats North and South Fought to Extend Slavery
What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?
—Alexander Stephens, Democrat and vice president of the Confederacy1
One of the most powerful weapons of historical revisionism is silence. From ancient times, the wise have recognized the uses of silence. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates convinces Glaucon that Greeks should not enslave other Greeks. Glaucon reluctantly goes along, but then blurts out that surely it is fine for Greeks to enslave barbarians. This assertion, Plato informs us, Socrates greeted only with silence. In this case, Socrates’ silence is prudential. He has gone as far as he can go to convince Glaucon; to attempt to go further is to risk losing what has painstakingly been accomplished.
Then there is Lincoln’s silence during the great secession winter of 1860-61. There was a four-month interregnum between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, and during this period several states seceded and, in a panic, Democrats as well as some Republicans considered various proposed measures to appease the South and prevent a civil war. The most famous was the Crittenden proposal, which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line across to the Pacific, allowing slavery permanently south of the line and prohibiting it north of it. While there was strong pressure on Lincoln to react publicly to these proposed measures, he said nothing, while working behind the scenes to defeat them. Thus Lincoln’s silence, like that of Socrates, was in service of prudence. He had to wait until he was inaugurated to have the power to actually implement the mandate he had just won.
While I have just given two instances of the noble use of silence, this chapter focuses on a very ignoble use of silence to distort historical truth. Here I focus on progressive revisionism about the Civil War and Reconstruction. The purpose of this revisionism is to blame the conflict mostly on the South, and to blame the South again for the postbellum resistance to Northern Reconstruction. What is left out of this narrative is the role of the Democratic Party. This is how silence can be used not passively, to withhold information, but actively, to deceive.
For example, in both of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ books and in his numerous articles for The Atlantic, there is no mention of the Democratic Party affiliation of the Confederates. They are typically named as Southerners, not as Democrats. This is particul
arly interesting because Coates is himself a Democrat and he apparently has no intention of holding his party responsible for its historical crimes, even though these are precisely the crimes for which Coates seeks reparations and restitution. Coates does not wish to explain why he continues to belong to a party that perpetrated the very offenses about which he is apparently inconsolable. So Coates disingenuously uses silence to serve his ideological purpose, which is to shift the blame to Trump and the Republican right.
But the pattern goes even deeper. Coates and the historians he relies on—figures such as Barbara Fields, Annette Gordon-Reed and Eric Foner—go beyond minimizing the Democratic affiliation of Southern apologists for slavery. They also leave out or at the very least downplay the role of the Northern Democrats in upholding slavery before and during the Civil War, and then reestablishing a form of neo-slavery in the South after the war. This use of silence here is critical, because to implicate the Northern Democrats is to undermine the progressive narrative that assigns virtually exclusive culpability to the South.
Ultimately progressives seek to cast blame not merely on the South but also on America. In this way they can smear the Republicans, whose base is in the South and who see themselves as reviving an American nationalism. So in addition to blaming the South—the current base of the GOP—progressives also cast some of the blame on Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Abraham Lincoln. Leading figures of modern-day historiography including George Fredrickson and Fred Kaplan, not to mention progressive outlets like the Huffington Post, fault Lincoln with being a bit of a racist, not quite as enlightened as progressives themselves.2
A sample work in this genre is Lerone Bennett’s Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, which presses the case for Lincoln being a racist by raising all the familiar issues.3 Didn’t Lincoln say that if he could save the union without freeing a single slave, he would do it? Didn’t Lincoln emphasize in his debates with Douglas that he did not support social equality or intermarriage between the races? Didn’t Lincoln specifically come out against giving blacks voting rights or letting them serve on juries? And didn’t Lincoln’s celebrated Emancipation Proclamation free the slaves only in the Confederacy—where Lincoln had no power to free them—while not freeing any of the half million slaves in Union states like Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri?
Lincoln’s words and actions seem the incriminating hallmarks of a racist, if not a full-blown white supremacist. And this progressive indictment of Lincoln may be responsible for the vandals who defaced the Lincoln statue as part of their campaign to take down or destroy racist monuments. They might well have been the acolytes of Coates, or of Reconstruction historian Eric Foner, who emphasizes that not only is Lincoln guilty, “the whole nation is guilty, even though the main effort is in the South.”4
Foner is one of the most subtle, cunning revisionists of the left. Here, from his magnum opus Reconstruction, are a few telling sentences. “Conservatives, however, were not the only delegates to raise questions of social equality.” In Foner’s bizarre nomenclature, Southern Democrats who oppose equality are “conservatives.” By contrast, “On the party’s left stood the radical Republicans.” Incredibly, the most zealous Republicans are now positioned on the left. And then, “Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region under the control of a reactionary ruling elite.” Somehow the Democratic racist ruling class of the South is classified as a group of right-wing reactionaries, the natural predecessors in Foner’s view to Trump, the GOP and modern-day conservatives.5
One inaccuracy on top of another. Clearly I have my work cut out for me. And my task is made even more complex by the fact that modern progressive revisionism about the Civil War and Reconstruction was preceded by a separate Democratic and progressive revisionism that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Immediately following the war and Reconstruction, Democrats got to work fashioning a narrative of concealment aimed at fooling future generations about what had just happened.
The old lies and the new historical accounts parallel each other—the lying Democratic narratives of the past, sitting alongside the sanitized progressive narratives of the present—but they are not the same. The old Democratic liars pretended that the Civil War was not about slavery. Here the classic examples are Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis, who were respectively the vice president and president of the Confederacy. Two decades after the war, Davis insisted that “African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Stephens portrayed the war as “a strife between the principles of Federation on the one side, and Centralism or Consolidation on the other. Slavery, so-called, was but the question on which these antagonistic principles . . . were finally brought into actual and active collision with each other on the field of battle.”6
Davis and Stephens appear to us as creatures of the distant past. Can we reasonably link them with the progressive Democrats who came of age a few decades later, in the early twentieth century? Yes, we can. We see a very similar understanding of the Civil War promoted in the early twentieth century by the progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard. The Beards, who agreed with Davis and Stephens that slavery had little or nothing to do with the war, famously coined the term “Second American Revolution” to characterize the shift of power, caused by the war, from the “planter aristocracy” of the South to “Northern capitalists and free farmers.”7
The same period saw the rise of the so-called Dunning School—named after William Dunning and his colleagues at Columbia University—which portrayed Reconstruction as a vicious intrusive Republican effort to impose Negro rule on the South, happily thwarted by independence-loving Southerner Democrats who brought the uppity blacks under heel and sent the no-good Republican carpetbaggers packing. It comes with some surprise for us to discover that Dunning and his colleagues saw themselves as progressives and regarded themselves as writing progressive history.
Blowing these Democratic big lies out of the water and exposing the truth—that is my task here. First, I show that the Civil War arose not out of a North-South debate but rather out of a bitter struggle between a Republican Party that sought to block the spread of slavery and a Democratic Party North and South that sought to continue it. Then I show the role of the Northern Democrats, even during the war, to undermine the Union war effort, to force a peace treaty with the South and to give slavery a permanent place in America’s future.
When this failed, I show how the Northern Democrats attempted to block the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and worked closely with the Southern Democrats to defeat Reconstruction, which was a Republican project to create multicultural democracy in America. Instead the Democrats deployed a new weapon, racial terrorism, to disperse white Republicans, subjugate blacks and reestablish their political hegemony in the South.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO PARTIES
On December 22, 1860, in a final effort to avert the looming prospect of civil war, Abraham Lincoln wrote a brief note to his former colleague Alexander Stephens of Georgia, soon to become vice president of the Confederacy. Both Lincoln and Stephens had been Whigs, and they had worked together in opposition to the Mexican War and other issues. They respected each other.
Moreover, Stephens had in his native Georgia given an impassioned speech opposing secession, arguing that despite the election of a Republican president, slavery would be “much more secure in the union than out of it.”8 Lincoln admired the speech so much that he had requested an official copy of the transcript. If there was ever a chance that two men—one a Northerner, the other a Southerner—could work things out, this was it.
Lincoln reassured Stephens that, as his campaign statements repeatedly stressed—and as the Republican platform made absolutely clear—the new government had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. “The South would be in no more danger in this respect
,” Lincoln wrote, “than it was in the days of Washington.”
Then Lincoln added, tellingly, “I suppose, however, that this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.”9 And upon this difference—as Lincoln dolefully predicted—America went to war with itself in the following year.
As Stephens undoubtedly knew at the time, but which has been subsequently muddied by progressive scholarship, Lincoln was not actually distinguishing the positions of the North versus the South. The North certainly did not unanimously share the view that slavery was wrong. Only Republicans in the North held that position. Democrats in the North—Stephen Douglas notably among them—emphatically rejected that view. Northern Democrats led by Douglas contested the 1860 election against Lincoln on the basis of that disagreement.
That the slavery debate was not a North-South debate but rather a partisan debate can be verified by the startling truth I first reported in Hillary’s America and that has gone unchallenged since. In 1860, at the time Lincoln wrote this letter, no Republican owned a slave. I don’t mean merely that no Republican leader owned a slave. No Republican in the country owned a slave. All the slaves in the United States at the time—all four million of them—were owned by Democrats. Stephens himself crossed over from the Whigs to the Democratic Party in 1855, five years prior to the civil war.
In the years leading up to the war, in multiple addresses and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln himself stressed the main issue that separated the two parties. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties,” Lincoln said in a September 11, 1858, speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, “is that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong.”
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