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发帖数: 1 | 1 President Jackson regularly violated American law, violated basic civil
liberties, and unleashed a storm of public turmoil. He empowered his coarse
supporters and (one hopes inadvertently) stoked domestic violence on a
massive scale. Jackson was pro-slavery and usually pro-states’-rights, and
abhorred the then small abolitionist movement. He called anti-slavery
abolitionists “monsters” who stirred up “the horrors of a servile war”
and deserved to “atone for this wicked attempt with their lives.” He asked
a session of Congress to authorize federal censorship of abolitionist mail
and even went so far as to order the federal postal service to leave
southbound abolitionist mail undelivered. Historian David Walker Howe has
referred to this as “the largest peacetime violation of civil liberty in US
history.
Jackson’s policies empowered anti-abolitionists (North and South) and
helped unleash a storm of mob violence against these activists and, indeed,
all anti-Jackson political groups. In 1834 a Jacksonian New York mob drove
Whig Party observers away from a polling place. The next day a Whig parade
was physically attacked. These events augured three years of such mob
violence. Ethnic, racial, and religious animosities influenced these attacks
, but free blacks and abolitionists were the most common targets. William
Lloyd Garrison, a famous abolitionist, was nearly lynched and was saved only
when the authorities held him in jail for his own protection. In New York
City there was a three-day riot in response to an African American
celebration commemorating the date of slavery’s abolition in the state. The
mob violence was so pervasive that urban centers responded by forming the
first modern police forces. (These men initially lacked uniforms and were
identifiable only by a copper badge — hence the nickname cops.) This is a
vital point. Most American police forces were formed not in response to a
crime wave but rather on the heels of white urban riots!
These mobs were made up of Irish and German Catholic immigrants. The members
of these groups tended to be staunch Democrats and were registered to vote
by Democratic operatives as soon as they debarked their ships. Though poor
and stigmatized, these immigrants learned to be white — were informed of
their “whiteness” — and passionately enforced the system of racial caste
in America. They may have been poor, they may have been Catholic, but at
least they were white; it was not the first time a sentiment of this kind
had been held in America.”
Excerpt From: Daniel A. Sjursen. “A True History of the United States. |
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