The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #2

In the first installment of "The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed" I mentioned reading recently Robert Remini's Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959).

For me the book was a revelation because I was unaware what a stalwart Jeffersonian Republican Martin Van Buren was and how strongly he conceived of his mission to elect Jackson as the standard bearer of the new Democratic Party as a way to salvage Jefferson's legacy.

What is Jefferson's legacy?

To answer that question I next turned to Roger G. Kennedy's Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (2003), a eye-opening formidable piece of scholarship.

In a nutshell Jefferson's legacy is a massive expansion of slavery and the re-colonization of the American South by the British Empire a few decades after the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War.

Jefferson accomplished this by appropriating Indian lands under a cloak of expanding yeoman farmer homesteads but in reality the lands were raped with mono-culture cash crops (cotton, tobacco) destined for the English export market and harvested by brutalized African slave labor. 

At the very root of our party system in United States is the left of tribal lands, the expansion of African slavery and the British Empire.

As the statues are torn down, let's hope Jefferson's is one of them.