Friday, March 9, 2018

A House Divided.

We would do well to pay heed to the old enmities bubbling up in our politics: it is not that we are on the verge of another civil war, but that the Civil War never truly ended. With the exception of slavery itself, what divided the United States then divides us still today.”

These are the words of Manisha Sinha, historian of the Abolitionist movement and the Civil War. 

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/06/todays-eerie-echoes-of-the-civil-war/

Interesting to note, though, that while the divisions are pretty much the same, the positions of both major US parties have done a 180 degree switch.  In the 1860s, the Democratic Party was the party of the southern slaveholders and their conservative northern allies (“doughfaces”) while the Republicans were liberal on abolition and the political rights of black Americans.

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