Thread by @NotReallyABear2

Anyone up for some history?

You know how the North were all the abolitionists & the south were all the racists & when the south went republican that’s when the parties flipped & the GOP was suddenly guilty of the democrats racist history?

Yeah that’s BS.

New York, July 1863.

Lower Manhattan, 7/16/1863. The Civil War is raging. The President is Abraham Lincoln, (R). Northerners were being drafted to fight in the war, & wealthy New Yorkers were paying a commutation fee while the poor could not. Rioting began on this class warfare premise but quickly/

flipped to a race riot. Why? Because democrats running the city were telling poor whites that an influx of black freed slaves would be competing for their work & would make them even poorer.

But weren’t the northern democrats abolitionists too?!? HA HA NO.

Calling themselves “Peace Democrats” (because they opposed the Civil War), Democrats in New York fanned the flames of poor white (mostly Irish at the time) insecurities & anger.

Economic terror & class hatred boiled over into racial & political hatred. The Governor of New York, a Democrat named Horatio Seymour, was sympathetic to rioters. The attacks quickly turned into attacks on black citizens, prominent Republicans & abolitionists, with the rioters/

lynching several black men they found in the street, then burning and pillaging a black orphanage.

There were actually many southern sympathizers in New York during the Civil War. They were democrats.

In the end, the riots lasted three days in NYC. 2000 people were injured and 120 were killed, mostly black men, including a 7 year old child. 50 buildings were burned to the ground, including the black orphanage and two churches. The Federal government had to send troops in.

Landlords, fearful of their buildings being burned, evicted black tenants, driving them into the dangerous streets. There was an exodus of black New Yorkers after the riots, causing the draft riots to be called “equivalent to a Confederate victory” by historian Samuel Morison.

At least eleven black men were lynched in the streets of New York. Likely more. Democrats demonized black freed men and women and compared them to animals. Innocent people were murdered over this demonization by NORTHERN DEMOCRATS.

You know how Joe Biden told a crowd that Mitt Romney would put black people “back in chains”? Even if he meant economically, this rhetoric is remniscent of what Northern democrats told poor Irishmen as the draft riots approached in order to whip them into a frenzy.

Have the Republicans done and said some terrible things in the past? Sure. But the democrats history is littered with lynched corpses, and I am not interested in letting them project that history into anyone else. They own that shameful history. It’s where their party began.