I am not a fan of all of Gordon S. Wood's 1992 THE RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Like most historians of the Revolution, Wood sees the war as primarily a Northern affair. He proclaims that there was "no oppressive established church" as if Baptists did not have to support the Church of England in Virginia, and Quakers did not have to pay fines for fornication because they could not be legally married, and Presbyterians did not have to pay to support the Catholic Church in Maryland. He confuses "English" with "Scotch," as in "Scotch-Irish."
Anyhow, I want to quote a bit of what he says about the Federalists in the first decades of the Republic. He quotes Timothy Ford of South Carolina who in 1794 "spoke for the Tidewater slaveholding planters who were worried about the massive migration of small Scotch-Irish farmers into the backcountry of Carolina." This would include my GGGG Grandfather Ezekiel Henderson, young but a veteran of the War, removed to western SC from North Carolina after his marriage at the end of the war. Ford did not want men like Henderson to vote because his interests could not be the same as the interests of the coastal slaveholders. Men like Ford were horrified by the idea of "universal manhood suffrage," so they set up barriers "to protect the state against the onrushing rabble."
After the Civil War Southern Democrats managed to protect their interests against the votes of black men and some poor whites, but, as President Johnson foresaw, the voting rights act changed all that and gave the Republicans the chance to train their members in voter suppression so that they have become the absolute masters of voter suppression in 2012, in Ohio, in Florida, and many other states.
Shame, shame, shame on anyone who professes to be of the party of Lincoln.
Anyhow, I want to quote a bit of what he says about the Federalists in the first decades of the Republic. He quotes Timothy Ford of South Carolina who in 1794 "spoke for the Tidewater slaveholding planters who were worried about the massive migration of small Scotch-Irish farmers into the backcountry of Carolina." This would include my GGGG Grandfather Ezekiel Henderson, young but a veteran of the War, removed to western SC from North Carolina after his marriage at the end of the war. Ford did not want men like Henderson to vote because his interests could not be the same as the interests of the coastal slaveholders. Men like Ford were horrified by the idea of "universal manhood suffrage," so they set up barriers "to protect the state against the onrushing rabble."
After the Civil War Southern Democrats managed to protect their interests against the votes of black men and some poor whites, but, as President Johnson foresaw, the voting rights act changed all that and gave the Republicans the chance to train their members in voter suppression so that they have become the absolute masters of voter suppression in 2012, in Ohio, in Florida, and many other states.
Shame, shame, shame on anyone who professes to be of the party of Lincoln.
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