“This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first.
Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.
The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East.
Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs-that’s what came of it.
The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them.
We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out.
We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.” – Populist movement leader Mary Elizabeth Lease. (Excerpts from a speech that she delivered circa 1890.)
We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks.
Not true. Almost all of the slavery trade took place before “WE” were a country and almost all of it was done by foreign ship captains. Also once slavery was here in the U.S. there were only about 10,000 or so slave owners; hardly “WE”. With few exceptions the Southerners who went to war and backed the war did it for a multitude of reasons where slavery was the least of them. Last point; slavery arrived on this continent in a way not so different from how illegal drugs arrive here. That is surreptitiously, without consent of most Americans and driven by foreigners.
No need
No supply
Blaming foreign slavers or drug mules is almost the same as blaming politicians for not giving us what we “deserve”…
I don’t think the word “blame” means what you think it does. They did it… period. I was just setting the record straight. It is important because when someone uses the word “we” than it should be “we” and not a handful of citizens and a few foreign ship captains. It is unfair to pain the entire South or the entire country with something that 99.999% of them took no part in. This kind of loose talk is intended to further the smear of all Americans committing the original sin. It simply did not happen that way. Further more the civil war and the forces behind it was full of intrigue and profiteering that had little to do with slavery BUT slavery was a perfect whipping boy. I am a Yankee, born within sight of Boston and when I joined the military I discovered that the Southerners made a lot of good and true points that simply do not appear in most history books.
The war was about cotton; cotton and England’s mills beating out the mills of New Englanders. The objective was to [punish the South, break them and get unrestricted access to cotton. My grandfather fought in the civil war for the North and his grave is appropriately honored in the cemetery back home. IMHO all of the Southern soldiers who fought should be equally honored. NOT because it was about slavery, but because it was about their rights and their states rights. In effect this was the first time any group stood up and said “Molon Labe”. I am not unhappy that they lost but I am sad for the years and years of mistreatment of the South by the federal government. I am happy that we are still 50 states under one flag and one constitution. Had the South won I doubt we would have gotten here.