A Daily Reid: Republicans betrayed Black Americans in 1877 and they just did it again in Texas (and screwed Latinos, too)

We should never forget , nor forgive, The Trump-Texas Sellout

Republicans have a habit of sticking a knife in the backs of Black people.

President Abraham Lincoln, for all the credit he gets as “The Great Emancipator,” believed Black people to be genetically inferior to white people. And while he stated that he personally believed slavery to be immoral and abhorrent, his preferred solution was to ship free Blacks off to a far-away colony, which some of his fellow “liberals” had already accomplished in the 1840s by sponsoring the colonization of the African land they called “Liberia” by free Black settlers who eventually became that nascent country’s upper caste, oppressing the native tribes exactly as their white benefactors’ forefathers had done to indigenous Americans. Lincoln’s administration recognized the country in 1862.

Note that all three of these are Lincoln quotes:

‘It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.’ – Abraham Lincoln

‘I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.’ – Abraham Lincoln

‘The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with their institution in the states, I have constantly denied.’ – Abraham Lincoln

When Lincoln became president in 1856, he had an admirable vice president — a truly decent man and “Radical Republican” Senator from Maine, named Hannibal Hamlin. Hamlin didn’t just oppose slavery. He actually pursued aspects of racial equality — rare for a white man of his time. But when it came time for re-election in 1860, the Republican Party ditched Hamlin for a Southerner they believed would placate the planter class and convince them to remain loyal to the Union. In an utter betrayal of the Black people who later came to revere Lincoln as The Emancipator,” the party in 1864 chose the vile, racist, garbage pile named Andrew Johnson (cursed be his name), as the new vice presidential running mate.

Two years before Lincoln’s untimely trip to the theater and his death at the hands of a confederate traitor/actor on April 15, 1865, Lincoln issued the famous “Emancipation Proclamation,” on January 1st, 1863. As the story goes, it was at Hamlin’s urging — i fact Hamlin was pushing for full emancipation. And while the mythology states that Lincoln, “freed the slaves,” the truth is rather less uplifting. In fact, his Proclamation fell short of what Hamlin urged, and freed only the enslaved people living in states that were currently in rebellion. It also, “expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control.” That meant the enslaved people in the border states that remained loyal to the Union — and those living and toiling in the Union-controlled parts of the South — were as captive after the proclamation as before. Imagine seeing all of those blue uniforms and realizing they meant you were in fact not free…

And let’s not forget that Lincoln also said this:

‘My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.’ – Abraham Lincoln

The Emancipation Proclamation did have one enduring benefit though, both to Black men and to the increasingly desperate Union cause. More from the National Archives (enjoy it before Trump makes the staffers delete it…)

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery's final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

Those 200,000 men wound up turning the military tide, helping William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant to whup the turncoat confederates, by giving the people most eager to shoot dead their former captives, the means to do so. And it was their valor that prompted Black women and men to invent Decoration Day, later turned into Memorial Day.

But there was more betrayal to come.

For the enslaved Blacks of Texas, it took two years and extraordinary means for them to even discover there had ever been an Emancipation Proclamation at all:

It goes by many names. Whether you call it Emancipation Day, Freedom Day or the country's second Independence Day, Juneteenth is one of the most important anniversaries in our nation's history.

On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, who had fought for the Union, led a force of soldiers to Galveston, Texas, to deliver a very important message: The war was finally over, the Union had won, and it now had the manpower to enforce the end of slavery.

The announcement came two months after the effective conclusion of the Civil War, and even longer since President Abraham Lincoln had first signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but many enslaved Black people in Texas still weren't free, even after that day.

First things first: Juneteenth gets its name from combining "June" and "nineteenth," the day that Granger arrived in Galveston, bearing a message of freedom for the slaves there.

Upon his arrival, he read out General Order No. 3, informing the residents that slavery would no longer be tolerated and that all slaves were now free and would henceforth be treated as hired workers if they chose to remain on the plantations, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

"The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer," the order reads, in part.

It's perhaps unsurprising that many former slaves did not stay on the plantations as workers and instead left in search of new beginnings or to find family members who had been sold away.

"It immediately changed the game for 250,000 people," Shane Bolles Walsh, a lecturer with the University of Maryland's African American Studies Department, told NPR.

Enslaved Black people, now free, had ample cause to celebrate. As Felix Haywood, a former slave, recalled: "Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes ... just like that, we were free." …

…When Granger arrived in Galveston, there still existed around 250,000 slaves and they were not all freed immediately, or even soon. It was not uncommon for slave owners, unwilling to give up free labor, to refuse to release their slaves until forced to, in person, by a representative of the government, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote. Some would wait until one final harvest was complete, and some would just outright refuse to submit. It was a perilous time for Black people, and some former slaves who were freed or attempted to get free were attacked and killed.

For Confederate states like Texas, even before Juneteenth, there existed a "desire to hold on to that system as long as they could," Walsh explained to NPR.

Before the reading of General Order No. 3, many slave owners in Confederate states simply chose not to tell their slaves about the Emancipation Proclamation and did not honor it. They got away with it because, before winning the war, Union soldiers were largely unable to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in Southern states. Still, even though slavery in the States was not abolished until the ratification of the 13th Amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation still played a pivotal role in that process, historian Lonnie Bunch told NPR in 2013. (And the amendment did not extend to tribal lands.)

"What the Emancipation Proclamation does that's so important is it begins a creeping process of emancipation where the federal government is now finally taking firm stands to say slavery is wrong and it must end," Bunch said.

After the war, this country finally had a chance to build that “more perfect union” the slaveholding founders rattled on about, through the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and the launch of Reconstruction in the South. But Reconstruction, which was actually wildly successful in states like South Carolina, Louisiana, and even Mississippi, died abruptly, in a decades-long spasm of racist violence, after just twelve years, in large part due to a hideous compromise by Lincoln’s party, the Republicans, through which they literally sold out the nearly 4 million formerly enslaved Black people in the American South (and the nearly half a million free Blacks who might find themselves south of the Mason-Dixon Line….) leaving them in the clutches of vicious Southern white Democrats.

Images from Thomas Nast and other illustrators. The third panel, by Nast, is titled "This is a white man's government." Brittanica.

It was one hell of a “compromise…”

The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement between southern Democrats and allies of the Republican Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election and marked the end of the Reconstruction era.

Immediately after the presidential election of 1876, it became clear that the outcome of the race hinged largely on disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina—the only three states in the South with Reconstruction-era Republican governments still in power. As a bipartisan congressional commission debated over the outcome early in 1877, allies of the Republican Party candidate Rutherford Hayes met in secret with moderate southern Democrats in order to negotiate acceptance of Hayes’ election.

The Democrats agreed not to block Hayes’ victory on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control over the region. As a result of the so-called Compromise of 1877 (or Compromise of 1876), Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina became Democratic once again, effectively bringing an end to the Reconstruction era.

Which brings us back to Texas, which this week went ahead and passed their blatantly racist gerrymandered maps through the state House; but not before they got dozens of Democrats to sign what amounted to slave lease permission slips in order to leave the locked House chamber, while essentially incarcerating a member who refused to sign.

I will note that I was told that despite what the chair claimed, once the vote to enact the racist maps was achieved, the House chamber doors were in fact unlocked, meaning the only vote Republicans demanded a carceral system to achieve, was the one to steal Black and Brown access to congressional and economic power in Texas.

Here’s what one Democrat had to say about the maps passing.

Fully accurate. But I’ll note again, for the record, that this racist map could not have passed at all, had Democrats not insisted on returning to Texas and giving these treacherous Republicans a quorum. The opportunity to rail against racism from the House floor and for the cameras is meaningless if it doesn’t actually achieve the goal of preserving those hard-won seats. I can’t not add that, because that too, was a hideous compromise, which will cost Black and Latino Texans, dearly.

In the end, it is Republicans, as they have done historically, who have stabbed Black and Brown Americans in the back in Texas. Of the new seats, Latino Texans, who are the largest group in the state, will hold just eight of 38 seats. And Black Texans — the largest African-American cohort in the country — will hold just two. That means that in Texas, it will take three Latino voters to count as much politically as a single white voter, and it will take FIVE Black voters to equal a single … as the Texas Republicans term it … “Anglo.”

Republicans on Wednesday further embedded this racist system, which deepens the already-existing political apartheid in the state. But Democrats, with their lack of strategy and cohesion, enabled it.

Read my deep dive into the racist new maps here.

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