Missouri, Bloody Kansas, and compromises

[markus]

As I consider the real outcomes of today's compromise, I have to think back to other times in which our nation has compromised with the uncompromising, the amoral, the enemies of our government.

The GOP of today are as much at odds with what we should stand for as a nation as the slavers of the 19th century. Today, we had our Missouri compromise. By the vastly overclocked time line of the 21st century, how soon will come our Nebraska-Kansas, and Dredd Scott?

Certainly there are Whigs enough in the middle to take us back from the brink for today. Our opponents, however, will settle for nothing less than One Nation, Under Jesus, With Liberty and Justice for Corporations.

The GOP vision is a radical departure from the trend in our nation toward economic and political equality. They seek to overturn every progressive advance since the Civil War. In the end, the hope to reinstate the sort of wage slavery of the 19th century which was so much more economically efficient than the field hand slavery of the ante bellum South.

So we give them Missouri, and an up-and-down vote in Kansas. And what is the outcome?

Actually, we did less well than Henry Clay did almost 200 year ago. We let them move the line north, by acceding to the Terrible Three. In our century, we gave them Kansas and Dredd Scott in one day.

Now we need only wait for our own bloody Kansas when one of the SCOTUS justices retire or die.

Let's hope it is less bleak than what comes to me in this rumination.

However, I see no reason to be optimistic. We've been down this appeasement road before. It was a road to ruin.

[Richard Steele]

1. I agree. We lost, they gained.

[Selatius]

2. I think we only delayed a confrontation

The confrontation won't be tomorrow over district court judges. It will be over the damn Supreme Court itself when someone either steps down or dies.

[reality based]

3. If you believe that we are living in a time of great danger

to our republican form of government, a time when almost all our institutions-- press, political parties, elections, bureaucracy, military, the states, the House of Representatives, and yes even the judiciary-- have failed to prevent the spread of a kind of stealth fascism in America, then you could take comfort that the Senate showed a little life tonight. Perhaps when the time comes we can count on enough small "r" Republican Senators to join in a defense of our governing principles to make a difference.

[annabanana]

9. the stink of lame duck is beginning

to waft through the halls of the Senate..

[Fovea]

4. Ironically

I mentioned the Kansas Nebraska act in another thread.

I really think we did little to nothing to stop a fascist SCOTUS.
We just gave Frist and Rove time to DeLay a few moderate repugs.

I live in a part of Kansas that bled. 4 blocks from my house is a Wyandot indian graveyard, some of the graves are from the ones who faced Shelby at Wilson's creek. a mile north of my house, escaped slaves crossed the Missouri River to the free town of Quindaro.

There is a statue to John Brown there from a grateful people. John Brown was not a good fellow. But he fought fire with fire before the rest of the Union took up arms. The Union *said* they were fighting to preserve the union, but native Americans fought because they either were tribes that kept slaves, or did not.

[Scout1071]

5. I don't live far from you and I work in Lawrence. John Brown is quite

honorable in these parts. Here is a pic of the survivors of Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence.

[DivinBreuvage]

10. John Brown was actually a pretty decent guy

Don't be fooled by all the crap that was written about him by Southern sympathizers during the era of Jim Crow, Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, and the Ku Klux Klan marching through Washington DC.

[Fovea]

11. I wasn't

talking about the Harper's ferry raid.

I was talking about his beheading of 5 suspected border ruffians in Pottawatamee KS, 1856.

Really, looking at him and his kids, sword in hand, riding around the border, ** would call him a terrorist. He reminds me a bit of another Kansas family of this day, the Phelps klan of Topeka.

I would have fought for the Union, without a doubt, but let's not pretend that all the whackjobs were riding with Quantrill. After all, Quantrill went *really* funny in the head when his kid sister died in a Union Jail collapse.

I live 3 miles as the bike rides from the Pacific House hotel, where Union order 11 was signed. It was the Fallujah of its day. See the George Caleb Bingham painting of the same title.

Where I live was part of the Wyandot nation, but for every Mathias Splitlog, there was a Stand Watee. There were few heroes in the Western Civil War, which lasted fully a decade longer than the declared one.

Of the real heroes, look at Lyons, Siegal, and Mathias Splitlog before you cannonize Brown, IMO.

[DivinBreuvage]

12. The Pottawatomie Raid didn't just happen, you know

It was a response to the crimes that proslavery men had been getting away with for some time -- including the cold-blooded murder of a number of freesoil men. John Brown didn't even manage to tie the score. Yet the only deaths you appear to be aware of are those committed by John Brown. Why is that? (I'm not criticizing you, I'm saying you've been deceived by proslavery propaganda).

Here's a second example: in May of 1858 proslavery men rounded up 11 freesoil Kansans and shot them in a ravine along the Marais des Cygnes. No effort was made to arrest or punish the killers despite the fact that their identities were known; only one of them was ever even brought to trial. Later that year John Brown raided slaveholders in Missouri, freeing 11 slaves; one slaveholder who put up resistance was shot dead by Brown's men (Brown himself was not at the cabin in question). Mass hysteria swept the South and their sympathizers in the North and James Buchanan put a price on Brown's head.

Brown himself eloquently pointed out this hypocrisy in his "Parallels" (I'll excerpt -- you can read the whole thing at http://www.plainandsimple.org/parallels.html):

"Not One year ago Eleven quiet citizens of this neighborhood... were gathered up from their work and their homes by an armed force and... formed into a line and all but one shot, five killed and five wounded. The only crime charged against them was that of being free-state men. Now, I inquire, what action has ever, since the occurrence in May last, been taken by either the President of Kansas, or any of their tools, or by any proslavery or administration man, to ferret out and punish the perpetrators of this crime?

"Now for the other parallel. On Sunday, the 19th of December, a negro called Jim came over to the Osage settlement from Missouri and stated that he together with his wife, two children and another negro man were to be sold within a day or two and begged for help to get away. On Monday (the following) night, two small companies were made up to go to Missouri and forcibly liberate the five slaves together with other slaves. One of these companies I assumed to direct....

"Now for a comparison. Eleven persons were forcible restored to their natural and inalienable rights, with but one man killed, and all 'Hell is stirred from beneath.' It is currently reported that the Governor of Missouri has made a requisition upon the Governor of Kansas for the delivery of such as were concerned in the last-named 'dreadful outrage.' The marshal of Kansas is said to be collecting a posse of Missouri (not Kansas) men at West Point in Missouri, a little town about ten miles distant, to 'enforce the laws.' All proslavery, conservative free-state, and dough-faced men, and administration tools, are filled with holy horror.

"Consider the two cases, and the action of the administration party."

[Fovea]

13. Really, I know all this.

My point is this. There are few heroes in the western war between the states.

The border ruffians were cutthroats and killers. After the war they were unrepentant criminals. There is no dispute about this. But just because Quantrill was a whackjob does not mean the Jayhawkers were uniformly saints.

This is dangerously close to the kind of generic villany we are currently using to justify an unjustifiable occupation, and brutal suppression of Iraqi sovrenignity.

I support the troops, just not the troops who torture and abase the incarcerated. I have boundless admiration for General Siegle, for Blunt, for Lyons. But Ewing was protecting a future political career, and order 11 was cosmically stupid. Ewing tried to stop the Jayhawkers too, but he could not afford to alienate Sen. Lane.

Yes, Lawrence was a brutal massacre, probably the worst of the war, but Order 11 was the most blatent violation of civil liberty in our history until WW2. It did more for the Confederate cause than it did to stop bushwhacking. It turned Bingham from a Union supporter to an implacable enemy. Bingham, IIRC owned the building that was the Union women's prison.

So do not think I am a confederate sympathizer, or stooge. I am just saying that the jayhawkers need no apotheosis for the Union cause to be right. When the next civil war starts here in a few years, I will not style myself a hero for shooting freepers on the freeway. I will not expect a statue, like Brown, I will be happy if I don't end up lynched.

[DivinBreuvage]

15. I certainly did not think you were either a Confederate sympathizer

or stooge... your posts made that quite clear. You make some excellent points in this last post of yours as well. I would agree also that the Civil War in the west (which, as you correctly point out, began before the national war and continued after it was over) was a grim, nasty affair from which very few combatants came out clean.

I have read quite a bit about John Brown, however, and when you take him all in all -- as he really was, not as he has been portrayed by people who despise the idea of black freedom -- he really does stand forth as quite a heroic figure, particularly for his time.

One little known fact about him, that you may be interested in, is that he, like his father, was sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans: at one point he told his white neighbors in Pennsylvania that he would rather pick up his gun and help drive them out of the country than be involved in "so mean an act" as chasing away a band of poor Indians who lived in the area.

[merbex]

6. My youngest daughter is studying The "Compromise Era"

1820 and 1850; I immediately thought of that.

Our only REAL recourse is to take back Congress in 06 and pray that there are no openings on the Supreme Court till after that time

Dean's grassroots effort is now critical;building infrastructure where there is none

AND making sure the votes are counted legitimately

I heard Will Pitt in Cambridge MA shortly after Nov, say that we are fighting a political war on 20 fronts

Truer words were never spoken

[markus]

7. Bush has to press his advantage before the next Congress

I don't see a lame duck sending up an extreme nominee and succeeding. Only time will tell if this compromise will hold until '08, and if we can make any real gains in the next election.

The GOP sees the need (as did Roosevelt) to pack the courts to make their agenda stand, especially the most radical parts of it. Losing this battle will set up back into the 19th century for a generation. That is not a world I am willing to bequeath to my children.

Compromising with the uncompromising enemies of the Republic will ultimately gain us nothing if we do not find and press an advantage elsewhere. I am still afraid that what we saw here was a desperate attempt by our own modern Whigs to make the problem go away.

The only thing that goes away if you ignore it is a rotten tooth.

[dusty64]

8. Unfortunately the

biggest issue is STILL being ignored by our "leaders". Most of us know and accept that the machines we "vote" on are owned and wholly controlled by some VERY frightening and extremist companies. NOTHING has really been done about this at all, the rethugs will throw a couple bones (mainly moderate "troublemakers") to us in 2006 and thats all. The idiot pundits will be scratching their heads trying to explain how the gop held their own despite massive dissatisfaction from the People, they'll try to tell us the mysterious fundie base turned out in droves and those damn exit polls were wrong again and should be abolished. They'll get away with it again and perfect their fraud strategy for 2008.

[Walt Starr]

14. So tell me, what would you have done differently?

Seriously, give me your solution.

Crickets is all I here from the naysayers.