For as far back as I can remember, my many liberal friends cannot fathom why a good Southern Boy such as I, simply cannot abide the Democrat Party. One even told me point blank that "... we (Democrats) are the good guys ...we couldn't possibly do anything wrong", and kept a pure innocent straight face while saying it.

Jesse James used to boast about shooting "radicals" (Republicans).The KKK was the armed auxiliary of the Southern Democratic party, and the "South" was expansive enough at the time (post-reconstrction) to include Indiana and S. Illinnois.

Northern (city) Democrats didn't have the Klan, they relied on shear corruption, thuggishness, street gangs, union bullies, and organized crime.

"Northern (city) Democrats didn't have the Klan, they relied on shear corruption, thuggishness, street gangs, union bullies, and organized crime."

Hm. Some things never change.

The Democrats have always been, are now, and will always be the party of slavery and degradation. Their narcissistic psychoses will let them be nothing else.

You mean the Democrats are the party of Slavery and Secession?

Would never have known that from all of the civil rights stuff on the air and on tape/disc.

Republicans supported civil rights from the get-go, but when it came to the spotlight LBJ and the ghost of JFK stole it from them. And then the Democrats went 180 with affirmative action.

Democrats - Racist? What Race Do You Want Getting Favors? Because We Can Do That.

I see the Dems haven't changed much in 145 years. Only most publik-skool edjumacated Americans don't realize the Democratic Party's historical association with the KKK, the Copperheads, and the pro-slavery South, because that history wasn't taught in school. To his credit, McClellan disavowed the worst of these elements of the Democratic Party when he ran for election, but it took him a while to do so, and by that time, Mobile Bay and Atlanta were in Union hands, making Lincoln's reelection more certain.

It is little known now that the great emancipator was not going to grant suffrage to former slaves. He grew up in that neighborhood, and knew that what would happen with immediate enfranchisement would be no less a disaster for blacks than it was for whites. It was.

Jefferson Davis said that the assassination of Lincoln was the second greatest disaster the South suffered. The Republican radicals took over, and true radicals they were. Don't be braggin' about old-timey Republicans.

I must dispute the comment at 7:16 PM.

First, because it was not in the power of President Lincoln to "grant suffrage" to anybody, whether white, black, or bluish-purple: traditionally, enfranchisement has been done by state law; it took federal constitutional amendments to force enfranchisement regardless of race or sex, for instance, and the president has no formal role in approving amendments to the federal constitution. (This ought not really need to be explained, should it?)

Second, Lincoln himself proposed to Louisiana's governor Michael Hahn, March 13, 1864, that the state's constitutional convention might consider "whether some of the colored people may be let in" for suffrage; furthermore, Lincoln referred quite positively to that state's legislature's authority to enfranchise blacks according to that new constitution, in his speech on reconstruction, April 11, 1865.

Just a slight modification to my earlier comment. I'm well aware that the KKK was founded after the Civil War, so McClellan wouldn't have had to disassociate himself from the Klan, but rather from its ideological predecessors. Which he did. He still lost.

Dispute away, ELC. For Lincoln to grant southern states the right to determine sufferage is a distinction without a difference. Obviously.

It wasn't Lincoln's to grant, james wilson. It took a few amendments to the US Constitution to deal with all of that. Specifically, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

Obviously nothing. I corrected your false assertion with citations to Lincoln's own writings.

Wow, so educated on U.S. history that you fail to know that during the entirety of the 1800's the democrats were the more conservative of the two parties and would be much like modern day republicans, that's why through most of the early to mid-20th century you had what were called "dixiecrats" right-wing, southern congressmen and senators who still held on to the conservative tradition in the south. For most of U.S. history the entire southern half of the U.S. was democrat and the North Republican, then things switched in the early 1900's though the ideologies did not change.