On a day celebrating the expansion of civil rights for all, Martin Luther King Day, in a week that will see our republic supplant the first black president with a bombastic white Republican businessman it is worthy reviewing the two institutions of the presidency and what sparked the civil rights movements of Reverend King's time, slavery. 

We come into Donald Trump's presidency a deeply divided nation.  As in all recent elections, over 90% of the black population have been voting for Democratic candidates.  One would think that they vote in such solidarity because the Democratic party best secures their self-interests, yet it always has seemed to me that such a view is mostly delusional and ill-founded. 

Much of the policies and dogma of modern progressive/liberal thought look to support and grow the government, with a goal of making individuals work hard towards making everybody eventually  dependent on government-- a new type of slavery, if you will, where the individual is suppressed for the overall betterment of a few lords with official posts. 

The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson and has a dark history regarding slavery and basic civil rights for all, contrarily the Republican Party, and their first President Abraham Lincoln, represented the antithesis of their ethos.  This is an undeniable fact of history. 

And while some may look at the progression of those parties since their founding and say their roles have changed over the years, which is hard to refute, their basic tenets still seem to hold.  Beyond the self-serving rhetoric of both, those arguing for liberty for all and a colorblind society nowadays tend to be Republicans.  Those arguing for liberty for some, for benefits for others, and for oppression/suppression of others, tend to be Democrat.  These beliefs are consistent over nearly two hundred years and have changed very little.

Democrat plantation owners of the nineteenth century provided for their slaves much like Democrat politicians offer their black constituents today, with the added bonus of not having to work sixteen hours a day out in the fields.  All that is required is political support when needed, whether to vote, protest, or do whatever it takes to promote the cause of the day.   

In full disclosure, I eschew the current direction of both parties, yet see the only saving graces for a free society in certain members and policies of the Republican Party.  I look on the ascension of Donald Trump as president with a bit of trepidation, his views are not often precise, clear, or directed, and so it's difficult to know what's going to happen. 

However, the direction our country would have went with a president who would have carried on with the current trend would have been disastrous.  This is a lesson of history, and why those who consider themselves members of the Democratic Party, especially those who are familiar with the true legacy of freedom espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, should take note of. 

Supporting a strong central government with both the power to reward and punish millions of individuals at their whim is little different than supporting a strong plantation owner with hundreds of slaves at his direction.  Here is a history of the Democratic Party and their presidents before the Civil War starting with Old Hickory himself, the spiritual leader of that party until his death, during which the republic won and abolished slavery-- at least until it was resurrected in a different form. 

Andrew Jackson:  During Jackson's political life the issue of slavery was rather dormant, having been many years settled after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were passed and many years before the issue would come to the front forcing the Civil War.  Jackson's support of the institution is therefore seen largely in the way he lived his life and his political battles. 

From the deep south, Jackson never spoke out against slavery.  To the contrary, he profited and prospered from it, owning a cotton plantation that may have utilized up to 300 slaves.  In his military actions, he participated in military actions that tended to add slave-friendly territory to the map.  Famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said:  "Jackson has to own that he owes his farm on the banks of the Mobile to the strong arm of the negro."

Jackson's presidential actions never confronted the issue of profits vs. human misery and freedom inequity, he strongly advocated the addition of Texas as a slave state.  When he died, he had over a hundred slaves  who were busy working his property without just compensation.  His family and his own life were built off of the money that he received through the sweat of slaves processing his cotton crops. 

Martin Van Buren:  President Van Buren succeeded Jackson to the presidency, but out of political expediency he did not support the annexation of Texas.  Although he considered slavery immoral, he thought it was totally sanctioned by the Constitution-- a position held by many modern day Democrats on the issue of abortion. 

He was against its abolition both in D.C. and in the United States altogether, and said so in his Inaugural Address in 1837: "I believed it a solemn duty fully to make known my sentiments in regard to it [slavery], and now, when every motive for misrepresentation has passed away, I trust that they will be candidly weighed and understood.... I must go into the Presidential chair with the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding States, and also with a determination equally decided to resist the slightest interference with it in the States where it exists."

The Van Buren administration also proved itself particularly hostile to Native Americans.  Federal policy under Andrew Jackson had sought, through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, to move all Indian peoples to lands west of the Mississippi River. Continuing this policy, Van Buren supported further removals after his election in 1836. The federal government supervised the removal of the Cherokee people in 1838, a forced stagger west to the Mississippi in which a full quarter of the Cherokee nation died.  The opposing party of the time, the Whigs, criticized this conduct.

James K. Polk:  During Polk's presidency, four years after Van Buren left office, many abolitionists harshly criticized him as an instrument of the "Slave Power," and claimed that the expansion of slavery lay behind his support for the annexation of Texas and later war with Mexico.

Polk was a slaveholder for almost his entire adult life. His father Samuel left title to over 8,000 acres of land and about 53 slaves to his widow and his children. James inherited control over nine of his father's slaves, either directly or from deceased brothers. In 1831, he became an absentee cotton planter, sending slaves to clear plantation land that his father had left him near Somerville, Tennessee.

Three years later he sold his Somerville plantation and, together with his brother-in-law, bought 920 acres of land, a cotton plantation near Coffeeville, Mississippi. He ran this plantation for the rest of his life, eventually taking it over completely from his brother-in-law.  Polk sought to hide from public knowledge the fact that, while he was president, he was secretly buying as many slaves as his plantation revenues permitted. By the time of his death in 1849, he had more than fifty slaves that became the property of his wife.

Franklin Pierce:  Four years after Polk left office, Pierce took over, a New England politician who actually had a southern perspective on the slave issue.  President Pierce’s inaugural address vowed to defend slavery, stressing his conviction “that involuntary servitude as it exists in different states of this Confederacy, is recognized by the constitution. I believe that it stands like any other admitted right, . . .”.

Fulfilling a campaign pledge, President Franklin Pierce vigorously enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1854, after Anthony Burns, who had escaped from slavery in Virginia, was recaptured in Boston there was a popular outcry against his return to slavery. The United States marshal in the city requested federal troops to guarantee that Burns would remain in custody. Pierce unhesitatingly responded that the “law must be enforced” and ordered the official to “incur any expense of the law.” Dispatched a ship to transport the captive back to Virginia, Pierce was later termed “the chief slave catcher of the United States.”

While violence in the Missouri territory continued to escalate President Pierce came down hard on the anti-slavery forces in a speech January 24, 1856 criticizing them for toiling with “misdirected zeal in the attempt to propagate their social theories by the perversion and abuse of the powers of Congress.”  Pierce would recognize the Lecompton pro-slavery government which stood arrayed against the town of Lawrence that the anti-slavery forces made as their base.

James Buchanan:  Immediately succeeding Pierce of whom he mirrored many views (and background since he was a northerner from Pennsylvania), Buchanan called the territorial issue of slavery “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” in his inaugural address.  By the end of his term, the nation was about to start the Civil War.  He too was a northerner with southern sentiments, peppering his policy and cabinet liberally with southern proslavery ideas and people.

Two days into his term, the Dred Scott decision was made by the Supreme Court asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to exclude slavery in the territories, which bolstered Buchanan's views.  In his third annual state of the union message, Buchanan claimed that slaves were "treated with kindness and humanity.... Both the philanthropy and the self-interest of the master have combined to produce this humane result." 

Like Pierce he would recognize the Lecompton pro-slavery Constitution in 'Bleeding Kansas', until Congress ordered another election due to irregularities. This time the proslavery forces boycotted the process, allowing the antislavery forces to claim victory by defeating the document.  Towards the end of his term, Buchanan was saddled from taking any action against plans of secession of the south by the strength of the pro-slavery factions of his cabinet he picked. 

These five pre-Civil War presidents illustrated that the institution of slavery was rooted deep in the heart of the Democratic Party in the early years, even in those presidents from the north where slavery was out of fashion.  The party has definitely changed, going from a party that no respectable black person would vote for, to one that hardly any would vote against. 

The reason this has occurred is not hard to deduce.  Despite the work of Lincoln and his Republican colleagues after the Civil War to grant blacks the rights they are entitled to, they did not promise them extra rights or privileges as the other party has sought to do at the expense of everybody else through the social programs of FDR, LBJ and BHO. 

Most government programs seeking to level the racial playing field at this stage will work only to grow an already repressive government and promote an underlying racism that appears to be the major cash crop that modern Democrats cultivate. 

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Excellent work X. I'm afraid the Demcratswill be a force to be reckoned with far into the future. Having indoctrinated generations of school children with progressive Ideology plus the liberal propagandizing of colleges and the never ending support and spreading of lies by the media the leftists have managed to spread their deceptive agenda and have swayed fully one half of the Americans to their side of the political spectrum.

The Ludington Torch is dedicated to freedom and truth, and we will sometimes have to shed light and hurt feelings of groups that are dedicated to achieving the opposite goal.  It's ironic that modern-day Democrats will always go for polarization by saying that Republicans are enemies of those of the wrong color or the wrong gender.  History says otherwise, the civil rights wars of the 1860s and the 1960s to free and realize equal opportunities for all were widely supported by the Republican Party, widely unsupported by the Democrats. 

While Democrats try to portray Republicans having a war on women, they fail to recount their sad history concerning women's suffrage.   Most educated Americans vaguely remember that the amendment granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920. But the number of people who know anything about the forty-year legislative war that preceded that victory is too small.

That war began in 1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress.  The Republicans continued to introduce the 19th Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before allowing either chamber to vote on it. In 1887 it finally reached the floor of the Senate.

Once again, however, it was defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates of women’s suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote. This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of the new century, several other states gave women the vote, including Washington and California.

Congress, however, didn’t deign to vote on the issue again until 1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats. It was subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House, where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again in early 1918.

The big break for 19th Amendment came when President Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise. Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.

The Republicans fought a war for women much like they fought a war for blacks, this is the historical record.  They need to be given credit for it occasionally, not let modern-day Democrats disparage them for not giving them (or government) unequal privileges for their own political gain.  I agree with perhaps the greatest Democrat who ever served as president, however, that one should not ascribe either party as the solution without seeing their solutions in the first place:

There is no JFK in the Democrat Party of today. He would be scorned and ridiculed for being too conservative in most thoughts and actions. Now it's the party of pure idiocy and partisanship that they have cornered the market on. Responsibility for a mutually positive USA future is lost and forgotten.

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Thanks for coming onto the website with an open mind and other open perceptive organs. 

It is always great to hear compliments and praise, but (and this goes to every member) be sure to also feel free to do your own research, add your own life experiences, and constructively disagree when the need arises.  Thought provocation is not a crime here, it's a blessed event, and a well-fertilized argument can sometimes grow to epic proportions reaching out to Houghton, Highland Park and beyond.

Thanks IHAVEANOTION for your excellent observations and analysis. You are a member that really thinks and is open minded in your posts, which many newbies refuse to do. I don't think there are any other Ludington blogs that resemble such informative and provocative information. And as you and others have stated, X does a remarkable job of informing with accuracy and links to prove his points. Feel free to invite any others that are of your understanding and intelligence. RightMichigan.com is also another blog that might be of interest, thanks.

The Democrats are relying on three important factors to get them elected: Illegal aliens and dead voters, die-hard Dems. that will never change their voting, and people, kids, that expect everything to be free, without working for it. That either has to change this time around, or we are ALL Doomed to that end.

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