“Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1945
The image is a black and white photo of a large pile of human skulls and bones in front of a barbed-wire fence.
The Republicans started off as the party for rich Northerns. They took the abolitionist stance partly for humanitarian reasons, but also because industrialization of the South with it’s massive slave labor pool would have crushed Northern industrialists. The GOP is still the party of Northern business owners, they just convinced white workers that they were also looking out for them.
Hmm, how do we square that with the fact that Lincoln was very pro-labor and he argued against the myth that wealthy capitalists create jobs?: “It is [falsely] assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor[…] Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration” -Abe Lincoln , First Annual Message to the Senate and House of Representatives
The Republican Party started out as the “Big Tent Antislavery Party”, and slowly realigned away from labor and free farmers to more heavily favor industry and capital over the course of the 1870s and 80s, though even as late as the 1890s and 1900s there was strong progressive/populist appeal in the Republican Party.