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Frederick Douglass Republicans
The Message of Liberty
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Between speaking fees, investments and income from presidential appointments, Frederick Douglass’ was able to mass $300,000 in savings–an equivalent of more than $10 million dollars today.
-KCarl Smith

In 1857, a Democratically controlled Supreme Court delivered the Dred Scott decision, declaring that blacks were not persons or citizens but instead were property and therefore had no rights.

The 13th Amendment to abolish slavery was voted for by 100% of the Republicans in congress and by 23% of the Democrats in congress.

Not one Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for the 14th amendment declaring that former slaves were full citizens of the state in which they lived and were therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of any other citizen in that state.

Not a single one of the 56 Democrats in Congress voted for the 15th amendment that granted explicit voting rights to black Americans.

In 1866 Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan to pave the way for Democrats to regain control in the elections.

In the 19th century, Democrats prevented Black Americans from going to public school.

In the 20th and 21st century Democrats prevented Black Americans trapped in failing schools from choosing a better school. In fact Democrats voted against the bill by 99%.

Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, Literacy tests, white only primaries, and physical violence all came from the Democratic Party.

Between 1882 and 1964, 4,743 individuals were lynched. 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites. Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and Democrats successfully blocked those bills.

Though both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed into law under Democrat President, Lyndon Johnson, it was the Republicans in Congress who made it possible in both cases – not to overlook the fact that the heart of both bills came from the work of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the 108th Congress, when Republicans proposed a permanent extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it was opposed by the Congressional Black Caucus (composed only of Democrats).

Following the Civil War, Frederick Douglass received Presidential appointments from Republican Presidents Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield. Democratic President Grover Cleveland removed Frederick Douglas from office but Republican President Benjamin Harrison reappointed him.

Very few today know that in 1808 Congress abolished the slave trade. Although slavery still had not been abolished in all the states, things definitely were moving in the right direction.

In 1789, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance that prohibited slavery in a federal territory. In 1820, the Democratic Congress passed the Missouri Compromise and reversed that earlier policy, permitting slavery in almost half of the federal territories.

In 1850, Democrats in Congress passed the “Fugitive Slave Law”. That law required Northerners to return escaped slaves back into slavery or else pay huge fines.

Because the “Fugitive Slave Law” allowed Free Blacks to be carried into slavery, this law was disastrous for blacks in the North; and as a consequence of the atrocious provisions of this Democratic law, some 20,000 blacks in the North left the United States and fled to Canada.

The “Underground Railroad” reached the height of its activity during this period, helping thousands of slaves escape from slavery in the South all the way out of the United States and into Canada – simply to escape the reach of the Democrats’ Fugitive Slave Law.

In 1854, the Democratically controlled Congress passed another law strengthening slavery: the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Even though Democrats in Congress had already expanded the federal territories in which slavery was permitted through their passage of the Missouri Compromise, they had retained a ban on slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska territory. But through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Democrats repealed those earlier restrictions, thus allowing slavery to be introduced into parts of the new territory where it previously had been forbidden.

Following the passage of these pro-slavery laws in Congress, in May of 1854, a number of the anti-slavery Democrats in Congress – along with some anti-slavery members from other political parties, including the Whigs, Free Soilers, and Emancipationists, formed a new political party to fight slavery and secure equal civil rights for black Americans. The name of that party? They called it the Republican Party because they wanted to return to the principles of freedom and equality first set forth in the governing documents of the Republic before pro-slavery members of Congress had perverted those original principles.

One of the founders of the Republican was U.S. Senator Charles Sumner. In 1856, Sumner gave a two day long speech in the U.S. Senate against slavery. Following that speech, Democratic Representative Preston Brooks from South Carolina came from the House, across the Rotunda of the Capitol, and over to the Senate where he literally clubbed down Sumner on the floor of the Senate, knocked him unconscious, and beat him almost to death. According to the sources of that day, many Democrats thought that Sumner’s clubbing was deserved, and it even amused them. What happened to Democrat Preston Brooks following his vicious attack on Sumner? He was proclaimed a southern hero and easily re-elected to Congress.

In 1856, the Republican Party entered its first Presidential election, running Republican John C. Fremont against Democrat James Buchanan. In that election, the Republican Party issued its first-ever Party platform. It was a short document with only nine planks in the platform, but significantly, six of the nine planks set forth bold declarations of equality and civil rights for African Americans based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

It is worth noting that for over a century and a half, Democrats often have taken a position that some human life is disposable – as they did in the Dred Scott decision. In that instance, a black individual was not a life, it was property; and an individual could do with his property as he wished. Today, Democrats have largely taken that same position on unborn human life – that an unborn human is disposable property to do with as one wishes.

African Americans were the victims of this disposable property ideology a century and a half ago, and still are today. Consider: although 12 percent of the current population is African American, almost 35 percent of all abortions are performed on African Americans. In fact, over the last decade, for every 100 African American live births, there were 53 abortions of African American babies. Democrats have encouraged this; and although black Americans are solidly pro-life with almost two-thirds opposing abortion on demand, a number of recent votes in Congress reveals that Democrats hold exactly the opposite view, with some 80 percent of congressional Democrats being almost rabidly pro-abortion and consistently voting against protections for innocent unborn human life.