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.