Making history fit your needs

For those who believe the study of history is wasted, consider former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint.
Even by the willingness of some politicians to rewrite, misstate or just make up American history for their own purposes, DeMint is in a class all his own.


Former Sen. Jim DeMint

"Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people," the head of the Heritage Foundation said on the Truth in Action radio show last week.
"Unfortunately, there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people."
And then DeMint's red-meat line: 
"So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God."
Any high school history student can punch holes in DeMint's skewered history, even the back-of-the-room slug who slept through half the class sessions.
To point out one of the more obvious errors, DeMint claims that the words "all men are created equal" appear in the Constitution. Perhaps DeMint should pull out the pocket-size edition of the document politicians of his ilk are fond of carrying. Those words are not in that document. They can be found in the Declaration of Independence, penned by the slave owner Thomas Jefferson.
Words that DeMint could find in the original Constitution if he would only look relegated some Americans to the status of three-fifths personhood, a dance-with-the-devil compromise fashioned to birth the nation. It was only after the Civil War that the document was amended (and it was nearly a century later that civil rights and voting rights for all citizens were codified by Congress).
Republicans love to call themselves the "party of Lincoln," a statement that ignores party realignment. Republicans of Lincoln's time were much different than those who belong to that party today. Where are the reddest of the red states today? The Deep South, a place where they love their history, especially when spun with a certain mythical turn that allows inconvenient truths to drop away.
That, perhaps, is why DeMint and others curl or ignore historical facts. Doing so makes it so much easier to rotate history for their own devices. In this case, DeMint tries to exonerate pro-slavery elements and make it seem they really wanted the pernicious institution to end.
Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano recently made the same claim, declaring that slavery was a dying institution and that Lincoln should have tried "purchasing the slaves and then freeing them."
Lincoln did offer "compensated emancipation" to the Border States that remained in the union "and any Confederate states interested," according to Columbian University's Eric Foner, one of the nation's foremost Civil War historians.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion," Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, "but not to his own facts.”
DeMint and Napolitano are among a notable group who never let facts get in the way of their opinions. That becomes a problem when they state their opinions as facts and then spin their yarns to a too often unsuspecting and gullible public. Studying a little history is one way to arm yourself against the myth-makers like DeMint.