The more things change …

In 1856, Senator Sumner from Massachusetts gave a mocking speech meant to ridicule slave owning Democrats. Democrats would have none of it. They puffed up with sanctimony and called Sumner’s speech “self-righteously insolent.” They believed slavery a general good and a Republican had no right to challenge their narrative. A day or so later, Congressman Preston Brooks waltzed into the Senate chamber and marched up to Senator Sumner and blindsided him with his cane. Southern senators could have stopped him, but instead watched as he beat Sumner on the head with all his might.

Sumner was sent to the hospital and suffered incapacitation for nearly five years. Brooks was quoted as saying that it was fortuitous that he caught Sumner in “a helpless attitude” because Sumner had superior strength and if mindful, he would have needed to shoot him with his revolver.

The entire South applauded and exulted Brooks for his bravery. When Republican Congressman Burlingame chastised Brooks for his brutish behavior, Brooks challenged Burlingame to a duel. Challenges to duels then became a craze as Southerners taunted anyone brave enough to speak out against slavery.

By 1858, slavery’s extension into the territories no longer appeared imminent. In the 1916 biography Abraham Lincoln, Lord Charnwood wrote that Republicans saw “no harm in shifting towards some less provocative principle on which more people at the moment might agree. Confronted with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a united South whose leaders were accustomed to make the Union government go which way they chose and had no disposition to compromise in the least.” Lincoln objected to being forced to accept morally wrong principles, so he refused to espouse the accepted cant that slavery was a general good. Charnwood gave this as the reason why establishment Republicans initially fought Lincoln’s candidacy.

It seems, after more than one hundred and sixty years, nothing has changed in either party’s behavior. Yesterday, I saw a photograph of a person in front of the Supreme Court proudly holding a sign that said, “Abortion is good for Everyone.” 

Replace the word abortion with slavery and the slogan is identical to the Democratic Party catchphrase in 1858.