I just finished reading a book, “Lincoln and his Wife’s Hometown”, because I need to maintain my status as a history nerd. Believe me, you have to read the right things if you want to keep the ladies away. Mary Todd Lincoln grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, the largest slaveholding area of the Bluegrass, and the book documents how Abraham Lincoln’s visits to this city defined and shaped his views on slavery. The book also made me realize how much the slaveholding power of the antebellum South reminds me of the oil industry today.
During its time, the slaveholding faction exerted more influence on the government than any other special interest group, just like the wildly wealthy and influential oil elite. They had so much power in fact, our founding fathers purposely excluded the word “slavery” from the Constitution in order to avoid the subject for fear of angering their slaveholding constituents. They thought if we avoided it, it would eventually just go away. Then the Civil War happened and George Washington felt pretty awkward in Heaven. That’s how powerful the slaveholding elite was – we fought a war over it. And God knows we would never fight a war to protect our oil interests. That would be silly.
continued at Daily Kos....
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