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#Post#: 9528--------------------------------------------------
Thaddeus Stevens
By: 90sRetroFan Date: October 22, 2021, 10:30 pm
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Our anti-American enemies supply us with an article about a true
American:
HTML https://www.amren.com/features/2021/10/adored-now-for-what-he-was-once-hated/
[quote]I can think of no white man who was once reviled for
racial views but is now honored for them, but a prime candidate
would be Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens.[/quote]
Before we continue, I would just like to clarify that Stevens
should not be considered "white" in the first place. Not only
was his political allegiance not to "whiteness", but also he (as
far as we know) never reproduced. (This is also why Hitler
should not be considered "white" either, but I digress.)
[quote]When he died in 1868, the New York Times wrote that he
“had so fostered hatred of the nation’s [Confederate] enemies,
that he refused, even in their helplessness, to extend the
fraternal hand,” adding that his “measures were unjust.”
Historian Lloyd Paul Stryker wrote in a 1929 book that Stevens
was a “horrible old man . . . craftily preparing to strangle the
bleeding, broken body of the South,” and that Stevens thought it
would be “a beautiful thing” to see “the white men, especially
the white women of the South, writhing under negro domination.”
In his bestselling The Epic of America, published in 1931,
historian James Adams called him “the most despicable,
malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to
power in America.”
...
The old state constitution was vague on whether blacks could
vote, and Stevens insisted that propertied blacks be given the
franchise, just like whites. This was voted down and a new
constitution denying blacks the vote was approved by referendum.
By 1836, Stevens had become a fervent and open abolitionist,
saying that “the domestic slavery of this country is the most
disgraceful institution that the world had ever witnessed.” He
believed that the Constitution barred Congress from interfering
with slavery in the states, but was one of very few to claim
that it had the power to abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia, even against the wishes of white citizens residents.
...
The Compromise of 1850 included fugitive slave laws that
required free states to help catch runaway property. Stevens
urged defiance of the laws, and in 1851 acted as defense counsel
for a group of blacks and whites who had killed a slaveowner who
had come for his property. This outraged many in both South and
North. Whigs drove him out of the party, and he failed to win
reelection in 1852.
He switched parties again, and joined the American Party, better
known as the Know Nothings, because he appears to have doubted
whether Catholics could be good citizens. However, after he
learned that most ethnic immigrants opposed slavery, he dropped
nativist views. In 1858, Stevens returned to Washington as a
Pennsylvania congressman, this time as a member of the
short-lived Union Party, a mix of Republicans and Know Nothings.
He campaigned not only on abolition but on giving the vote to
women.
Stevens was thrilled by John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.
He said that Brown “deserved to be hung for being a hopeless
fool” for his “attempt to capture Virginia with seventeen men,”
adding that Brown should have known “that it would require at
least twenty-five.” Within a week of Brown’s execution, he was
calling for publication of Brown’s last statements, letters,
interviews: “I know nothing that would be more read or do more
good.” In a speech on the floor of Congress about Brown, he
insulted the South in such vile language that it had to be
sanitized in the Congressional Record.
...
When the war broke out, Stevens was 69, but the fight seemed to
rejuvenate him. In July 1861, he became head of the Ways and
Means Committee, and never failed to vote money to support a war
that he saw as a way to make blacks equal to whites and punish
the South.
...
Stevens had no time for legal niceties. He scoffed at the
“puerile inconsistency” of people who would “send forth your
sons and brothers to shoot and saber and bayonet the
insurgents,” but who “hesitate to break the bonds of their
slaves.”
...
From the beginning, Stevens wanted all slaves freed, armed, and
turned against their masters: “The slaves ought to be incited to
insurrection and give the rebels a taste of real civil war.”
This shocked many whites. Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury
denounced any attempt “to elevate the miserable ****” and make a
soldier of him. The New York Times wrote: “the enrollment of
negroes in the military service in such states as South Carolina
and Georgia would, of course, mean nothing else than a
determination to exterminate the white population in those
states.” The article added that Southerners might accept defeat
at the hands of white union soldiers, “but to expect them to
submit quietly to the rule of their own slaves, armed by our own
Government and quartered in their midst, is an error, the folly
of which is only exceeded by the devilish malignity that
suggests it.”
...
In the West, as the Army marched East to fight the Confederacy,
Indians moved into the vacuum and, in some cases, pushed
settlers back hundreds of miles. Stevens said that any resulting
bloodshed was the fault of “bad white men.” He also opposed
legislation that would have limited Chinese immigration.
After Appomattox, Stevens wanted “to inflict condign punishment
on the rebel belligerents” and to treat the Confederate states
as conquered territory, unprotected by the Constitution,
subjected only to the laws of war.
...
Stevens repeatedly introduced bills to seize the property of
ex-Confederates and give it to blacks. Anything left over would
be sold to the highest bidder to pay pensions to Union soldiers.
There were other radical Republicans, but even without Southern
representation in Congress, no majority supported such harsh
vengeance.
...
Republican moderates were much more interested in reconciling
with Southern whites with whom they wanted peace and harmony
rather than in punishment and revolution. Even abolitionists
were disturbed by black rule in the South.[/quote]
Which is precisely why democracy is the problem. Imagine if
Stevens had been a monarch!
[quote]The Reconstruction Act of 1867 put the US Army in control
of 10 Southern states, but then-President Andrew Johnson refused
to order the depredations the radicals wanted. Already, in the
previous year, angry at Johnson’s lenient treatment of the
South, Stevens had been preparing for impeachment. He admitted
that his motives were “wholly political,” and that Johnson need
not have committed any crime, much less the “high crimes and
misdemeanors” called for in the Constitution.
After several failed attempts, on February 24, 1868 Stevens
persuaded Congress to vote articles of impeachment on the theory
that the president had violated the Tenure of Office Act by
firing his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. By then, Stevens’s
health was failing, and he had to be carried around Congress in
a chair. He was one of the managers of the impeachment trial,
but was so weak he spoke only three times. The New York Herald
described him:
face of corpselike color, and rigidly twitching lips … a
strange and unearthly apparition — a reclused remonstrance from
the tomb … the very embodiment of fanaticism, without a solitary
leaven of justice or mercy … the avenging Nemesis of his party —
the sworn and implacable foe of the Executive of the nation.
On May 21, conviction in the Senate failed by a just one vote.
However, it is important to remember that most Southern states
had not yet been readmitted to Congress, and Republicans had a
huge minority. Johnson was saved by Republican defectors who
thought Congress was abusing its power. Stevens was carried from
the Senate — an observer called him “black with rage and
disappointment” – and shouted, “The country is going to the
devil.”[/quote]
He has been proven prescient:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/red-coup/
[quote]A dying but undaunted Stevens drafted new articles of
impeachment, but the House refused to adopt them. As Southern
states were readmitted, Stevens proposed a bill to break up
Texas into several parts so that the additional Republican
senators could help vote Johnson out. The New York Herald wrote
that “it is lamentable to see this old man, with one foot in the
grave, pursuing the President with such vindictiveness.”
Stevens did not live out the year, dying on August 11, 1868.
...
“on the subject of Reconstruction, then, Mr. Stevens must be
deemed the Evil Genius of the Republican Party.” Moderates
considered his death “an emancipation for the Republican Party”
because it ended his vindictive influence.[/quote]
And look what the GOP has turned into today, precisely because
it has lacked people with the moral fortitude to demand
accountability for treason.
What our enemies think of Stevens:
[quote]He would stop at nothing in the name of blacks and wanted
to crush whites who stood in his way. It is easy to imagine him
teaching critical race theory, bellowing “black lives matter,”
and finding “white supremacy” everywhere. He had the perfect
personality for it: indignant, uncompromising, nourished by
hate.[/quote]
I agree with our enemies' assessment. This is the kind of
leftist we need more of. See also:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/true-left-breakthrough-hate/
#Post#: 9700--------------------------------------------------
Re: Thaddeus Stevens
By: Zea_mays Date: November 8, 2021, 2:57 pm
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This is basically National Socialism:
[quote]But it is said that if we hold out this thing, they will
never submit—that we cannot conquer them—that they will suffer
themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid
waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more
than any other; but if they hold this language, and the means
which they have suggested must be resorted to, if their whole
country must be laid waste, and made a desert, in order to save
this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, sir,
reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be
repeopled by a band of freemen [freed slaves] than to see them
perpetrate the destruction of this people through our agency.
-Thaddeus Stevens[/quote]
HTML https://archive.org/details/sim_united-states-congress-congressional-globe_1861-08-05_26/page/414/mode/2up
Stevens had some other quotes which seem relevant to the treason
going on today:
[quote]Least of all would I reproach the South. I honor her
courage and fidelity. Even in a bad, a wicked cause, she shows a
united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human
bondage, because it is their cause. But the North - the poor,
timid, mercenary, driveling North - has no such united defenders
of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty. None of
the bright lights of the nation shine upon her section. Even her
own great men have turned her accusers. She is the victim of low
ambition - an ambition which prefers self to country, personal
aggrandizement to the high cause of human liberty. She is
offered up a sacrifice to propitiate southern tyranny - to
conciliate southern treason. -Thaddeus Stevens, 1850.[/quote]
(Just like today, the traitors are high energy and those who
claim to oppose them are hopelessly low energy. At least in the
1860s we had a real president to stand up to them.)
[quote]We are told that because the Constitution does not allow
us to confiscate a certain species of property, therefore we
cannot liberate slaves. Mr. Speaker, I thought the time had come
when the laws of war were to govern our action; when
constitutions, if they stood in the way of the laws of war in
dealing with the enemy, had no right to intervene. Who pleads
the Constitution against our proposed action? Who says the
Constitution must come in, in bar of our action? It is the
advocates of rebels, of rebels who have sought to overthrow the
Constitution and trample it in the dust; who repudiate the
Constitution. Sir, these rebels, who have disregarded and set at
defiance that instrument, are, by every rule of municipal and
international law, estopped from pleading it against our action.
Who, then, is it that comes to us and says, "you cannot do this
thing, because your Constitution does not permit it?" The
Constitution! Our Constitution, which you repudiate and trample
under foot, forbids it! Sir, this is an absurdity. -Thaddeus
Stevens, 1861[/quote]
(This reminds me of all the idiotic debates on discussion forums
that Republicans "didn't really commit treason as outlined in
the Constitution, because that only applies to working with
nations we have declared war on, and therefore we can't punish
them". ...The oaths members of Congress have to take clearly
include both "foreign enemies" and "domestic enemies", and hence
make this interpretation idiotic.
I think people who repeat this are misinterpreting what Chief
Justice john Marshall said in 1807. What Marshall was saying is
that conspiracy [i.e. a plan] to commit treason is a separate
crime from carrying out the actual treason. In the court case in
1807, it was determined actual treason was not committed, merely
the conspiracy. But, with the Insurrection, we have both the
conspiracy [i.e. the inside job] and the actual assembling and
carrying out of the treason.
[quote]“However flagitious may be the crime of conspiring to
subvert by force the government of our country, such conspiracy
is not treason. To conspire to levy war, and actually to levy
war, are distinct offences. The first must be brought into open
action by the assemblage of men for a purpose treasonable in
itself, or the fact of levying war cannot have been committed.
So far has this principle been carried, that . . . it has been
determined that the actual enlistment of men to serve against
the government does not amount to levying war.” Chief Justice
Marshall was careful, however, to state that the Court did not
mean that no person could be guilty of this crime who had not
appeared in arms against the country. “On the contrary, if war
be actually levied, that is, if a body of men be actually
assembled for the purpose of effecting by force a treasonable
purpose, all those who perform any part, however minute, or
however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually
leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as
traitors. But there must be an actual assembling of men, for the
treasonable purpose, to constitute a levying of war.”
[...]
As a result of the Whiskey Rebellion, convictions of treason
were obtained on the basis of the ruling that forcible
resistance to the enforcement of the revenue laws was a
constructive levying of war.[/quote]
HTML https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-3/section-3/clause-1/treason-clause-doctrine-and-practice
Anyway, the difference between Stevens's day and ours is, this
time, the Constitution is very clear on what to do. The 14th
Amendment says traitors who support insurrection must be removed
from Congress. The Constitution also clearly says what the
punishment for treason is.)
#Post#: 26763--------------------------------------------------
Re: Thaddeus Stevens
By: 90sRetroFan Date: June 14, 2024, 5:49 pm
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Hartmann credits Stevens and admits Reconcialiation was a
mistake:
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4AKxs3k6MQ
The correct course of action was physical extermination of all
Confederates, just as Stevens envisioned:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/thaddeus-stevens/msg9528/#msg9528
[quote]From the beginning, Stevens wanted all slaves freed,
armed, and turned against their masters: “The slaves ought to be
incited to insurrection and give the rebels a taste of real
civil war.” This shocked many whites. Delaware Democrat Willard
Saulsbury denounced any attempt “to elevate the miserable ****”
and make a soldier of him. The New York Times wrote: “the
enrollment of negroes in the military service in such states as
South Carolina and Georgia would, of course, mean nothing else
than a determination to exterminate the white population in
those states.”
...
Stevens wanted “to inflict condign punishment on the rebel
belligerents” and to treat the Confederate states as conquered
territory, unprotected by the Constitution, subjected only to
the laws of war.[/quote]
That didn't happen. So now we have to deal with Trump.
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