Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (9 page)

THE EVIDENCE DISAPPEARS

Jackson’s real estate shenanigans became a hot topic in his 1828 presidential campaign. Even earlier, in 1824, his opponents suspected him of profiting from political office but they were unable to produce convincing evidence. By 1828, however, Jackson’s critics had gotten smarter and more determined. Jackson, however, was ready for them. On December 4, 1827, a fire broke out in the building containing Jackson’s financial papers. Conveniently, all the original records of his earlier land dealings were destroyed.
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Jackson professed his innocence, and again, no one could prove he was behind the fire. The whole situation, however, bears an uncanny
resemblance to Hillary Clinton deleting her emails. Oops! They’re gone! And now we will never have full information about why she set up her private email account and what she wanted to keep out of the official State Department email system. Hillary might have thought she was being original, but Jackson got there first. Just like his twenty-first-century counterpart, Jackson deleted the evidence that his critics might have used to incriminate him.

Thanks to his land-stealing schemes, Jackson went from living in a log cabin to running a huge plantation stretching over a thousand acres. In 1819, he and Rachel moved out of their log house and built a mansion that still stands today, with a spectacular white colonnade front that awed visitors then as it does now. As for the old log cabin, Jackson found another use for it. What good is a plantation if you don’t have slaves? Jackson converted his former dwelling into slave quarters.

Jackson had been a slave owner since his early days as a young lawyer in Tennessee. His first slave was a woman named Nancy. The record of the sale notes that “Andrew Jackson Esquire” took ownership of “a Negro Woman about Eighteen or Twenty Years of Age.”
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Later, as Jackson grew rich and his real estate multiplied, he bought slaves to work that land. Altogether, Jackson owned some three hundred slaves over the course of his life. The most he owned at any one time was 150 slaves.

This made him a large slave owner by American standards. By contrast with the South American plantations, American plantations were typically quite small, employing fewer than twenty slaves. Jackson was also a slave trader, a practice disparaged by most slave owners. In one telling incident, Jackson purchased an ad in a local paper offering a bounty for one of his runaway slaves. Jackson offered a $50 reward for the return of the slave “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him to the amount of three hundred.”
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Eventually Jackson rode his wealth and popularity all the way to the White House. In 1824, the first time Jackson ran, all the candidates were from a single party, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. There was at the time no system of primaries to determine who should get the nomination. Although Jackson won the most votes, he was
outmaneuvered by an adversary, Henry Clay, who steered the presidency to John Quincy Adams.

An indignant Jackson and his supporters formed the Democratic Party, while his opponents coalesced into a rival Whig Party. These were the two parties that dominated American politics for the next few decades, until the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party was founded. The Whigs, led by the stalwart Henry Clay, provided modest though largely ineffective resistance to Jackson. Until the founding of the Republican Party, however, there was no party in America strong enough to stop the thieving Democrats.

The Jackson Democrats won by an electoral landslide in 1828. A central plank of Jackson’s campaign was Indian removal. In defending this policy, Jackson suggested his actions promoted the welfare of the Indians. He spoke of “preserving this much-injured race” by placing them under government protection “free from the mercenary influence of white men.” To listen to Jackson, one might think he was relocating the Indians for their own good.

At the same time, speaking to Democratic audiences, Jackson supporters made their case for Indian removal in terms that didn’t shy away from bigotry. Jackson ally Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan territory, said of the Indians, “To roam the forests at will, to pursue their game, to attack their enemies, to spend the rest of their lives in listless indolence, and to be ready at all times to die—these are the principal occupations of an Indian.”
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Upon taking office, Jackson instructed his allies in Congress to draw up the Indian Removal Act. The legislation gave Jackson the power to offer land west of the Mississippi to Indian tribes. The Indians were expected to give up their land in the east for new land in the west, and Congress appropriated money to pay for their moving expenses. Theoretically the Indians were being asked to move by choice, but in reality they were being pushed out. Settlers stood ready to occupy Indian lands whether the Indians voluntarily gave them up or not.

Although there was no Republican Party around at the time to stop Jackson, there were many who opposed Jackson’s Indian policy. One of
them was Jackson’s former ally Davy Crockett. “Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself,” Crockett confessed. Jackson’s minions threatened that Crockett would suffer politically for his opposition. Even so, Crockett stood firm, condemning Jackson’s Indian policy as “wicked” and “unjust” and “oppression with a vengeance.”
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While most of the Indians got the message and started packing, the Cherokees refused to go. The Cherokee position was that it didn’t matter what Congress decided. The Cherokee were a separate nation with their own written constitution. They were protected by a slew of treaties with the United States government going back generations. The Cherokees appealed their cause to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the decision was handed down by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.

Marshall conceded that European settlers had gained control of much of the United States and that the right of U.S. citizens to occupy the land of the country was “conceded by the world.” Still, Marshall said, there was no evidence that the Cherokee Nation had relinquished its right to the lands it still possessed. Congress had expressly affirmed those rights through treaties dating back to 1778. Certainly the Indians, lacking power to enforce their rights, were now under the protection of the United States. Even so, Marshall concluded, with seemingly specific reference to Jackson, “Protection does not imply the destruction of the protected.”
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LET HIM ENFORCE IT

How did Jackson respond to Marshall’s ruling? He ignored it. “John Marshall has made his decision,” he quipped. “Now let him enforce it.” While historians debate whether Jackson said exactly these words, there is little doubt that these were his sentiments. In any case Jackson took no steps to carry out the Supreme Court’s ruling. He allowed Georgia settlers to force the Cherokee to relocate. This was accomplished by stealing Indian livestock, burning Indian towns, and squatting on Indian land.

Jackson’s conduct in this respect echoes the Obama administration’s refusal to comply with laws and court rulings that Obama finds uncongenial. From the Defense of Marriage Act to welfare reform to Obamacare to immigration, today’s progressives seem willing to bend the law to their own purposes. This tradition of Democratic lawlessness has its true forefather in Andrew Jackson.

The Cherokee continued to protest. The tribe owned a printing press which put out a newspaper,
The Cherokee Phoenix
. Acting on the advice of Jackson’s former attorney general, John Berrien, Jackson’s people raided the printing house and destroyed the press, shattering it to pieces and silencing the voice of the Cherokee people.

Jackson also had Cherokee leader John Ross arrested. The Jackson administration then opened up an investigation into whether Ross was a genuine Native American. Actually there was little doubt he was. While Ross had Scottish and Irish blood through his father and grandfather’s line, Cherokee society was matrilineal, and Ross had Cherokee blood directly through his mother and grandmother. Ross’s great-grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee. The Cherokee recognized him not merely as one of their own but as their elected leader.

Jackson, however, considered Ross to be a fake Indian. In 1834, Jackson’s men organized a plebiscite of the Cherokee and put before them the question of whether Ross was a legitimate Native American and whether he actually represented their interests. To Jackson’s chagrin, Ross won 95 percent of the vote. Jackson tried again the next year, and once again the Cherokee overwhelmingly sided with Ross.
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By itself the Jackson ploy was transparent and got nowhere. But it’s worth noting, because successive generations of Democrats have continued Jackson’s practice of trying to discredit nonwhite opponents by portraying them as inauthentic. Today when Republicans who are black, Hispanic, or Native American expose Democratic chicanery, they are routinely denounced—not just by Democrats but also by their allies in the press—as sellouts and, in the case of African Americans, “Uncle Toms.”

For example, political scientist Manning Marable said of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Ethnically, Thomas has ceased to be an African American.” Columnist Carl Rowan of the
Washington Post
wrote of black economist Thomas Sowell, “Vidkun Quisling in his collaboration with the Nazis surely did not do as much damage as Sowell is doing.” And Spike Lee said that Michael Williams, a black appointee in the Bush administration, was such a traitor to his race that he deserved to be “dragged into an alley and beaten with a Louisville slugger.”
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Back to our story. Eventually the Jackson Democrats found a small faction of Cherokee who were willing, in exchange for bribes, to sign a removal agreement. This was called the Treaty of New Echota. The leaders of this group were the true Uncle Toms. They were not the recognized leaders of the Cherokee, and more than fifteen thousand Cherokee—led by Ross—signed a petition of protest. Ignoring their pleas, the U.S. government gave the Cherokee two years to migrate voluntarily.

The deadline of 1838 came and went, and most Cherokee had not moved. The Democrats at this point did not hesitate to use force. Those who refused to move were compelled. “The soldiers cleared out one farm at a time, one valley at a time,” Inskeep writes. “Approaching a house, the troops would surround it so that no one would escape, then order out the occupants with no more than they could carry.”
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Native Indians unable to travel were rounded up in internment camps, a policy reminiscent of the Japanese internments that a later Democratic administration would enforce during World War II. Reports differ about how bad conditions in the camps were; what no one disputes is that around four thousand Indians died from malnourishment and disease. The Trail of Tears has gone down in American history as cruel and infamous. It certainly was, although its actual perpetrator was not “America” but rather the Jackson Democrats.

The Trail of Tears occurred after Jackson had left the presidency. He was by this time back at his plantation, the Hermitage. His handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, was president. Yet Van Buren was only
continuing the policies of his mentor. From a safe distance, Jackson approvingly watched his Democratic Party carry out his handiwork.

For Jackson, the Trail of Tears represented the culmination of his lifelong efforts. Far from being a disaster, this ugly chapter in U.S. history was one of the original “achievements” of the newly formed Democratic Party. Moreover, the way the Jackson Democrats treated the Indians was not an aberration. Rather, it was only the beginning of a long subsequent Democratic Party history of dispossession, cruelty, bigotry, and theft.

CHAPTER 3

PARTY OF SLAVERY

THE DEMOCRATS’ DEFENSE OF OPPRESSION

In all ages of the world, some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue
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—Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Labor, 1847

I
n November 2014 Hillary Clinton made some revealing comments about illegal immigrants while receiving a “History Maker” award from the New York Historical Society at the city’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel. President Obama had just issued an executive order curbing the ability of law enforcement officials to deport illegal immigrants. Obama’s action circumvented the law, provoking a firestorm of criticism from many Republicans.

Hillary rushed to Obama’s defense, emphasizing why America needs illegals. “We should all remember . . . that this is about people’s lives. This is about, I would venture to guess, the people who served us tonight, who prepared our food tonight.” Hillary’s Democratic sympathizers in the audience burst into spontaneous applause.
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Hillary indeed “made history” that evening because, without quite intending to, she revealed why she and many Democrats support illegal immigration. Quite simply, her argument is that there is dirty work to be done and someone has to do it. In Hillary’s mind, hotels like the
Mandarin Oriental cannot maintain elegant rooms and serve five-star cuisine without illegals cleaning the rooms, serving the food, and cleaning up afterward. One cannot, it seems, rely on Americans to do such jobs.

The very idea that people might work for those wages, and take pride in their work, is incomprehensible to Hillary. The country no longer has slaves to do the dirty work, and so America needs illegal immigrants. The applause attending Hillary’s remarks shows that she was not merely speaking for herself. Other Democratic fine-diners that evening were very much on board with Hillary’s position.

Listening to Hillary that evening, I felt I was at a campaign rally for a Democratic presidential candidate in the mid-nineteenth century. The feel was the same, and most important, the argument was the same. A century and a half ago, the issue wasn’t illegal immigration; it was slavery. Democrats then justified slavery on the grounds that there was dirty work to be done and someone had to do it. Some of them even insisted that slavery benefited both the master and the slave, because slavery gave full employment to people who were incapable of doing anything better than menial work. And here is Hillary Clinton making essentially the same case, not in defense of slavery, but in defense of illegal immigration.

A few days after Hillary’s comments, the Mandarin Oriental hotel issued a press statement that it does not knowingly employ illegals. So Hillary was most likely wrong on the facts. But that’s not what interests me about this episode. Nor am I interested in pressing a direct analogy between slavery and illegal immigration—obviously the two issues are quite different.

No, what interests me most here is the familiar attitude of superiority, condescension, and disdain. That was evident in the pro-slavery blather of the nineteenth century, and it was on full display at the Mandarin Oriental in November 2014. Democrats, it seems, never change their stripes.

Hillary’s plan, I argue in this book, is the enslavement of America. Enslavement is not slavery, but it’s related to slavery. Slavery is a condition while enslavement is a process. Enslavement is the process of converting
free into unfree citizens, by confiscating their earnings, their resources, and their property in the form of taxes or fines. The ultimate end is the same: our lives and even our hopes and dreams are now in someone else’s control. We have become serfs not of a plantation owner, but serfs of the progressive state.

In order to understand enslavement, we need to understand slavery. This chapter focuses on the Democratic Party’s role as the champion and defender of slavery. Oddly enough, slavery for many centuries needed no defenders because it had no critics. It was like the family, a longstanding institution that was simply taken for granted.

But starting in the seventeenth century and continuing through the nineteenth century, slavery came under attack. The attack was two-pronged. The first prong of the attack was the American founding, which had no power to end slavery but which established a framework for reducing, corralling, and ultimately placing slavery on a path to extinction. The second force, which emerged almost a century later, was the Republican Party, a party explicitly founded to block and then eliminate slavery, healing the “crisis of the house divided” and creating a single union of free citizens.

These attacks on slavery provoked the defense of slavery that formed the cornerstone of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party in the South invented the “positive good” school that argued slavery was good not only for the master but also for the slave. The champion of this school was the Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun. Northern Democrats, led by Senator Stephen Douglas, produced a subtler but no less invidious apologia for slavery: “popular sovereignty,” a doctrine that allowed each state and territory to decide for itself whether it wanted slavery.

Democrats on the Supreme Court also forged the majority in the notorious
Dred Scott
decision that upheld slavery and insisted that blacks have no rights that a white man needs to respect. Democratic presidents after Jackson—from Polk to Buchanan—protected slavery from abolitionist, free soil, and Republican attack.

Even during the Civil War, many northern Democrats—the so-called Copperheads or Peace Democrats—took the side of the Confederacy,
urging Lincoln to make a deal with the slave-owning South. They tried, unsuccessfully, to defeat Lincoln for reelection in 1864. Finally, even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a small group of Democrats made a last-ditch attempt to save their cherished institution by assassinating Lincoln.

WHITEWASHING HISTORY

“Whoa!” you might say. “We’ve never heard this story about the Democrats. Are you making this stuff up?” Actually, no. Nothing I write in this chapter is controversial in terms of whether it happened or not. I am relying on the mainstream historians of slavery: David Brion Davis, Kenneth Stampp, Eugene Genovese, Orlando Patterson. How, then, can my arguments sound so outrageous? The reason is that progressive Democrats have whitewashed the party’s history. They have cleaned up the record.

How? They have done it in two ways. The first is to take the crimes of the Democratic Party and blame them on America. Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity.

The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in
The Atlantic
.
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Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details.

First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor
Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats.

Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves.

Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the
Charleston Mercury
editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”
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The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the
Dred Scott
decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats.

All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

Let’s begin with the progressive indictment of the American Founders. “Jefferson didn’t mean it when he wrote that all men are created equal,” historian John Hope Franklin wrote. “The truth is we’re a bigoted people and always have been.” Franklin argued that by betraying the principles of freedom and allowing slavery to continue, “the founding
fathers set the stage for every succeeding generation of Americans to apologize, compromise and temporize on those principles.”

In the same vein, Senator Bill Bradley articulates the progressive view that “slavery was our original sin.” And former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall refused to “find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound. The government they devised was defective from the start.” Instead of jingoistic celebration, Marshall wrote, Americans should seek an “understanding of the Constitution’s defects.”
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Notice the rhetoric here. “We’re a bigoted people.” This is an African American talking. Does he mean that he himself is bigoted? Of course not. “We” here means “Americans.” So too with Bradley. “Our original sin” obviously doesn’t refer to Bradley, who never owned slaves. Rather, it is an assumption of collective responsibility, or more accurately, an allocation of responsibility to America as a whole.

In the progressive narrative, America is to blame, and the first offenders were the Founders themselves. The progressive conclusion is that the founding was “defective,” setting up the progressive agenda to replace and move away from founding principles, what Obama called the “remaking” of America.

SINS OF THE FOUNDERS?

So let’s examine whether the progressives are right. Were the Founders a pro-slavery lot who enshrined slavery in the new republic and in the new constitution? Was their assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” a big lie? If these charges are true, then America was indeed “defective” from the start.

But they aren’t true. This is not to deny that the Founders were flawed and self-interested men, or that several of them owned slaves. Jefferson, for example, owned more than two hundred slaves and never freed them; Washington also owned slaves and freed them only upon his death.

Yet Jefferson’s case is revealing: far from rationalizing plantation life by adopting the “happy slave” arguments that would later become
popular among southern Democrats, Jefferson the Virginian vehemently denounced slavery as unfair and immoral. “The almighty has no attribute that can take side with us,” he wrote. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

Moreover, Jefferson insisted that slavery was bad for slaves and bad for the masters. It was bad for the slaves because, unable to keep the fruits of their labor, they became unenterprising and slothful. Jefferson pointed out, however, that slavery had exactly the same effect on masters. Not having to do any work, masters too became unenterprising and slothful. Moreover, many masters exercised a despotic rule over their slaves, making them little tyrants in their own kingdom.
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These arguments may seem surprising coming from a slave owner, and they are. The remarkable thing is not that Jefferson the plantation owner had slaves, but that this slave-owning planter nevertheless declared that “all men are created equal.”

Here we can instructively contrast Jefferson with the founder of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson. Unlike Jefferson, Jackson never expressed any doubt about the injustice of slavery. What provoked Jackson’s indignation on the subject was abolitionist agitation. In his 1835 Annual Message to Congress, Jackson called for laws to “prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the southern states, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.”
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Jefferson, however, was typical of the Founders in that he recognized slavery was wrong and that black people had rights. Confronted by those who justified slavery with the argument that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, Jefferson retorted, “Whatever be their talents, it is no measure of their rights.”
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If Jefferson and the Founders knew that all men are created equal, and that black people have rights, why not outlaw slavery and establish equality of rights under the law at the outset? The simple answer is that had they done so, there would never have been a union. The Founders in Philadelphia were not choosing whether to have a union with slavery or a union without slavery. They were choosing whether to have a union
that had slavery or no union at all. If the Founders decided not to have a union, then slavery would have continued in the various states. In that case, slavery may well have lasted much longer in America than it actually did.