Douglas Mercer
December 30 2021
The slogan of the state of Illinois is "The Land Of Lincoln." Were it the "Land Of Douglas" the course of history would have unfolded very differently. Lincoln and Douglas of course had those famous debates; when they are depicted Lincoln is always towering and Douglas is always short. And in history the stature of the two men is the same. Lincoln the great giant and holy martyr of equal rights and equal citizenship, a harbinger of the rainbow future. Douglas the minor dwarf who tried to thwart the future which belonged to blacks. Douglas is now seen as a throwback and an atavist, as the worst expression of the worst of America. But had he prevailed the course of history would have taken quite a different turn. No civil war, no slaughter of over half a million White men, and no negro citizenship. The paradise of America would have remained so. Today we would still have a real country.
A White man's country.
***
There's no doubt that by our lights the founders were White Nationalists but they were rarely explicit about it. There was the 1790 law on naturalization to be sure; this shows you what they were about when it was time to put their money where their mouth was. But outside of that it's hard to find explicit statements from them about the White character of the nation. It's likely this was because that White character was so obvious that it went without saying. But usually it is the most obvious that most needs saying. And when you couch things in universal terms your words are susceptible to twisting.
You have to fast forward to the years before the civil war when you get the first explicit and repeated statements that this is a White nation. By that time what had been so obvious to generations on this continent was not so obvious to everyone. You had "respected" men in the north funding a maniac who wanted to unleash black slaves to kill White people. You had politicians clamoring for equal rights for blacks. To the sane White men of the era this all seemed to be so much insanity. So they decided to say what had always been obvious. that this was a White man's country. Apparently it didn't go without saying, so they said it. It is always when you are under siege that the unadorned truth comes tumbling out.
***
A great country is always built on simple principles. In this case the principle was that this was White man's land.
Stephen Douglas for one minced no words and laid it bare for all to see.
"I hold that this government was made on the White basis; made by the White men, for the benefit of White men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by White men and none others."
What should have been a trivial statement of fact had become an alarm bell in the night. It still is ringing in our ears, particularly as dark night descends all around us.
So said the great Stephen Douglas. For his trouble he is reviled and slandered and banished and replaced.
Eastern Illinois university is now getting on the act of stripping White America of its heroes and symbols.
"During the meeting, Glassman said he concurred with the unanimous vote of the Naming Committee, which was charged with researching the issue and getting feedback from various parties, that a name change was in order."
Trust me, in our time a Naming Committe promises no good. The Glassman in this case is the President of Eastern Illinois University and the name they are going to change is that of Stephen Douglas, White stalwart.
"Eastern Illinois University is working to scrap the name of Douglas Hall, an all-male dormitory, because it is named after Stephen Douglas."
“Over the past few decades, Stephen Douglas has become an increasingly controversial figure for deploying inflammatory and racist rhetoric as a means to realizing his political aspirations, compelling EIU to once again reinstate the University Naming Committee to reconsider the Douglas Hall name as a reflection of EIU’s commitment to diversity, inclusivity, and empowerment,”
When you hear the words diversity, inclusion and empowerment you know you are about to get hosed. Certainly they want to disempower you--that's what the diversity and the inclusion amount to.
Evidently this is the kind of searingly beautiful statement they object to. In our day the following will no longer do.
"Lincoln declared that all distinctions of race must be discarded and blotted out, because the negro stood on an equal footing with the white man; that if one man said the Declaration of Independence did not mean a negro when it declared all men created equal, that another man would say that it did not mean another man; and hence we ought to discard all difference between the negro race and all other races, and declare them all created equal“
Here Douglas mercilessly pin pricks Lincoln's essential sophistry, the idea that if negros were excluded next it might be someone else, maybe a White man. That is risible on its face but that is how Lincoln always proceeded. He had a gift and penchant for important sounding rhetoric which seemed to adhere to a logic but when you took a step back you realized it was just high-sounding words and fluff and wholly illogical. It was a technique Lincoln often used to cow his listeners with nonsense which had a noble ring to it
And now just as they are about to melt that statue of Robert E. Lee down and turn it into some unworthy black man so too are they going to take Douglas Hall and replace that name with another one unworthy.
"In November 2021, the university released a shortlist of possible new names for the dorm consisting of former university presidents, faculty, Illinois politicians, and community members who contributed to the civil rights movement or broke through racial barriers. Recommended names on the list include former Governor of Illinois Edward Coles, EIU’s first African American professor Bill Ridgeway, Tuskegee airman Captain Charles Hall, who served in WWII, and the university’s first African American alumna Zella Powell."
Edward Coles was one of those anti-slavery sellouts who freed his slaves so he got on the short list. But as a White man he is unlikely to be picked. If you are a betting man go with one of the negroes. That it will be one of them is as sure as some black man is right now committing a felony.
But whoever they pick it is quite a comedown from the Little Giant, it's replacing a giant with a gnat. How the once mighty have fallen.
"In the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020, university officials, professors, and students quickly sought to replace Douglas Hall by formally requesting to rename the dormitory."
To make fundamental and epoch making changes to your society based on the death of sociopath is not the royal road to a bright future.
On the other hand the bracing comments of Stephen Douglas could have been, and could be again, that royal road. What you see in Dougals is that he goes back to fundamentals. All men are created equal has been so blindingly drilled in to our contemporaries, and so blindingly believed in by the brainwashed, that it's hard to see past the forest for the fog. As if anticipating trouble where there should have been no trouble at all, Douglas goes to the heart of the matter, something which should have been a matter of course, but needed to be drilled in to people's head. And so he drilled.
"Lincoln maintains there that the Declaration of Independence asserts that the negro is equal to the white man, and that under Divine law, and if he believes so it was rational for him to advocate negro citizenship, which, when allowed, puts the negro on an equality under the law."
For his prescience and his cogency and for his trouble Dougals is now a pariah. Lincoln of course is a paragon.
"With the nation racing to come to grips with centuries of racial sins, officials plan to remove the Capitol lawn statue of Stephen A. Douglas. Statues of two historical Illinois figures with ties to slavery, Stephen Douglas and Pierre Menard, are slated to be removed from the Illinois Capitol lawn after a panel voted Wednesday to have them taken down and to begin a comprehensive study of artwork on the Capitol complex."
That comprehensive study bodes no White man good. That is the sniffers of racism will stick their noses in to every nook and cranny and see if they can't smell them some racists. The funny thing is that if they are truly serious about it not many White men at all before 1960 would make the grade, and all they'd have left is a black guy who once protested on a soap box in front of the building and some black women who got the White men the coffee. A gallery of honor it will not be. It certainly is no way to honor the past.
On the other hand Stephen Douglas, that little Giant, begins to take on an enormous magnitude in memory, in the future he will have a pride of place in the pantheon, something which will make one and all regret that at the time he wasn't given a Viking funeral.
"I say to you in all frankness, gentlemen, that in my opinion a negro is not a citizen, cannot be, and ought not to be, under the Constitution of the United States."
It's no country for negroes.
Any questions? This is White man's land. Nothing else to say about it really. But he said it, and that's the important thing.
Let us say it too.
And over at the University of Chicago they ramped up the iconoclasm and tore down their better:
"Growing protests over statues and other memorials invoking America’s problematic past have reached the University of Chicago, with the removal of two tributes to Stephen Douglas."
Naturally Douglas has a riposte to all this mealy-mouthed moralism.
"I declare that a negro ought not to be a citizen, whether his parents were imported into this country as slaves or not, or whether or not he was born here. It does not depend upon the place a negro’s parents were born, or whether they were slaves or not, but upon the fact that he is a negro, belonging to a race incapable of self-government, and for that reason ought not to be on an equality with white men."
You can see him peering into the future when citizenship would be parsed out legally rather than on the basis of blood, about the status of the parents and so forth. Douglas cuts right through this nonsense. The black parents could have been born on the moon, or the heart of Dixie for that matter, and it does not matter. You see he's a negro: and negros can't be citizens. Case closed. No tip toeing or tap dancing or walking on eggshells required. Simple is as simple does. To the chop logic he responds with clarity. To the sophistry he responds with the law of blood. Why, even a benighted Supreme Court justice could understand that principle, almost anyways.
***
This is the sign of our times:
"A movement to remove memorials and artwork depicting historical figures with connections to slavery from public spaces gained momentum earlier this summer after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, which sparked nationwide protests against racism and police brutality against people of color."
And all of this is because principles were not stated and adhered too inflexibly. All of this because White America from the beginning did not speak of up always and loud and long about the White character of this nation and speak about it always with no deviation. All of this because "freedom" and "equality" where the watchwords rather than the simplest word of all: White.
And so over time citizenship became a bowl of mush and law upon law was added to make it less and less clear, and less and less White. Thus citizenship became watered down and the American Creed with it's nefarious celebration of equality took over.
Should have stuck with the White Creed.
The things that go without saying are the things which most need saying.
"I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother, or any kin to me whatever."
Amen, brother.
They say that when it came to love Mary Todd chose Lincoln over Douglas. And when it came to the crux of the matter, whether this was to be a White nation or not, so did America.
Big mistake.
One that we are paying for literally in spades.
Had Douglas ascended to the highest office in the land and had he survived a little longer, only a few more years were needed, we would have a real country today. Once that we could be proud of.
A White man's country.
The only kind worthy of the name.
