Douglas was a radical expansionist. Both parts of the Democratic Party in 1860 called for the annexation of Cuba. And there were 100,000 slaves in Cu… - Harry V. Jaffa

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Douglas was a radical expansionist. Both parts of the Democratic Party in 1860 called for the annexation of Cuba. And there were 100,000 slaves in Cuba, and Cuba was the place that slaves were still being brought from Africa and then resold in the United States. So under a Douglas presidency, we would have taken over the rest of Mexico and Central America whenever we had the resources and the appetite to take to do so. You can be sure that most of the Mexicans would have either been reduced to peonage or to slavery. In the Mexican War itself, in case you don’t know it, we appropriated 60 percent of the land area of Mexico as it was then defined through the Spanish Conquest. So we increased the size of the United States by 40 percent and reduced Mexico by 60 percent.

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About Harry V. Jaffa

Harry Victor Jaffa (7 October 1918 – 10 January 2015) was an American historian, writer, and collegiate professor from New York City, known for his writings on the American Civil War.

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Alternative Names: Harry Victor Jaffa Harry Jaffa
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There is a further and deeper reason why colonization failed and why all subsequent attempts to return Americans of African descent to Africa, even those originating solely within the black community, have failed. The reason is that the overwhelming majority of these Americans regard their destiny to be in the United States. They were, after all, sold into slavery originally by black tribesmen, who captured them in order to sell them, and who slaughtered the ones they did not sell. No resent of slavery, however profound, engendered any love of a mythical African homeland. To have asked them to return to Africa was not unlike asking American Jews whose parents or grandparents fled czarist or Stalinist tyranny to return to Russia. However involuntary their emigration from Africa, American Negroes, whether free or slave, have always seen America itself as the promised land. Both Christianity and the Declaration of Independence embodied promise to all men. They saw no better or equal hope anywhere else, and certainly not in Africa. The truth is that the slaves, ignorant and illiterate as they may have seemed, were far from unintelligent. The Bible that they heard about, even if they were not allowed to read it, contained stories that convinced them that the same God that had freed the children of Israel would free them. Jefferson Davis might have thought this to be mere credulity. Yet it certainly compared favorably with his own absurd reading of the story of Noah.

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So the repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that whole territory to the ingress of slavery. That sparked the greatest political revolution in American History. In the spring of 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, there was no Republican Party; there were no Republican congressmen. In the four elections of 1854, 100 Republican Congressmen were returned to the Congress. At that moment, Stephen A. Douglas was looked upon as the antichrist from the point of view of the anti-slavery movement.

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