Thread by @HC_Richardson

@DineshDSouza Sigh. @KevinMKruse and @TheTattooedProf and I drew straws, and I lost.

OK. Here goes....

Lincoln's GOP was not "left-wing." It was, indeed, conservative. It held to the principle the Founders stated in the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal."/1

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf That concept was flawed from the start, of course, because the Founders also enslaved people and denied that women had rights. But Americans at the time believed the government was set up to promote the ability of white men to work hard and rise. But the 1830s brought change./2

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf Cotton had become hugely profitable, but it needed fresh land and lots of slave labor. Planters demanded Texas, and lands below that. Northerners worried that new slave states would overawe free states in the Senate, and they tried to limit the spread of slavery./3

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf They did... until 1854. That was the year that everything hit the fan. The US had acquired the vast West to California in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf IL Senator Stephen Douglas wanted to organize the Northwest so a transcontinental railroad could cross it. The land the road would cover was free under the 1820 Missouri Compromise (which gave the South the land below MO in the LA Purchase and the North the land above it)./5

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf But southerners said no way to another free state, + Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing slavery above the MO Compromise line. Lincoln and most northerners recognized this was a radical attempt by slaveholders to take over the government for their own benefit./6

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf Slaveowners forced the K-N Act through Congress, and it was clear they were taking over government with the intent of monopolizing resources to concentrate wealth at the very top of society. Their progress was rapid-fire, and instructive:/7

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf In 1856, they installed a weak president who tried to suppress an anti-slavery popular government in Kansas. They beat a northern Senator almost to death on the Senate floor to silence him. And they backed the Dred Scott decision, which said Congress could not limit slavery./8

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf By 1858, it was clear that the government was working for the very rich, which was a radical new departure from the Founders' vision. Slaveowners were unapologetic that they wanted a world run by a very few rich men. As James Henry Hammond said in 1858:

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf Lincoln denied this radical change in the nature of America. Government must not work for the very few; it must work to promote equality of opportunity for all. In 1859, he said:

@DineshDSouza @KevinMKruse @TheTattooedProf And that's what the GOP did in the 1860s: it saved "government of the people, by the people, for the people," as Lincoln explained in the Gettysburg Address. They were not "left-wing," but were conservatives stopping a few rich men from taking over the government./END