The 1866 Civil Rights Act

Posted on | April 18, 2012 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

Thanks to Republicans beginning to appreciate the heritage of our Grand Old Party, it has become better known that Republicans in Congress supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act much more than did the Democrats. Indeed, the legislator most responsible for breaking the Democrat filibuster was a Republican senator, Everett Dirksen.
And now, the question that should be before us: How did that landmark legislation come to be? The answer to that is a source of pride for all Republicans today.
The origin of the 1964 Civil Rights Act can be traced back to the Reconstruction era. That was when the Republican Party enacted the first civil rights act ever, the 1866 Civil Rights Act. Never heard of it? Democrat history professors would rather you didn’t. With that law, Republicans took a big step toward making Abraham Lincoln’s vision for “a new birth of freedom” a reality.

It was a ‘whoa’ moment while reading Rumsfeld’s book to discover that he’s a goat so old as to have voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act. The 1964 one. Michale Zak is a historian who is working diligently to recover American History in general, and that of the GOP in particular, from decades of Commie airbrushing.
Read his entire Human Events article on the 1866 Civil Rights Act.

Update: linked by The Lonely Conservative

Category: Republicans

Comments

24 Responses to “The 1866 Civil Rights Act”

Adobe_Walls
April 18th, 2012 @ 10:44 pm

Way too little way too late. Politics is a what have you done for me lately business. Romney is the nominee ergo the Republican party is irredeemable. That was the litmus test I established at the very beginning of the primary. Any party wherein it is even thinkable let alone possible for a Romney, or a Bush to get it’s nomination simply isn’t conservative at all. The conservatives in it who hope to change it are simply chasing their tail. I’ll do my bit this one last time and try to help vote the Bolsheviks out of office but unless a candidate is from a conservative party and is also on the ballot as a republican they’ll not get my vote after this cycle.
History of the GOP’s Role in Passing Civil Rights Legislation | The Lonely Conservative
April 19th, 2012 @ 12:06 am

[…] at The Grand Old Partisan.I saw this earlier, and almost forgot to post it until I was reminded by Smitty’s post.Tweetvaso linkTags: Civil Rights Act, Democrat, history, republican This entry was posted on […]
Charles
April 19th, 2012 @ 2:17 am

What real claim do so-called conservatives have on either America or the Republican Party? The Republican Party by its history both old and recent is inherently a liberterian rather than conservative party.

The original conservatives were the poltical supporters of aristocracy, which is un-American. All the aristocratic U.S. Presidents have been Democrats. The Democratic Party can claim back to 1828 so they have dibs on the label conservative by right of primogeniture.

Socialists are the heirs of an international political movement that can claim back to around 1825 as a reactionary counter to the industrial revolution. They have the prior claim to both Democrats and Republicans.

The Republican Party gets in trouble when it strays from libertarianism, as it did with Taft and his income tax, Nixon and his break-ins, and the Bush neocon dynasty.
Adjoran
April 19th, 2012 @ 2:51 am

I felt that way after Dole’s ’96 performance. I had been willing to overlook his tack to the middle as Majority Leader because the job is keeping the party together to get things done, and he had to keep 60 votes for cloture to get the Contract items through. But the campaign was lame.

Then came 2000, and “compassion conservatism” which seemed to me just Liberal Lite, since real conservatism is the true compassion – even if with a little tough love. But it was Dubya or AlGore, and it just made no sense to sit on the fence.

But the overall Party has moved to the right significantly from Reagan’s day, when Lugar was one of the conservatives. Now he’s being primaried and no one is crying for him. Conservatives are winning over the GOP and the country; it’s just going a lot slower than it needs to.

It’s not going to go any faster if any of us throw up our hands in frustration and give up the fight – or try to change the fight to start a new party, which ain’t happening.

We do need to remember that it took the “Progressives” a century to get us here, we aren’t turning back the clock with one Reagan, or a few election cycles.

And also that the alternative to the “lesser of two evils” can only be the greater evil.
Bob Belvedere
April 19th, 2012 @ 7:38 am

Unlike the Progressives, however, we don’t have time on our side.
Quartermaster
April 19th, 2012 @ 7:49 am

The GOP did not start as conservative or Libertarian. It was simply a reorganization and rebranding of the dying Whig party which was progressive.

Conservatism has a strong libertarian streak. Always has, alsways will. That’s why it was an act of grave stupidity for Santorum to insult libertarians and say he was conservative, not libertarian. If he has no libertarian streak, then he’s not a conservative. Period.
Quartermaster
April 19th, 2012 @ 7:50 am

In my considered opinion, it’s already too late. No matter who is elected, the next term will see the economic collapse of the US unless whoever is in office will take a meat ax to FedGov and borrow no more. We know that ain’t gonna happen.
Saul
April 19th, 2012 @ 9:00 am

It’s great to review the proud history of the Republican party, which was on the side of the angels in the slavery and civil-rights debates of the 1800s. But it’s tedious to read a hack like Michael Zak, who can’t refrain from making up history. I refer to his assertion that “Democrat history professors” don’t want anyone to know about the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
I read his piece, which would get a failing grade in any history course because he provides no evidence to back up his thesis about the perfidy of Democrat history professors. Then I Googled “Civil Rights Act of 1866” and easily found all kinds of books and scholarly articles on the topic by…yes, history professors. Spare me Zak-think (i.e., purely imagined) replies positing that all those history professors are Republicans.

We need better interlocutors than this. Great debates can’t happen with people who just make stuff up.
Pathfinder's wife
April 19th, 2012 @ 10:03 am

I don’t think you can claim that today’s American conservatives are of the same strain as the ones in revolutionary times because the advance of time by necessity means different things are desired to be conserved now as opposed to then.

As for libertarianism, it is an ideology that has strains in both liberalism and conservatism — as in a sense it has more to do with the scale of chaos and control within each system.

Nice try at shutting “conservatives” out though (hey, I really don’t care; I’m an independent — but I’ve noticed that some libertarians seem very desirous to have the GOP to themselves — socons need not apply…it’s probably a bad idea, and acting in a way very far removed from upholding liberty for all (which means libertarianism become a hollow sham and a fraud, but the GOP as a party has gone so far down the socialist rabbit hole itself that maybe the socons should take this as an opportunity to get away while they still can…as well as those libertarians who realize their movement has been shanghai’d).
Pathfinder's wife
April 19th, 2012 @ 10:18 am

It was a fatally poor choice of words, possibly more. However, I do see a strain of truth in what he said (it was one of the things that made me start to notice him).

Libertarianism has itself started to rot. It has gathered to it people who are more in love with the “freedom” to do anything they want rather than building a more free society. The tyranny of the individual and the libertine rather than the libertarian as it were — this only leads to anarchy, which itself leads to loss of liberty. It was a good point to make. The libertarians have some housecleaning to do of their own.
Of course, to be fair the conservatives do as well. And no true liberal (by the true definition of that word) should be siding with the “liberals” as they name themselves today…but as already said: the time is perhaps, unfortunately too late now.
The only ones who have no doubts about themselves are the totalitarians, the “progressives”, and they are everywhere and quite sure of what they are doing.
Adobe_Walls
April 19th, 2012 @ 10:40 am

Reagan didn’t turn back the clock in any meaningful way, he slowed the march of Bolshevism but didn’t permanently reverse any of it’s gains. The GOP may contain more genuine conservatives now than in the past but “it” isn’t more conservative. The excruciatingly slow pace of it’s alleged conversion is fatal to it and the Republic. Reagan’s presidency was a temporarily and only marginally successful coup within the party. As Bob writes, “time is not on our side” we don’t have a century or a decade or even a presidential term in fact time has already run out. We’ve already gone over the cliff and are now falling at terminal velocity. It’s a long way down to the bottom of the chasm but crash we will. A president now has the power to declare martial law and seize supplies and “assets”. If Obamsky is reelected he will use that power because that’s the shortest route to his goals, Romney will use it because he thinks he must in a misguided attempt to “save” the country much like Bush felt he had to abandon “free market principles” to save the free market. Romney will not rescind each and every one of Obamsky’s executive orders he will not issue executive orders ruling all of the new powers by fiat Obamsky has empowered regulatory agencies with, he will not do anything to reverse the “Orwellian onslaught” there will be an economic/financial crash under the next president no matter who is president conservative principles will be found guilty. It will not be difficult for a man who actually believes that smarter not smaller government what’s required to abandon principles he never held in the first place.
Wombat_socho
April 19th, 2012 @ 10:52 am

Despair is a sin.
ThePaganTemple
April 19th, 2012 @ 11:00 am

but I’ve noticed that some libertarians seem very desirous to have the GOP to themselves — socons need not apply

I think you need to change that to the other way around, if you are aiming for accuracy.
Adobe_Walls
April 19th, 2012 @ 11:26 am

It’s not despair, I merely have a strangle hold on reality, we’ve squandered our few opportunities. It’s not time to despair but rather to prepare.
Pathfinder's wife
April 19th, 2012 @ 11:44 am

How about both are equally guilty? But you are right — it is a bad idea for one group to call the shots above all the rest.
Stogie Chomper
April 19th, 2012 @ 3:15 pm

It is foolish to take the Ann Coulter approach, which is to claim that Republicans were always fanatically pro-equality, anti-racist, pro-negro egalitarians, fighting the evil, racist, unenlightened Democrats. History is not that simple.

The Democrats were not always the neo-Marxists we see today, nor were they always the embodiment of evil. For that reason, I caution you against using history as a political weapon in the here and now.
ThePaganTemple
April 19th, 2012 @ 8:20 pm

I remember a time when conservatives used to point with pride to the GOP as a party much like a three legged stool, each of those legs representing social, fiscal, and national security conservatives. The point being that in order for the stool to work right, each leg was of equal importance.

How times have changed, and not for the better.
ThePaganTemple
April 19th, 2012 @ 8:22 pm

I can’t allow myself to believe its too late. I figure even if the best Mitt can do is “slow the decline”, at least that’s something, and might well lead to a future conservative president beginning the long hard process of actually reversing the decline. In fact, it might very well turn out to be vital to slow the decline first before we can reverse it efficiently. Much like a car going 100 miles per hour can just stop and turn around in the space of one second. You have to slow down first gradually, then stop and turn.
ThePaganTemple
April 19th, 2012 @ 8:27 pm

You’re right about the Republicans, they weren’t all or even mostly “fanatically pro-equality, anti-racist, pro-negro egalitarians”, and its foolish to believe they were. But the Democrats, I don’t know, that’s a different story. Not that they were intentionally racist and evil. Many if not most of them probably honestly thought they were doing the blacks a favor by bringing them over here, teaching them our religion and civilization, and caring for them while technically enslaving them. But just because they were blind to the fact that they were evil and racist doesn’t mean they weren’t evil and racist. Hitler probably thought he was all that and a bag of chips too.
Stogie Chomper
April 19th, 2012 @ 10:25 pm

Oh come on, read a book or something. Slavery existed on this continent before there was a United States of America or a Democrat Party or a Republican Party. To try and pin the responsibility for slavery on the Democratic Party is self-serving nonsense. Northerners are the ones who brought slaves over from Africa in horrible conditions in the holds of ships; Northerners ran the slave trade and made millions off of it. And for every slave they sold the South they sold 19 more to Cuba, Brazil and the West Indies.

So you are saying that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and most of the Founding Fathers were evil and racist? They owned slaves, and lots of them. Will you be renouncing your citizenship anytime soon? Just askin.’
ThePaganTemple
April 19th, 2012 @ 11:25 pm

No, but most of them inherited their slaves, and Washington freed his on his deathbed. And by the way, this might come as a big shock to you, but I’m not a big fan of Jefferson.

Slavery is an evil institution, and the Southerners who promoted it were evil, that’s just the way it is. It doesn’t mean a damn thing that it happened to have existed throughout the world before the Democrats came along. By the time the rest of the world renounced the practice, the Southern Democrats were still defending it, fiercely and aggressively, and even trying to expand it into the West.

You can put all the lipstick on that pig you want to, but you’ll never pretty that sow up, and you damn sure won’t ever convince anybody that knows the whole story that the Democrats of the old South who promoted and defended slavery before and during the war, and Jim Crow after the war, were anything but racist, evil turdblossoms.

And they haven’t changed a damn bit, their present day welfare plantation is just one more repackaging and re-branding of the same old sorry, rancid, evil shit.
JeffS
April 20th, 2012 @ 1:22 am

Yup.
Stogie Chomper
April 20th, 2012 @ 12:10 pm

You reveal not only your arrogance, but your ignorance as well. It was the Northerners who owned the slave ships and ran the slave trade, making billions off the slave traffic. For every slave they sold to the South, they sold 19 more to Cuba, Brazil and the West Indies. Oh yes, Pagan, tell me how morally superior you damn Yankees are and were.

Slavery was a solidly American institution, not a Southern one. The North had no program, policy or plan to end slavery peacefully, which would have entailed compensation to the slave owners (like occurred in Britain and other places inthe world); and would have entailed relocating the great masses of Southern slaves throughout the territories and the states where they could be assimilated and where they could earn a living.

The very racist Lincoln Republicans would have none of that. They passed laws to keep blacks out of their states (Lincoln’s state of Illinois being one of them.)

The early Republicans called themselves “The White Peoples’ Party” and were opposed to blacks in the territories because of economic and racist reasons, not moral ones.

You delude yourself.
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April 24th, 2012 @ 9:01 am

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