Now both April 15 and April 16 can be celebrated as days of
emancipation in the District of Columbia.
April 16
It is
becoming better known throughout the country that April 16 is
celebrated as Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia. When
April 16 falls on a Saturday, like this year, the day is celebrated
on Friday, April 15, causing the national due day for federal tax
returns to change from April 15 to Monday, April 18.
The District celebrates April 16 because, on that day in
1862, President Lincoln signed into law the District of Columbia
Compensated Emancipation Act (full
text). The law had been passed by the 37th Congress, both
houses of which were controlled by the Republican Party. Exercising
its plenary power over the District pursuant to the U.S.
Constitution, this Republican Congress abolished slavery in the
District, thereby overturning the District’s Slave Code, a form of
which had been published
just a month earlier, immediately emancipated all 3,000 slaves
belonging to District residents loyal to the Union, established a
three-person commission to adjudicate claims (and allowing persons
of color to testify), and appropriated one million dollars to
compensate owners up to $300 per slave.
We should note that, not only were public monies used to
purchase these slaves’ freedom, but public monies had been used to
enslave them. According to a 2005 report by the Architect of the
Capitol, over the decades hundreds of slaves were rented by the
Commissioners of the District of Columbia to build the U.S.
Capitol, most notably Philip Reid who cast the Statue of Freedom
atop it. (In ancient times, there were numerous “public slaves” who
were used by governments to build roads and aqueducts and temples.
The Egyptian pharaohs used their public Hebrew slaves in this
manner — we celebrate their Exodus this week during the Jewish
Passover and the Christian Holy Week. In the United States, the
U.S. military would rent slaves from their private
owners.
April 15
April 15,
2011, marked a new day of emancipation when President Obama,
following intense negotiations with a Republican-controlled House,
signed into law H.R. 1473, the Department of Defense and Full-Year
Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011 (text
of law). It marks a new day of emancipation in two
respects.
First, throughout the country, we have every hope that
this day will mark the beginning of the lifting of the heavy
Democratic hand in unprecedented spending, deficits, and debt
burden on our children. We can hope that the Democrats will see
that neither they, nor the Federal Government, have a monopoly on
compassion, that they will see that, merely because the Federal
Government reduces its spending on health care or education or
roads, it does not eliminate governmental or private spending for
these purposes. (See Quin Hillyer, “Save
Wrath for Obama,” April 15, 2011, and National Center
for Charitable Statistics.) We can hope that the number of days
we work (the percentage of our GDP) to pay taxes will start to
drop. We will not be slaves to our own government. Republican
President Gerald Ford used to say that a government big enough to
do everything you want it to do is big enough to take everything
from you. Former Senator Phil Gramm used to talk about a
constituent, Mr. Flatt, who owned a family printing business.
Senator Gramm would employ his “Dickey Flatt Test” (“Is it worth
taking it out of Dickey’s pocket?”) to determine his vote on public
spending. After April 15, we can say with Winston Churchill, after
the victory at El Alamein, “Now, this is not the end. It is not
even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the
beginning.”
Second, this law President Obama signed on April 15
contained two riders concerning solely the District of Columbia. It
reinstituted the District’s school voucher program and it
reinstituted the ban on the use of public monies for
abortions.
With respect to the latter, the Democrats in the District,
like the Democrats throughout the country, favor using public
monies for abortions. They are well aware that a large number of
residents are adamantly opposed to having their tax monies used to
pay for abortions. The Democrats do not have to agree that abortion
is deeply morally repulsive; all they need to do is to agree that
these are sincerely held beliefs. We’re not talking about money for
potholes. The District Democrats are just like those Democrats,
time and again, all over the country. Whatever they think
is a good cause, they’ll use majority rule to take money from
everybody’s wallets to pay for it. Instead of creating a private
fund, or a tax form with an optional check-off, for abortions, they
ride roughshod over conscientious objectors.
The Democrats insist on having their way. Lincoln referred
to this intolerance when he spoke of Democrats and other supporters
of slavery during his February 27, 1860, Cooper Union address.
Today, we could easily substitute “abortion” for “slavery” in the
following passages:
[W]hen you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce
us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws…
[What will convince them?] This, and this only: cease to
call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it
right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in
acts as well as in words. Silence will
not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them…
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in
politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private…The whole
atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to
slavery…
Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and
socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national
recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social
blessing.
…If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and
constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be
silenced, and swept away.
Following the Civil War, speakers at the 1874 New York State
Republican Convention recited calls by the Democrats that the
Republican Party should dissolve because the Party’s goals had been
achieved. The speakers declared that the Democrats had never
apologized for their record in support of slavery. (N.Y.
Times, Sept. 24, 1874; verbatim transcript of proceedings).
Jeffrey Lord has written on
these
pages of the abhorrent record of the Democratic Party on
slavery before the Civil War, on segregation during the hundred
years after the Civil War, and on baiting racial issues for the
past fifty.
No, it looks like the work of the Republican Party,
especially as long as there are Democrats and people like them,
will never be finished. Like the April 16 Compensated Emancipation
Act of 1862, the April 15 rider to ban the public funding of
abortions in the District was enacted at the behest of Republicans
and, pursuant to the plenary power of the Congress over the
District, it overrode tyrannical District law. The District’s
residents have been emancipated — by the Republicans —
again.
