In a Jan. 4 op-ed entitled "Embracing civil liberties," Ben Jealous implores the Republican Party to restore itself to a "sincere civil rights advocacy" that dates all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Jealous does not distinguish myth from history.
As was the custom, president-elect Lincoln refrained from substantive public discourse between his election and his inauguration, a period that coincided with the "secession winter" of 1860-61. Sen. William Seward was unofficially the party's interim spokesman; two days after agreeing to serve in Lincoln's forthcoming administration, Seward delivered "The Union," a speech to the U.S. Senate on Jan. 12, 1861, to present a litany of reasons why disunion must be avoided.
Seward offered to support a constitutional amendment forever forbidding federal interference in the practice of slavery by any state wherein it already existed. He reiterated Lincoln's campaign pledge to oppose all efforts to expand slavery but added that the U. S. government would always protect its existence in the slave states. And he declared that it was U.S. power alone that could preserve Southern slavery: "If dissolution prevail, what guarantee shall there be against the full development here of the fearful ... hostility to slavery which elsewhere pervades the world?"
No one can square this history with a Republican resolve to end slavery, or even with a mere advocacy of civil rights. If Mr. Jealous is to express political opinion that relies for credibility upon antebellum history, he must at bare minimum acknowledge that Southerners exited with full knowledge that nothing could better ensure a preservation of slavery than remaining in the Union and that Lincoln launched his war for no reason other than to sustain levy in the Old South of his grotesquely inequitable U. S. tariff.
Dennis G. Saunders, Columbia