I kept telling people that Frederick Douglas helped Lincoln’s campaign at a time when Lincoln couldn’t promise to end slavery. I got called every name in the book for suggesting that a less than perfect candidate was much better than an absolute fascist.
Related: a lot of our current problems have been festering for the last century+ since we didn’t finish the job after the civil war. If instead of helping the landowners who incited the rebellion rebuild plantations without slaves and subsidizing their production, if we ignored the financial and diplomatic repercussions and just hung the bastards and took their assets, it would have served a much stronger precedent and then maybe we wouldn’t have had organizations like Daughters of the Confederacy re-writing our textbooks for the last hundred fucking years. (My grandmother was one.)
I kept telling people that Frederick Douglas helped Lincoln’s campaign at a time when Lincoln couldn’t promise to end slavery. I got called every name in the book for suggesting that a less than perfect candidate was much better than an absolute fascist.
Related: a lot of our current problems have been festering for the last century+ since we didn’t finish the job after the civil war. If instead of helping the landowners who incited the rebellion rebuild plantations without slaves and subsidizing their production, if we ignored the financial and diplomatic repercussions and just hung the bastards and took their assets, it would have served a much stronger precedent and then maybe we wouldn’t have had organizations like Daughters of the Confederacy re-writing our textbooks for the last hundred fucking years. (My grandmother was one.)
Slavery never went away, they just became sharecroppers, which is a form of slavery.
SCOTUS ruled that sharecropping was a form of slavery in the 1960s. BTW, Clarence Thomas and Roberts want to overturn that ruling…