A Constitution Written in Blood
As he stood in a line of battle that stretched 1,000 men across, three ranks deep, through farms and woodlots and waited for the command to forward march, I highly doubt 1st Sergeant Charles Broomhall, Company D, 124th Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1st Corps, Union Army of the Potomac, was pondering that September 17th, 1862 was the 75th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. Or if he did understand the significance of the date, while studying the damage being done by the solid and case shot from the corps artillery screaming into the smoke-obscured rebel lines formed up against them a mile to the south, did he truly ponder the consequences of the momentous event in which he was about to be a bit player. I often wonder how much men like Broomhall and his fellow soldiers understood that they were about to take the first bloody steps of America’s most tragic and violent day. When the hot September sun finally set upon the devastated battlefield near the Antietam Creek, nearly 23,000 Americans had fallen, making it the bloodiest day in our country's history. But the course of the nation was forever altered, and the first true act of reconciling the promise of the Revolution as embodied in the Constitution to include all of its citizens had been initiated. Antietam finally provided the Union its first significant victory (if not the hoped-for destruction of Lee’s army) and with it the moral force Lincoln needed to announce his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that he had tabled all summer while awaiting good news from the field. Today, September 17th, is indeed a date that Americans should celebrate as both the true birth of the constitutional republic, and the new birth of freedom for millions of Americans that resulted from the horrific battle fought along the sluggish creek’s banks.
September 17th is also a date that Republicans should look on with pride. We of the Grand Old Party can cast an eye across the chasm of time to recall the ideals of our most favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, arguably the nation’s greatest President. For seventy-five years following its ratification, the Constitution remained a fatally flawed document. It held forth that three million plus Americans of African descent held in bondage were property not people (although for purposes of House representation it was settled that they would count as three-fifths of a person!). The notion of slavery is viscerally repugnant to us today. The antithesis of who we are. But this is who we were. Through fifteen presidents in four political parties this practice was not only upheld, but was protected and, after the debates were over, seconded and signed with political compromises in 1820 and again in 1850 that kept men in chains for the sake of a faux peace. Neither solution lasted because neither solution rectified the fundamental moral crime of slavery itself which was an absolute wrong and unsustainable.
The great irony of the Civil War is that slavery, the one overarching and unavoidable question that was the incubator of all others, was the one issue that both sides agreed at the beginning was not what the war was about. And both sides were wrong. It finally fell to a Republican president to draw the line on the question. Cynics and racists will argue that Lincoln no more cared for the black man than did his Southern counterpart Jefferson Davis. And his earlier expressions give some weight to this, such as his oft-quoted claim that his primary goal was to save the Union, not end slavery (you know the one: “if I could free all slaves… if I could free some… if I could free none…”) But clearly a moral catharsis befell the man and by the summer of 1862 he was ready to make this a war about a higher cause than just union and free navigation of the Mississippi. All he needed was a victory to avoid his Proclamation appearing, as Secretary of State Seward warned him, “the last shriek on the retreat.”
Again the cynics will say that it was for political not moral reasons that Lincoln put forth his notion of emancipation — a foreign policy stiff-arm to keep the world power of England at bay and prevent their recognizing the Confederacy as France had our nation in 1778, tipping the balance of the Revolution in our favor. Only a naïve schoolboy would believe that such pragmatic notions did not play a role in Lincoln’s ultimate course. But from as early as an 1831 trip to New Orleans where he saw blacks so horribly mistreated, Lincoln seems to have formed a moral objection to the practice that was the foundation of many of his policies. He wrote often of how he hated the practice, calling it in 1858 a “monstrous injustice.” Even if the practical politician was forced to occasionally set it aside, the evil of slavery was always in his peripheral vision. And our great party was originally founded to end this practice completely, by first halting its expansion.
For me, the most disheartening chapter in the story of disarray that has been the modern GOP during the past few election cycles is the almost complete abandonment of our party by African-American voters. I realize that the nation has elected seventeen Republican presidents since Lincoln and that politics and indeed the nation has turned over many times since. But when 96% of any particular ethnic group votes for the opposition, something more than just the ebb and flow of political loyalties is in play here. Obviously the first black presidential candidate had much to do with the last election results, but what of the many before that which show African-Americans routinely casting their lots in overwhelming numbers with the Democrats?
I cannot speak for this nation’s many black communities. (I use the plural as I reject that there is one monolithic group here). But the ingrained mindset we must cut through to show that the Republican Party is not hostile to black interests is formidable nonetheless. It starts at the very highest levels of leftist academia and trickles all the way down to the urban streets. Consider Georgetown sociology professor, and ordained minister, Michael Eric Dyson’s take on Clarence Thomas (and I presume other black conservatives): "White supremacy as a notion [can] inhabit black skin." He goes on to offer that one can be “a ventriloquist as a black skinned person, saying ideas that are corruptive of a tradition of Black response." To sum up Dyson's thesis: "Blackness" as he defines it has nothing to do with skin color but rather one's ideology and politics. And of course, the farther left your beliefs, the truer to your race you are. Thus the notion of “Uncle Tom” is alive and well in academia it seems. So long as this mentality is promulgated in the highest intellectual circles, dispensed as gospel by so-called “black leaders” who have a real political — and economic — stake in keeping the grievance machine humming, and then unchallenged and even endorsed by pop culture and the mainstream media, we have a tough road ahead.
Ironically, on social issues blacks as a whole fall more in line with conservatives than they do their self-appointed liberal spokesmen. It is thus on economic matters where the abyss is found. Again, this German-Irish writer would never presume to be an expert on the black experience in America. To my knowledge, I have never been denied anything in my life because of what I am rather than who I am. I therefore leave it to people like our African-American chairman Michael Steele and other spokespersons like Condoleeza Rice, J.C. Watts, even Colin Powell (should he return to the GOP in more than membership card) to develop the Republican case. I would implore Mr. Steele especially to create a serious playbook we can all implement. Educate us as to where the GOP has gone wrong, encourage grassroots organizing, town hall meetings, and other interpersonal encounters with black voters to help us roll up our sleeves and bridge past divides. Let Mr. Steele help us offer the notion that the Republican Party, by its very nature of treating all groups as equals (and not as wards of the state deserving largess, an approach that in the end destroys lives rather than builds futures) is where the true friends of the black communities can be found. That real political power comes from not being captive to one party alone, as this only encourages parties to take those votes for granted while discouraging the other side from even reaching out. We must break through with a message that we are a party that from its very inception was built upon the bedrock principles of racial justice which eventually would evolve into social, political and hopefully economic equality for all where no one need be treated differently… so long as all are treated fairly.
The Republican party, far from being hostile to blacks, must be re-packaged and presented for what we truly can do for African-Americans if they give us a chance. Our message should be this: we can in the 21st century empower black voters to finally free themselves from the economic and social shackles of big government dependence and Democratic cradle-to-grave condescension that buys votes but destroys generations, as much as our first President’s great Proclamation unlocked their literal chains in the middle of the 19th century.
So I implore all Republicans to mark today, September 17th, on their calendar and take a moment to consider its import. In 1787, a great constitution was drafted, and then in 1862, exactly three-quarters of a century later, a great and terrible victory won to right its inherent wrong. Consider that with the leadership of a great Republican, we took the first bloody steps to transform this nation from a slave to a free state on that day. That should Barack Obama stroll the fields of the Antietam battlefield where men like Sergeant Broomhall stood and fought and bled, that he is standing upon hallowed ground won by Union men under a Republican president which paved the way for his transcendental election 146 years later. And that if we could come so far from being founded as a slave nation, to fighting a terrible civil war to end slavery, to electing an African-American as our President in a span of two centuries, it should not be so difficult for this Grand Old Party to reclaim the mantle of Lincoln, and once again free black communities from the malicious grip of a systemic Democratic monopoly that has done them little good, while pretending to care for them so much.