This election could be the first time since before the Civil War (!!!)......

[NNadir]

30. Well, again, the editorial "our" should not apply to me. Buchanan succeeding Pierce, and actually being (slightly)...

...worse than Pierce is not a bit of history that one would hope will not be repeated in US history.

For most of US history, we have been fortunate - except in this case - to have disastrous Presidencies followed by great Presidencies:

Buchanan/Lincoln, Hoover/FDR, Bush II/Obama, Trump/Biden.

Pierce may have been the only citizen of New Hampshire to have been fond of the Confederacy, and among Presidents, only John Tyler demonstrated more enthusiasm for it by actually joining the Confederate government, but Pierce's uncovered correspondence with Jefferson Davis (albeit before the war) clearly delineated where his sympathies lay.

Until Trump, John Tyler was the only openly treasonous President (or former President) of the United States in history.

In the mid 19th century, as opposed to today where the situation is reversed, the Democratic Party was more racist than the Republican Party, a state of affairs that lasted well into the 20th century. No less than Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped to lead the Democratic Party out of its racist past, had to entertain the likes of James Eastland, segregationist, at the White House. (She must have found it nauseating.) Possibly the most racist Presidential campaign in all of US history, even worse than Reagan, Bush I and Trump, was the 1864 McClellan/Lincoln election. The word "miscegenation" was coined by McClellan's supporters for that election.

With the possible exceptions of John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and US Grant, all US Presidents into the 19th century entered into the office as racists, with Lincoln being the President who most rapidly evolved in his views, this to the point that in a reception after delivering his famous 2nd Inaugural, one of the greatest - and in many ways most unsparing, given its terrible judgements - speeches in US history, he greeted his friend Fredrick Douglass in public and announced that there was no man he wanted to evaluate his speech more that Douglass. Douglass declared it a "sacred effort," which, of course, it was. This said, Douglass was aware of Lincoln's ambiguity. Make no mistake. As a man of his times, Lincoln entered office as a racist, an antislavery racist, but a racist all the same.

If I want to be proud of being a Democrat - and I am so proud - I'd rather look at our recent nominees and Presidents, and not those of a period of history not worthy of evoking with much affection in my view. In the 19th century, the Democratic Party was racially sordid, as sordid as modern Republicans are today, maybe even worse. In the much needed reevaluation of the historical Ulysses S. Grant, it has been stated that he was the most active fighter for equality and racial justice to whom only Lyndon Johnson can be compared. (I consider Grant the second most important President of the 19th century) It is with Johnson, that our party was finally completely liberated from its racist past, although both FDR and Harry Truman made great strides in that direction.