By Steven Jonas
Even before the end of the First Civil War the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution, which freed the slaves, was passed by
the Union Congress (although it was not fully ratified until the end of 1865). In 1868, the
14th Amendment was ratified. Among other things, it gave citizenship and
the right to vote to the former slaves.
While in the 11 former states of the Confederacy opposition to the
results and potential results of the Northern military victory began almost
immediately after the end of hostilities at Appomattox, that opposition really
took off, and became violent, after the ratification of the 14th. Because of course with citizenship came the
right to vote. And having former slaves
with the right to vote terrified the white ruling class in the South, and for
good reason. In the former Confederate states,
on the average, the former slave population amounted to about 35% of the total.
The Ku Klux Klan was
only one of a number of violence-prone organizations that was formed in the
former Confederacy almost immediately after the end of the War. After the passage of the 14th, one
of their major targets in terrorizing former slaves was the free vote. They had good reason for such a concern, for
during Reconstruction, numbers of former slaves were elected to a wide variety
of offices in those states. Following
the end of Reconstruction, as is well-known, voting rights, along with many
other rights, were very quickly eliminated for former slaves. "Jim Crow" was well in place by the
1880s. And as is well known was kept in
place until the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts on the mid-1960.
During Reconstruction, the reconstructed Democratic
Party, which formerly represented the Southern States, was the principal
opponent of it in national politics. But
following the election of 1876, when the Republican Party made a deal with the
Southern States to end Reconstruction in return for stealing the election from
a Democrat (no less) who had pledged to maintain Reconstruction, (yes, there
have been stolen elections more than once in U.S. history), the Republican
Party very quickly also became a party concerned with "the others" making their way
into citizenship and thus the voting population.
This should come as no surprise (although it does
to most U.S.). For one of the founding
members of the political coalition that became the Republican Party in 1856 was
the American Party (popularly known as the "Know-Nothings), led at the time by
a former Whig, former U.S. President, Millard Fillmore. The American Party was built on xenophobia,
at that time aimed at Irish and German immigrants. So, xenophobia (see of course Donald Trump)
is nothing new for the Repubs. It surfaced
again in the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882, and then again of course in the much more well-known Immigration
Act of 1924. The latter was aimed
at Roman Catholics (especially those from Southern Europe) generally and
specifically at Italians, as well as Jews and other Eastern Europeans. (Isn't it ironic that the three leading
Republican xenophobes now are Donald Trump, of German ancestry, Sean Hannity
[Irish], and Rudy Giuliani [Italian].)
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Source: OpEdNews
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