Opinion of the Republican Party (1854-1874)

[Mechaman]

Freedom Party, though probably less radical than being made out to be by some here..but in that time, in this country?

Yeah, Freedom Party for sure.

Pretty much this.

I would really hesitate to call it the "Greatest Party ever" given that the GOP had very pro-wealth elements in it even in the very beginning.  Lest us not forget this was the party of the Civil War Draft after all.

If anything, I would say that it was a very grey area party that was very naive about the nature of wage slavery.  Mainly that they thought it was something that would suddenly go away sometime in the late 19th century but was actually there to stay.

Still much more morally superior to the GOP that succeeded it though.

[Mechaman]

If anything, I would say that it was a very grey area party that was very naive about the nature of wage slavery.  Mainly that they thought it was something that would suddenly go away sometime in the late 19th century but was actually there to stay.

Do you reckon that this idea that wage-labor is a temporary condition for working men is still a fixture of the Republican Party?

ie hard-working men will advance in society, eventually reaching the point where they're able to start their own businesses, where they can then provide opportunities for more workers to advance themselves and do likewise.

Absolutely.

[Mechaman]

If anything, I would say that it was a very grey area party that was very naive about the nature of wage slavery.  Mainly that they thought it was something that would suddenly go away sometime in the late 19th century but was actually there to stay.

Do you reckon that this idea that wage-labor is a temporary condition for working men is still a fixture of the Republican Party?

ie hard-working men will advance in society, eventually reaching the point where they're able to start their own businesses, where they can then provide opportunities for more workers to advance themselves and do likewise.

Absolutely.

I did the one word response for a reason.   And that reason was pretension!

But seriously though, this idea that through hardwork all things are possible was at the very root of "Americanism" which was mostly just things that doo-righty Puritans believed and tried to force on the rest of the population.  It is something very unique about the American identity, though you could probably find similar phenomena elsewhere.  More to the point, in American conservatives have traditionally kept the population from getting restless by helping instill what I would like to call "the work guilt culture".

Also, a little bit of recommended reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Renegade-History-United-States-ebook/dp/B003L7874A/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413585354&sr=1-1&keywords=a+renegade+history+of+the+united+states

Many of the Revolutionaries were a bit disturbed by what they saw as "rampant immorality" and "slothiness".  This may shock many readers, but in Pre-Revolutionary America things like homosexuality, transsexuality, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexually liberated women, interracial sexual relationships outside of marriage, and people who worked whenever the hell they wanted to and their bosses could do nothing about it were pretty common.  They then set about promoting a society whereby if you dont' bust your ass you're a bad American.  This was at the heart of American Conservatism of the time, which went out of it's way to portray people like drunks, prostitutes, the Irish, Catholics, single women, blacks, Jews, pirates, bar owners, and the whole multitudes of "uncouth" peoples as "lazy" and "sexually immoral".  Many abolitionists, in the Republican Party and other parties, actually thought this way (which isn't to say it was an entirely conservative movement, far from it actually it demonstrates how diverse the coalition was when you digest comments by TNF and other posters) which kind of explains why you saw significant numbers of abolitionists in socially conservative movements like the Temperance Movement and the Know Nothings at the time.

So yes, I do believe that it's been a fundamental belief of Republicanism since it's foundation.  It was a party that understood the plight of the enslaved blackman but could never understand the anger of the impoverished Irishman.  No matter how many of them were pen pals of Marx.

[Mechaman]

Besides Lincoln, good

Why would someone think that Lincoln is worse than any other Republican of this era?  

It's possible.

The conservative Republicans were very wary of racial equality and harmony and only reluctantly backed the Emancipation Proclamation and other ideas out of the notion that Lincoln was using those to help end the war.

The radicals, by contrast, wanted total equality of blacks with whites and at the same time wanted to use the war and Reconstruction to basically destroy the South.

Lincoln I believe was probably in the middle of these two but leaned conservative.  I think what many "libertarian" posters dislike about Lincoln is this perception that he was truly not committed to the idea of racial equality (let me point out that this was the mid 19th century, I doubt even some of the people we like to proclaim as "radicals" were fully committed to the idea) and still got us into the Civil War on very dubious circumstances (ie a Confederate attack on a Union fort located just outside of Charleston, South Carolina) without abolition as the main goal for several years.

In other words, they are being very choosy and dare I even say "politically correct" with the "anybody but Lincoln!" approach.  Grant, the president who would later strongly endorse the 15th Amendment, at one point in the war said something to the effect of "if I found out the war was being waged over slavery, I'd give my sword to the other side."  Unlike Lincoln though, Grant had quite a bit of time to develop more into a supporter of racial equality, whereas Lincoln only had the last few years of his life.  It thus becomes easier for libertarians and others to judge Lincoln because his record on abolitionism was kind of mediocre and he tried to avoid the slavery issue for about half of his first term.  You could probably find a few other Republicans of the time (especially those who were in the more conservative wing) who were very skeptical about racial equality and whose abolitionist views on the matter were "move them to Liberia".  Call it a great reluctance to accept that the early GOP was a very wide tent so they lay the burden of blame on Lincoln who if anything had the unenviable task of balancing the interests of arguably radically different ideologues in his own party before having to deal with the incensed Democratic outrage against the entire war happening in the first place.

Call it the "he got us into a war and he wasn't even a devout anti-racist!!!!" logic.  That, and there is a certain libertarian impulse to take down presidents (except for Jefferson) who are universally loved by historians.  I certainly do not believe that there is racism or anti-black feelings among many libertarians like some have suggested, just that they do not truly understand racism or how devout the South was in keeping their slaves.  This goes back to their whole ideology about the "invisible hand" or how people don't do things if there is an inherent disadvantage or cost associated with it.  Well, slavery wasn't actually very efficient at all (many of the slaves goofed off at work whenever the whipping boys were away and many decided to occasionally walk off the plantation for weeks on end if they grew tired of it, etc. etc.) but Southern governments, landowners, and others still strongly defended it out of white supremacy.  This is the result of a revisionist narrative that casts the South as some sort of free trading libertarian minded paradise instead of the very authoritarian tyrannical area that it really was at the time.  That the Confederates fired the first shot should be telling to many anti-war libertarians, but they seem too fixated on the location of Fort Sumter for some reason.  Basically "Lincoln didn't even like black people and he invaded the South!  He did it to protect the Northern Manufacturing base because he's an extreme corporatist fascist!"

My historical rants about White Anglo-Saxon Protestant privilege and the outright corporatist policies of the parties like the Federalists, the Whigs, and later the Republican Party are well known.  I find "liberals" who defend ideas like protectionism which had always had a very conservative motive behind some of the most hilarious people out there.  Then again, when you have "liberals" who defend tyrannical autocrats like Alex Hamilton, John Jay, John Adams, and the whole host of early nationalists, this should be no surprise.  Which is basically my way of saying, in more than a few sentences, that I feel little to no admiration for the heavy tariff system that greedy robber barons and proto-fascist nativists and supremacist protestant moralists fully supported.  That the GOP welcomed these people should tell you how "radical" the party truly was and how doomed any left wing movement in that party would inevitably become when their opponents had a vastly larger pool of resources to drown them out.
But sh*t, enough about that!

Anyway, even with all of the obvious and very real wrongs about economic nationalism that was promoted by Republicanism, it is an extreme historical dishonesty for many libertarians to try to tie it as more of a cause of the American Civil War than it actually was.  After all, when the administration of John Q Adams pushed the "Tariff of Abominations" there were very few Southern politicians crying out for secession.  Crippling tariffs, contrary to what many think, were not something that the American public highly approved of at the time.  Congress had actually signed in some pretty historically low tariffs at the time and the trend didn't seem like it was suddenly going to reverse because a party with a mainly economically nationalist agenda was elected.  The Morrill Tariff was as steep as it was and was passed with as much approval as it was mostly because there weren't enough Southern legislators to protest.  This arguably helped leave the entire tariff debate squarely in the hands of protectionists until about the time of Grover Cleveland.  Especially when the right to hold slaves was stated as a reason for seceded IN THE BLOODY CONSTITUTION OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA.

But enough for now.  I got to get ready for work.

[Mechaman]

I appreciate it Rockefeller GOP.

We do agree on very little I imagine, but I think there is a duty here to remind people that what people think now days were not what they thought back then.  I admit I have a very biased perspective, but in general I think you would agree that many northerners in the past were economic conservatives who supported business interests over populist enterprises.  I would argue it would only be later, when the North was subject to massive amounts of immigration from Ireland (though that was already happening by the time the GOP was founded), Scandinavia, and Southern and Eastern Europe, that the region drifted more towards the economic left.

And more to the point, that libertarians have a naive view of history.  Almost as naive as some of our red avatars and "light green" independents.  TNF and other leftists on here do have a strong grasp of history, but I sometimes think that they give too much weight to a few radicals and Karl Marx buddies when talking about subjects like this.  I do think the Republican Party at it's founding was very radical and that probably had to do with the amount of radical Free Soilers and anti-slavery Northern Democrats and German Marxists that joined it.  However, as time went on it like every other major party in US History eventually adopted a pretty pro-business wing by at least 1860.  It is a very inconvenient fact of history that a large number of northern businesses had a vest interest in the end of slavery, given that it would strengthen their pro-tariff politics.

That is why I'm posting here, lol.

[Mechaman]

I must say that I strongly disagree with attempts to paint Deus or other libertarian posters are anti-black or racists just because of their anti-war views.  It might be an unpopular position to hold, but if you are a devout enough pacifist or anti-war person you can be against the Civil War without being racist.  I strongly disagree with my good friend from New York, but I do not believe that his bias is the cause of a negative opinion about blacks.

Do I believe that a large number of people who thought the Civil War was an unjust war are actually racists?  Yes I do.  Do I believe that holds true for Deus or other forum libertarians?

Not enough evidence to convict.

[Mechaman]

I strongly believe that the Civil War was justified because of its role in ending slavery, but it is credible to argue that Northern and Republican motives for the war were often selfish and political, rather than simply based on the noble mission of freeing the slaves.  

As for the South, however, it's pretty clear that they seceded to keep black people in slavery.  While Northern motives may not have been completely moral, Southern motives were pretty much entirely based on keeping their way of life based on slavery and keeping blacks "in their place".  The war was ultimately a great thing for freeing the slaves, even if ending slavery wasn't the North's prime goal.

People who oppose the Civil War today are not automatically racist, but their interpretation of history is wrong, if they don't think the South seceded because of slavery.

For the record, this is the sane position.