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Our country is in crisis. Scenes of children crying at the border have shocked every decent person. Millions are wondering how to end the toxic regime that produced this outrage and so many others.
More than a century ago, small children were also being snatched from their mothers—by slave owners. Before the Civil War, there was an intense debate about how to respond. Some Northern leaders urged voters to elect “moderates” who would accommodate Southern slaveholders.
In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison founded an anti-slavery newspaper – The Liberator. In his very first editorial, he declared that on the subject of slavery: “I do not wish to think or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm … but urge me not to use moderation.”
Wendell Phillips—America’s greatest orator against slavery—pointed out that society needed someone as impassioned as Garrison to counter the fanatical zeal of slavery’s leading apologist, John C. Calhoun. “[Calhoun and Garrison] are chemical equals,” Phillips explained. “In the 19th century, every attempt to compromise with the slaveocracy degraded the free states and eventually flopped. A national political party built on a shaky alliance between Northern business and Southern plantation owners tore itself apart over slavery. The fate of that apparatus—the Whig Party—should serve as a warning to us today. The nitric acid of today’s oppression cannot be washed away with the cologne water of “centrism.” If the new forces fighting for universal health care, free public education, and an end to attacks on immigrants cannot be heard inside the old institutions, those forces have every right to forge something new, just like the opponents of slavery spurned by the Whig Party created a new institution—the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.
For more information about history’s lessons for election battles today, check out the educational on the People’s Tribune website: www.peoplestribune.org
