Democrats, slavery, Irish, and Indians

[ilbegone]

You know how brown supremacists like to harp on things long before (sometimes centuries) our times, trotting out stuff like 19th century slavery, mid 19th century Irish immigration and the 1830's expulsion of southern Indian tribes to Oklahoma as though "Latinos" were going through the same treatment today and that modern white Americans are congenitally predisposed towards racism. They look at history not by light of the times, but with modern, slanted interpretation of the past.

However, I've been doing some reading and research.

It seems that discrimination in America concerning the Irish wasn't so much about being new and different or unknown as that they were Catholic in a nation which very much remembered both the 1642 English Civil War and the 1775 American revolution.

Simplifying it:

It was largely about the greater animosity between Catholicism and protestantism with the classic rub between puritan / presbyterian entrepreneurship and Anglican manorialism, with a further rub as to what constitutes morality.

Closet Catholic House of Stuart King Charles I, backed by the nobility, desired to rule more than parliament and protestants, including Puritans and Presbyterians, were willing to concede to. Charles couldn't get up an army in England proper, so he raised an army of Scotch and Irish Catholics. The English civil war was as much about religion as anything else.

King George III had difficulty enlarging his army with Englishmen who didn't want to fight fellow Englishmen in the American colonies, so large number of Scotch and Irish Catholics were enlisted as well as Hessian mercenaries hired for the fight in the Americas. I believe the only reason the Americans weren't trounced more than they were is because the British Generals didn't believed in King George's war either, they all had extensive ties to America.

And when the French entered the scuffle, more to give England a black eye over taking Canada as much as anything else, Parliament's concern became not about rebellious colonial subjects so much as foreign French Catholics (Irish and Scots were British subjects regardless of religion) - the real enemy. The colonists didn't win the war and despite King George's rants the English were torn about the war and gave it up in order to face the French.

An early draft of the Declaration of Independence mentioned among it's grievances that King George sent Scots to the war. It was stricken probably because of the large number of Presbyterians with Scotch Irish ancestry in the Colonies.

So, when the Irish came to New England beginning in the 1820's, it was about heavily drinking Catholics from Ireland in the light of the English Civil War and the Revolution, not about being different and to a lesser extent about cheap labor than has been bandied about. Protestant Germans and Scandinavians as well as Presbyterian Scots didn't have the problem as Catholic Germans and Catholic Irish did.

The Irish tended to become Democrats who sympathized with Anglican/Episcopalian southern manorial slavers, which rubbed on northern emancipators.

The Democrat party originated in the south with President Andrew Jackson and has a long history of sympathy for manorial plantation slavery, a desire for expansion into Latin America to add slave holding states, and Indian removal.

All but two of 99 Congressmen and Senators who signed the 1956 anti-intergration "Southern Manifesto" (Authored by Strom Thurmond) were Democrats. http://course.cas.sc.edu/germanyk/po...0Manifesto.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Manifesto

The Democrats were strong supporters of Jim Crow laws.

By contrast, the Whigs (faded out), the northern intermediate parties (faded out), and the Republican party (which began with Abraham Lincoln) were anti Slavery, anti manorial, and pro entrepreneur.

Shortly before the Civil War, Irish on the east coast (generally pro slaver Democrats) rioted under the ironic premise that free blacks would be competition for cheap labor.

From George Washington's presidency (no party 1789-1797) to President Andrew Jackson's administration (Democrat 1829-1837), the governmental inclination towards the "civilized tribes" seems to be that of assimilation. Jackson and his southern Democrats initiated the policy of removing southern Indians to Oklahoma territory to free up land for southern plantations to be worked with slaves.

Ironically, a sizable portion of the removed Indians had black slaves, which they took to Oklahoma with themselves.

Up until the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson, the Democrat party had largely been a party of white supremacists and oppressive racial politics.

Let the race baiters think about all this before they start in with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 19th century Irish, 19th century slavery, Jim Crow, and 1950's "white only" establishments as if it's all going on today. The Democrat party has been responsible for true atrocity since 1830's up until the 1960's. By contrast, things have been pretty tame across the social/political spectrum since the 1964 civil rights act.

[ilbegone]

2nd post, moved to first above.

[ilbegone]

3rd post, folded into first post above

[wetibbe]

I'm also a big history aficionado. I have tons of all sorts dating way,way back and I mean REALLY back.

But one modern observation. For the most part, say the majority, those people from certain countries and ethnic backgrounds that are tan, ebony, cafe au lait, bronze, black carry a lot of racist baggage not so frequently openly but certainly secretly and subliminally. And particularly those in Government, and more specifically the current, as well as the last 3 or 4 decades, are becoming more bold and brazen and partial in so many ways.

In South Africa during apartheid, the treatment of citizens by the government was objected to by numerous countries. However, when apartheid ended the treatment was reversed and it was murderous. I think we all know who the majorities were vs the minorities in numbers of population.

With the present rush to open the flood gates to immigrants and inundate the country, it will accelerate the tipping of balance and see the reversal of majority/minority sooner in the next 30,40,50, 60 years. Then it won't be pretty.

[ilbegone]

The evidently inevitable discussion about whether race indicates certain beliefs and certain predispositions, a discussion I find distasteful and essentially a counterproductive waste of time.

EVERYONE is prejudiced about something, even Mother Teresa. It's what one does with it that counts.

As well, the premise of your post could be interpreted as affirmative of the approximate brown racist quote:

"They are shitting their pants with fear. They are dying and they aren't making babies, they know we are going to outnumber them."

We can't go back to the 1950's in any fashion - the Cleavers, the Olsons, town of Mayberry and Fred McMurry are long gone - not the least with race relations. Sure there are those who stir up racial issues where there were none before their immediate presence, and there are those who have unjustified chips on their shoulders. But, not everyone is alike and we can get past the chips and baggage of most people who have them.

I don't care about the melatonin shade of America, I care that America remains American - race does not indicate nationality or ethnicity. America was something that never was before, the experiment admired for its surprising viability and envy for its general success. We now have misguided people who are changing the character of America into an emasculated version of something else.

The issue is illegal immigration, not race. The opposition has cornered the marketability of race in every realm; legal, educational, and social. You can understand what motivates certain people and identify propaganda they may dispense by studying the larger cultural and historical world they claim to come from, but you can't win by bad mouthing race.

To me, those who come from elsewhere are merely symptoms of the problem, the disease originates in America with American citizens of every race. You can deport every last illegal from whatever continent, culture, or race they come from, but you can't cure the disease without rooting out the cause of the disease which originates in America.

[Ayatollahgondola]

Originally Posted by ilbegone

. You can deport every last illegal from whatever continent, culture, or race they come from, but you can't cure the disease without rooting out the cause of the disease which originates in America.

But it's worth try, just for kicks if nothing else

[PochoPatriot]

I know I am late this thread, but I was wondering if you could site any sources for the arguments made in the initial post?

[ilbegone]

Originally Posted by PochoPatriot

I know I am late this thread, but I was wondering if you could site any sources for the arguments made in the initial post?

You can start with The Cousin's Wars by Kevin Phillips, Five Points by Tyler Anbinder, and perhaps the first half of Who Are We? by Samuel P. Huntington. There is a hodge podge of sources from which I put my stuff together, I'll make another post to further describe my methodology.

I've gone off on different tangents in this thread due to the whim of the moment and there are things alluded to in the first few posts of the thread that I need to get more of a look at before I enlarge the view - and I've learned a lot more about the issues which are brought forth in the first post than I knew then. Most of us like the simple explanation, but it's actually much more complicated than black or white and even shades of gray in most cases.

For example (and off the top of my head), the first person to own a black man in the colonies in a permanent manner was a black man in 17th century New England (even went to court to affirm his claim).

90% of the black slaves who were transported to the New World were obtained through trade with a black west African slave culture. There was not a great pounding through the African jungle by Europeans to capture black African slaves like the popular narrative likes to state.

You can google Cherokee slaves and get quite a narrative concerning the subject of Cherokees who owned black slaves.

I have since found that many of the Cherokee moved west decades before Jackson forced the rest out, some even wound up in Mexico and the Cherokee played a role in Spanish, Mexican, and American Texas.

Some things I need to look more into but seems to have happened:

The Blackfeet of the northern western plains were pushed out from east of the Great Lakes before European contact, and seems to have been moving south about 1800. The Sioux were pushed out of Minnesota into the plains by the Chippewa. There was a general migration of the southern plains Indians towards what became New England. The Apache and Navajo may have originated in Alaska, but the Comanches from what became Wyoming drove the Apaches out of Texas and raided to within 120 miles of Mexico City. The Pawnee may have practiced a small scale form of Human Sacrifice for crop fertility. There was more than a lot of inter-tribal barbarism and warfare over territory and food sources (and women) long before European contact and white expansion - nothing new concerning Manifest Destiny except the scale of territory taken and migration into the territories taken.

The 1675 King Phillip Indian war (the kill ratio was more than the Civil War) and use of Indians by the English and French against the colonists may have been a large and lasting factor of white American perception of Indians down through the 20th century. I believe there was some attempt to assimilate Indians prior to Andrew Jackson's policy of removal, but I may have been mistaken as to the extent as expressed in the first post. Indian and white interaction was much more complex than the simplistic "white racism" or "Indian Savages" explanations, and I would like to explore more of it and contrast it with the Spanish Colonial system. It seems to me that both mission and reservation systems, at least originally, had a vision of assimilation and eventual participation in mainstream society, but this was primarily sabotaged by both Spanish friars and crooked reservation agents.

I'm not a professional historian, I don't get paid to go to distant locations and rummage around in obscure, minute notes of the ancients to reach conclusions directly from the source. But I read a lot, and while there are different focuses and interpretations (as well as outright dishonest, biased bunk from any direction) I put a picture together of what reasonably really was. I've concluded that history (like a divorce) has four sides to every story - what one says, what the other says, what everyone else involved or not says (who's dog is in the fight or what there is to "prove"), then there's what really happened and here are the causes.

There is some wisdom in the modern biographer of Confederate president Jefferson Davis who said that there was a lot to dislike Jefferson Davis for, but that he wasn't going to judge the man according to modern society. The same could probably said for just about anyone who played a part on any side of the post 1492 New World - doesn't matter what name the hero or villain went by or culture he came from.

[ilbegone]

Addendum to the previous post:

I've always been somewhat interested in history and became more interested since about 2005 with all the marches, rallies and the media running to self appointed, racist Latino spokesmen for a whole race (regardless of nationality and individuality) for pulp fodder. It was a lopsided media narrative with all "the borders crossed us", "stolen lands", and "nativist bigots" rhetoric. If the same standards of "journalism" were applied to 19th century western expansion Sitting Bull would have been a xenophobic, nativist race hater rather than a currently perceived noble defender of his territory and way of life.

I try to get past cultural legend to find the truth within its setting.

For example, during my childhood there were all the books, movies, and stories about the 19th century frontier filled with adulation of western bound people and a picture of the times which was romanticized and populated with heroes instead of regular people who had characters which were both faulty and extraordinary.

There is no perfect person.

The same is true of the general Mexican cultural version of history.

Jim Bowie was a hero of Santa Anna's Alamo massacre, an American cultural freedom fighter who's popular story blurred place and time in cultural legend. Jim Bowie of fact not only died in the ridiculous (maybe even stupid) defense of a cut off, isolated, non stratigic location (which Santa Anna could have bypassed and easily achieved victory) but was also a slave smuggling, land speculating drunkard who sometimes dispensed fraudulent land titles and who had no qualms about bribing the court. Bowie had both American and Mexican citizenship and was fluent in Spanish. And, the Alamo of the period was in Mexico until the beaten down revolution was won by a fluke - exploitation of an overconfident Santa Anna and his army sleeping in at San Jacinto. And, most of the fighting participation was done with a minority of the population.

Davy Crockett was a story telling failed eastern politician who came to Texas to reinvent himself, something different than the tales I absorbed as a child. The frontiersman schtick was largely a political gimmick employed back east (he did hunt and trap and had other woodland skills, nothing unusual for the times) and which subsequently became a major part of his legend.

Not all Anglos in Texas were for independence from Mexico, and there were Mexican Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston. Things were a lot more complicated than "us versus them" 180 years ago. There wasn't anything mentioned about the 1824 Mexican constitution or Mexican centralists and liberals when I was a kid. It's not a black and white tale either way

On the other hand, Pancho Villa is a Mexican hero with all the corridos, tales, and all the exaggeration of greatness to be expected from a national figure. The Villa of fact was a bipolar mass murderer who knew how to butter his bread with his base - until the butter ran out, his base abandoned him, and he turned on the base. He loved children and, being illiterate himself, sought to provide education. He was a curious mixture of generosity and malevolence. The man was an inveterate woman chaser and arranged a number of fraudulent marriages - which caused a lot of confusion and fighting after his death over who truly was his real wife. And, he could never learn that cavalry charges were futile against machine guns behind barbed wire.

Both Bowie and Villa would be rotting in jail if they were from our time in America and did the same things now.

I do a lot of reading and compare for similarities and differences of accounts. Naturally the writings of Californios Osio, Sepulveda, and Vallejo will have a general view which might be quite different than Fremont and Stanton's views. However, there will be some differences in the accounts of the Californios and one might fill in an unexplained part of another account. An individual account might not discuss something which might be embarrassing or maybe change the facts of an event. That's natural and to be expected of most eyewitnesses, and some parts of the accounts will be contradictory. And would the accounts be somewhat different if they had been written before and not, in some cases, decades after the Mexican American war?

I like professor David Weber's books on the Spanish and Mexican northern frontiers. The forwards and conclusions (to me) support the Chicano movimiento, but the pages in between contradict many of the fables and spins any number of ethnic studies professors throw out.

If someone talks about Mexicans herding cattle in Oregon before 1848 it's a false statement, didn't happen, and it casts suspicion on the work. Professor George Sanchez' book Becoming Mexican American seems to be an honest work - it's chock full of dry statistics and contains the priceless statement that when Mexicans moved into Los Angeles, the Californios moved out.

I don't think that many Mexican historians address the northern frontier much beyond the cultural grievances because it is such a black eye to the Mexican national consciousness.

I've gotten to where I read the notes of a book. I've found that some cherry pick their citations out of context to support their work, and I've seen one who extensively cites his own previous writings to support statements. A book I no longer have (written by a professor with a northern European surname) dishonestly alleges that racism was the founding principal in everything Anglo Americans accomplished or sought to accomplish from the Pilgrims to the present. It seems every other word in the book was either "racist" or "racism".

They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research.

A lot of books are biased either way. I do the best I can to sort through it all to reach a reasonable conclusion, and it isn't always comfortable to my previous beliefs. It seems that the more I learn, the more questions there are. It was much easier watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett on that old snowy black and white TV you had to thump on every now and then to make it work.

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Originally Posted by ilbegone

Addendum to the previous post:

I've always been somewhat interested in history and became more interested since about 2005 with all the marches, rallies and the media running to self appointed, racist Latino spokesmen for a whole race (regardless of nationality and individuality) for pulp fodder. It was a lopsided media narrative with all "the borders crossed us", "stolen lands", and "nativist bigots" rhetoric. If the same standards of "journalism" were applied to 19th century western expansion Sitting Bull would have been a xenophobic, nativist race hater rather than a currently perceived noble defender of his territory and way of life.

I try to get past cultural legend to find the truth within its setting.

For example, during my childhood there were all the books, movies, and stories about the 19th century frontier filled with adulation of western bound people and a picture of the times which was romanticized and populated with heroes instead of regular people who had characters which were both faulty and extraordinary.

There is no perfect person.

The same is true of the general Mexican cultural version of history.

Jim Bowie was a hero of Santa Anna's Alamo massacre, an American cultural freedom fighter who's popular story blurred place and time in cultural legend. Jim Bowie of fact not only died in the ridiculous (maybe even stupid) defense of a cut off, isolated, non stratigic location (which Santa Anna could have bypassed and easily achieved victory) but was also a slave smuggling, land speculating drunkard who sometimes dispensed fraudulent land titles and who had no qualms about bribing the court. Bowie had both American and Mexican citizenship and was fluent in Spanish. And, the Alamo of the period was in Mexico until the beaten down revolution was won by a fluke - exploitation of an overconfident Santa Anna and his army sleeping in at San Jacinto. And, most of the fighting participation was done with a minority of the population.

Davy Crockett was a story telling failed eastern politician who came to Texas to reinvent himself, something different than the tales I absorbed as a child. The frontiersman schtick was largely a political gimmick employed back east (he did hunt and trap and had other woodland skills, nothing unusual for the times) and which subsequently became a major part of his legend.

Not all Anglos in Texas were for independence from Mexico, and there were Mexican Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston. Things were a lot more complicated than "us versus them" 180 years ago. There wasn't anything mentioned about the 1824 Mexican constitution or Mexican centralists and liberals when I was a kid. It's not a black and white tale either way

On the other hand, Pancho Villa is a Mexican hero with all the corridos, tales, and all the exaggeration of greatness to be expected from a national figure. The Villa of fact was a bipolar mass murderer who knew how to butter his bread with his base - until the butter ran out, his base abandoned him, and he turned on the base. He loved children and, being illiterate himself, sought to provide education. He was a curious mixture of generosity and malevolence. The man was an inveterate woman chaser and arranged a number of fraudulent marriages - which caused a lot of confusion and fighting after his death over who truly was his real wife. And, he could never learn that cavalry charges were futile against machine guns behind barbed wire.

Both Bowie and Villa would be rotting in jail if they were from our time in America and did the same things now.

I do a lot of reading and compare for similarities and differences of accounts. Naturally the writings of Californios Osio, Sepulveda, and Vallejo will have a general view which might be quite different than Fremont and Stanton's views. However, there will be some differences in the accounts of the Californios and one might fill in an unexplained part of another account. An individual account might not discuss something which might be embarrassing or maybe change the facts of an event. That's natural and to be expected of most eyewitnesses, and some parts of the accounts will be contradictory. And would the accounts be somewhat different if they had been written before and not, in some cases, decades after the Mexican American war?

I like professor David Weber's books on the Spanish and Mexican northern frontiers. The forwards and conclusions (to me) support the Chicano movimiento, but the pages in between contradict many of the fables and spins any number of ethnic studies professors throw out.

If someone talks about Mexicans herding cattle in Oregon before 1848 it's a false statement, didn't happen, and it casts suspicion on the work. Professor George Sanchez' book Becoming Mexican American seems to be an honest work - it's chock full of dry statistics and contains the priceless statement that when Mexicans moved into Los Angeles, the Californios moved out.

I don't think that many Mexican historians address the northern frontier much beyond the cultural grievances because it is such a black eye to the Mexican national consciousness.

I've gotten to where I read the notes of a book. I've found that some cherry pick their citations out of context to support their work, and I've seen one who extensively cites his own previous writings to support statements. A book I no longer have (written by a professor with a northern European surname) dishonestly alleges that racism was the founding principal in everything Anglo Americans accomplished or sought to accomplish from the Pilgrims to the present. It seems every other word in the book was either "racist" or "racism".

They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research.

A lot of books are biased either way. I do the best I can to sort through it all to reach a reasonable conclusion, and it isn't always comfortable to my previous beliefs. It seems that the more I learn, the more questions there are. It was much easier watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett on that old snowy black and white TV you had to thump on every now and then to make it work.

"They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research"(quote)

Now that was funny!!!!