(1) Racialism never put down firm roots in much of the North. States like Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota never had anti-miscegenation laws. Before Dred Scott, negroes were already citizens of many of these states. They had voting rights. There was little formal segregation. When Dred Scott was handed down, there were howls of protest across the North about the rights of black citizens.

(2) In the North, racialism was already in decline. Pennsylvania repudiated its anti-miscegenation law before the Constitution was even signed. Massachusetts followed in the 1830s. In every Northern state, Jim Crow laws were systematically torn down after the Civil War. Segregation in education and public accommodations was outlawed.

(3) The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution effectively destroyed the White Republic that was created by the Founders. Negroes were given full citizenship, voting rights, and a federal guarantee of equal protection under the law. See also the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, and 1875.

(4) The U.S. federal government has been in the business of repressing White Nationalists since the Grant Administration. Witness the fate of the Ku Klux Klan or the White League in the 1870s. See also the crackdown on the filibusters.

(5) In the North of the 1850s, the terrorist John Brown was embraced as a martyr and a hero. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a best seller. Frederick Douglass was a respected and admired intellectual.

(6) In the nineteenth century, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was already graced by anti-racist luminaries such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens.

(7) Abolitionism grew into a mass movement. Whites are entirely capable of producing and leading destructive egalitarian social crusades on their own intiative. Why wouldn’t they have continued to do so?

(8) The Civil War was fought to destroy the Confederacy.

(9) Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories were controversial even in his day. Samuel Stanhope Smith (the president of Princeton University) was one his famous opponents. Smith was arguing for environmentalism and cultural relativism over a hundred years before Franz Boas started teaching at Columbia.

(10) Religious groups like the Quakers and Unitarians would still have been around to promote universalism and egalitarianism.

(11) The colonization of what later became the United States was botched from the start. The Southern colonies were founded with a commercial purpose in mind. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were imported from Africa which grew through natural increase into millions.

(12) In the South, the planter class was addicted to servile non-white cheap labor before and after the Civil War, and often at odds with white interests.

(13) The United States was already flirting with third world immigration in the nineteenth century. Chinese immigrants settled in the Western states. The Japanese were allowed to colonize Hawaii. Mexicans worked as cheap labor in the Southwest when Arizona was still a territory.

(14) The ideological commitment of Americans to liberal democracy would still have invariably clashed with their racial nationalism. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt all wrestled with the issue.

From Occidental Dissent, July 12, 2009