To the Editor:

As we celebrated Juneteenth locally this year, it was important to recall that June 19, 1865 was the day that recently assassinated Republican President Lincoln’s Union forces finally freed the last of southern Democrats’ slaves.

Southern Democrats, who did not permit Republican Lincoln to appear on their states’ 1860 presidential election ballots, fought the Civil War to protect their right to own slaves.

Too many Americans had to die, to free other men from Democrats’ “peculiar institution.” And soon many freed Black Americans were terrorized and murdered by defeated Democrats’ Ku Klux Klan.

Juneteenth was the end of slavery, but defeated Democrats’ race hate did not end that day. History matters.

Edgar Tolmie

Altamont

Editor’s note: “Historical comparisons can often be useful for understanding what happened in the past and even today, but details matter and loose generalizations usually obscure more than they reveal,” says Dr. Christian McWhirter, the Lincoln Historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

He explains that, since the 1860 Republican Party had no real presence in most Southern slaveholding states — especially the Deep South — there were no political tickets being distributed … Of course, that didn’t mean people couldn’t vote for Lincoln, but they would have had to write him in like we would a third-party candidate today.”

The Democrats divided in the 1860 presidential election over the issue slavery. Southern Democrats walked out of the national convention and on their own adopted a plank protecting slavery and ran John Breckinridge while the Democrats, of the north, ran Stephen Douglas. Many northern Democrats fought in the Union Army.

Seven southern states that had voted for Breckinridge were motivated to secede before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration.