Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [74]
Two years after Madison wrote those words, the French would embark on their program of eliminating factions by killing people. To fashion a republic of “virtue,” they simply exterminated anyone who did not agree with “the general will.” The only way to ensure unanimity of opinion was to kill those who disagreed. Then—just as Rousseau foresaw—obeying the general will was completely free, because people were simply obeying themselves. All it took was a few years of murder and terror to make man free!
The whole history of liberal thought, back to Marx and ultimately back to Rousseau, is that political authority rests on force—until the revolution gives us true and perfect freedom at the sharp edge of a guillotine. Our founders realized there is no “general will,” and therefore were never required to slaughter citizens in order to create it.
If our revolution had been won by a mob, why would The Federalist keep saying how scary mobs are? Why would they jabber on and on about how the new Constitution would prevent mobs from arising? Wouldn’t they celebrate mobs? Why didn’t Americans cheer Shays’ Rebellion, rather than using it as an argument to create an all-new form of government? Both during the Revolution and for the next two centuries, mobs in America were dealt with swiftly and without remorse.
We have had plenty of violence in America. But until fairly recently, mobs didn’t drive events. One of the goriest episodes was the Civil War Draft Riots in New York City in 1863—perpetrated, of course, by Democrats. There was enough burning, pillaging, murdering, and corpse desecrating there to earn professional courtesy from a French mob.
In an explosion of animalistic violence, Irish Democrats, enraged by the Emancipation Proclamation, which they believed would force them to compete for jobs with blacks coming up from the South, ran through the city, lynching blacks and burning black establishments to the ground. As described in the book by Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863:
On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men’s bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams—jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones—while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging “vengeance on every nigger in New York.” A white laborer, George Glass, rousted black coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets. A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lamppost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin’s body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by its genitals. Black men who tried to defend themselves fared no better. The crowds were pitiless. After James Costello shot at and fled from a white attacker, six white men beat, stomped, kicked, and stoned him before hanging him from a lamppost.42
So America has always had people capable of behaving horribly. We call them “Democrats.” But the one-week riot had no effect on events.
President Lincoln sent the army from Gettysburg and restored order. The war continued. Even the draft continued. Even Irish service in the army continued.
One year after the Draft Riots, blacks and Republicans in New York City celebrated their alliance with an all-black regiment raised for the war. As the regiment marched through the streets, joined by members of the Union League