Author Topic: Thaddeus Stevens  (Read 342 times)

90sRetroFan

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Thaddeus Stevens
« on: October 22, 2021, 10:30:53 pm »
Our anti-American enemies supply us with an article about a true American:

https://www.amren.com/features/2021/10/adored-now-for-what-he-was-once-hated/

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I can think of no white man who was once reviled for racial views but is now honored for them, but a prime candidate would be Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens.

Before we continue, I would just like to clarify that Stevens should not be considered "white" in the first place. Not only was his political allegiance not to "whiteness", but also he (as far as we know) never reproduced. (This is also why Hitler should not be considered "white" either, but I digress.)

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When he died in 1868, the New York Times wrote that he “had so fostered hatred of the nation’s [Confederate] enemies, that he refused, even in their helplessness, to extend the fraternal hand,” adding that his “measures were unjust.”

Historian Lloyd Paul Stryker wrote in a 1929 book that Stevens was a “horrible old man . . . craftily preparing to strangle the bleeding, broken body of the South,” and that Stevens thought it would be “a beautiful thing” to see “the white men, especially the white women of the South, writhing under negro domination.” In his bestselling The Epic of America, published in 1931, historian James Adams called him “the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to power in America.”
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The old state constitution was vague on whether blacks could vote, and Stevens insisted that propertied blacks be given the franchise, just like whites. This was voted down and a new constitution denying blacks the vote was approved by referendum.

By 1836, Stevens had become a fervent and open abolitionist, saying that “the domestic slavery of this country is the most disgraceful institution that the world had ever witnessed.” He believed that the Constitution barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the states, but was one of very few to claim that it had the power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, even against the wishes of white citizens residents.
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The Compromise of 1850 included fugitive slave laws that required free states to help catch runaway property. Stevens urged defiance of the laws, and in 1851 acted as defense counsel for a group of blacks and whites who had killed a slaveowner who had come for his property. This outraged many in both South and North. Whigs drove him out of the party, and he failed to win reelection in 1852.

He switched parties again, and joined the American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, because he appears to have doubted whether Catholics could be good citizens. However, after he learned that most ethnic immigrants opposed slavery, he dropped nativist views. In 1858, Stevens returned to Washington as a Pennsylvania congressman, this time as a member of the short-lived Union Party, a mix of Republicans and Know Nothings. He campaigned not only on abolition but on giving the vote to women.

Stevens was thrilled by John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. He said that Brown “deserved to be hung for being a hopeless fool” for his “attempt to capture Virginia with seventeen men,” adding that Brown should have known “that it would require at least twenty-five.” Within a week of Brown’s execution, he was calling for publication of Brown’s last statements, letters, interviews: “I know nothing that would be more read or do more good.” In a speech on the floor of Congress about Brown, he insulted the South in such vile language that it had to be sanitized in the Congressional Record.
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When the war broke out, Stevens was 69, but the fight seemed to rejuvenate him. In July 1861, he became head of the Ways and Means Committee, and never failed to vote money to support a war that he saw as a way to make blacks equal to whites and punish the South.
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Stevens had no time for legal niceties. He scoffed at the “puerile inconsistency” of people who would “send forth your sons and brothers to shoot and saber and bayonet the insurgents,” but who “hesitate to break the bonds of their slaves.”
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From the beginning, Stevens wanted all slaves freed, armed, and turned against their masters: “The slaves ought to be incited to insurrection and give the rebels a taste of real civil war.” This shocked many whites. Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury denounced any attempt “to elevate the miserable ****” and make a soldier of him. The New York Times wrote: “the enrollment of negroes in the military service in such states as South Carolina and Georgia would, of course, mean nothing else than a determination to exterminate the white population in those states.” The article added that Southerners might accept defeat at the hands of white union soldiers, “but to expect them to submit quietly to the rule of their own slaves, armed by our own Government and quartered in their midst, is an error, the folly of which is only exceeded by the devilish malignity that suggests it.”
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In the West, as the Army marched East to fight the Confederacy, Indians moved into the vacuum and, in some cases, pushed settlers back hundreds of miles. Stevens said that any resulting bloodshed was the fault of “bad white men.” He also opposed legislation that would have limited Chinese immigration.

After Appomattox, Stevens wanted “to inflict condign punishment on the rebel belligerents” and to treat the Confederate states as conquered territory, unprotected by the Constitution, subjected only to the laws of war.

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Stevens repeatedly introduced bills to seize the property of ex-Confederates and give it to blacks. Anything left over would be sold to the highest bidder to pay pensions to Union soldiers. There were other radical Republicans, but even without Southern representation in Congress, no majority supported such harsh vengeance.
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Republican moderates were much more interested in reconciling with Southern whites with whom they wanted peace and harmony rather than in punishment and revolution. Even abolitionists were disturbed by black rule in the South.

Which is precisely why democracy is the problem. Imagine if Stevens had been a monarch!

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The Reconstruction Act of 1867 put the US Army in control of 10 Southern states, but then-President Andrew Johnson refused to order the depredations the radicals wanted. Already, in the previous year, angry at Johnson’s lenient treatment of the South, Stevens had been preparing for impeachment. He admitted that his motives were “wholly political,” and that Johnson need not have committed any crime, much less the “high crimes and misdemeanors” called for in the Constitution.

After several failed attempts, on February 24, 1868 Stevens persuaded Congress to vote articles of impeachment on the theory that the president had violated the Tenure of Office Act by firing his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. By then, Stevens’s health was failing, and he had to be carried around Congress in a chair. He was one of the managers of the impeachment trial, but was so weak he spoke only three times. The New York Herald described him:

    face of corpselike color, and rigidly twitching lips … a strange and unearthly apparition — a reclused remonstrance from the tomb … the very embodiment of fanaticism, without a solitary leaven of justice or mercy … the avenging Nemesis of his party — the sworn and implacable foe of the Executive of the nation.

On May 21, conviction in the Senate failed by a just one vote. However, it is important to remember that most Southern states had not yet been readmitted to Congress, and Republicans had a huge minority. Johnson was saved by Republican defectors who thought Congress was abusing its power. Stevens was carried from the Senate — an observer called him “black with rage and disappointment” – and shouted, “The country is going to the devil.”

He has been proven prescient:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/red-coup/

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A dying but undaunted Stevens drafted new articles of impeachment, but the House refused to adopt them. As Southern states were readmitted, Stevens proposed a bill to break up Texas into several parts so that the additional Republican senators could help vote Johnson out. The New York Herald wrote that “it is lamentable to see this old man, with one foot in the grave, pursuing the President with such vindictiveness.”

Stevens did not live out the year, dying on August 11, 1868.
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“on the subject of Reconstruction, then, Mr. Stevens must be deemed the Evil Genius of the Republican Party.” Moderates considered his death “an emancipation for the Republican Party” because it ended his vindictive influence.

And look what the GOP has turned into today, precisely because it has lacked people with the moral fortitude to demand accountability for treason.

What our enemies think of Stevens:

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He would stop at nothing in the name of blacks and wanted to crush whites who stood in his way. It is easy to imagine him teaching critical race theory, bellowing “black lives matter,” and finding “white supremacy” everywhere. He had the perfect personality for it: indignant, uncompromising, nourished by hate.

I agree with our enemies' assessment. This is the kind of leftist we need more of. See also:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/true-left-breakthrough-hate/
« Last Edit: August 12, 2023, 12:13:22 pm by 90sRetroFan »

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Zea_mays

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Re: Thaddeus Stevens
« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2021, 02:57:32 pm »
This is basically National Socialism:
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But it is said that if we hold out this thing, they will never submit—that we cannot conquer them—that they will suffer themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more than any other; but if they hold this language, and the means which they have suggested must be resorted to, if their whole country must be laid waste, and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, sir, reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be repeopled by a band of freemen [freed slaves] than to see them perpetrate the destruction of this people through our agency. -Thaddeus Stevens
https://archive.org/details/sim_united-states-congress-congressional-globe_1861-08-05_26/page/414/mode/2up


Stevens had some other quotes which seem relevant to the treason going on today:
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Least of all would I reproach the South. I honor her courage and fidelity. Even in a bad, a wicked cause, she shows a united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human bondage, because it is their cause. But the North - the poor, timid, mercenary, driveling North - has no such united defenders of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty. None of the bright lights of the nation shine upon her section. Even her own great men have turned her accusers. She is the victim of low ambition - an ambition which prefers self to country, personal aggrandizement to the high cause of human liberty. She is offered up a sacrifice to propitiate southern tyranny - to conciliate southern treason. -Thaddeus Stevens, 1850.

(Just like today, the traitors are high energy and those who claim to oppose them are hopelessly low energy. At least in the 1860s we had a real president to stand up to them.)


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We are told that because the Constitution does not allow us to confiscate a certain species of property, therefore we cannot liberate slaves. Mr. Speaker, I thought the time had come when the laws of war were to govern our action; when constitutions, if they stood in the way of the laws of war in dealing with the enemy, had no right to intervene. Who pleads the Constitution against our proposed action? Who says the Constitution must come in, in bar of our action? It is the advocates of rebels, of rebels who have sought to overthrow the Constitution and trample it in the dust; who repudiate the Constitution. Sir, these rebels, who have disregarded and set at defiance that instrument, are, by every rule of municipal and international law, estopped from pleading it against our action. Who, then, is it that comes to us and says, "you cannot do this thing, because your Constitution does not permit it?" The Constitution! Our Constitution, which you repudiate and trample under foot, forbids it! Sir, this is an absurdity. -Thaddeus Stevens, 1861

(This reminds me of all the idiotic debates on discussion forums that Republicans "didn't really commit treason as outlined in the Constitution, because that only applies to working with nations we have declared war on, and therefore we can't punish them". ...The oaths members of Congress have to take clearly include both "foreign enemies" and "domestic enemies", and hence make this interpretation idiotic.

I think people who repeat this are misinterpreting what Chief Justice john Marshall said in 1807. What Marshall was saying is that conspiracy [i.e. a plan] to commit treason is a separate crime from carrying out the actual treason. In the court case in 1807, it was determined actual treason was not committed, merely the conspiracy. But, with the Insurrection, we have both the conspiracy [i.e. the inside job] and the actual assembling and carrying out of the treason.

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“However flagitious may be the crime of conspiring to subvert by force the government of our country, such conspiracy is not treason. To conspire to levy war, and actually to levy war, are distinct offences. The first must be brought into open action by the assemblage of men for a purpose treasonable in itself, or the fact of levying war cannot have been committed. So far has this principle been carried, that . . . it has been determined that the actual enlistment of men to serve against the government does not amount to levying war.” Chief Justice Marshall was careful, however, to state that the Court did not mean that no person could be guilty of this crime who had not appeared in arms against the country. “On the contrary, if war be actually levied, that is, if a body of men be actually assembled for the purpose of effecting by force a treasonable purpose, all those who perform any part, however minute, or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as traitors. But there must be an actual assembling of men, for the treasonable purpose, to constitute a levying of war.”
[...]
As a result of the Whiskey Rebellion, convictions of treason were obtained on the basis of the ruling that forcible resistance to the enforcement of the revenue laws was a constructive levying of war.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-3/section-3/clause-1/treason-clause-doctrine-and-practice

Anyway, the difference between Stevens's day and ours is, this time, the Constitution is very clear on what to do. The 14th Amendment says traitors who support insurrection must be removed from Congress. The Constitution also clearly says what the punishment for treason is.)