"... the shooting cannot be far off."

Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off.
[Stewart H. Holbrook, Lost Men of American History; discussing the debate on slavery in the 1850s.]

I made a mistake: I started re-reading part of Mr. Holbrook's book, and now am compelled to share with you, my loyal readers, some of the passages I particularly enjoy.

The few pages I've just finished concern a book, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, by Hinton Rowan Helper of North Carolina - a member of the planter class. The book indicts slavery on purely economic grounds. Mr. Helper has no use for blacks at all:

To the end of his long life he loathed Negroes and would never, if he could help it, stay where they were employed.

Rather, he believes slavery to be destroying Southern culture and civilization, and advocates abolition... and sending the Blacks back to Africa. He later

... wrote three books on "the Negro Question" which were little more than unbalanced denunciation of the black race as a menace to the North and South. He said flatly that he wanted "to write the Negro out of America... out of existence."

The book is said to have gone through 140 printings. Southern legislatures passed laws against it.

In Arkansas, three men were hanged by mobs for owning copies of the book.

Among his other arguments, Helper notices the effects of slavery on the non-slaveholding Southern whites:

Their freedom, he says, is only nominal, and their "unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated" upon them by the oligarchism of the slaveholders. "How little the poor white trash, the great majority of the Southern people, know of real conditions of the country... it is sadly astonishing."
[emphasis added]

"Unparalleled illiteracy and degradation... purposely and fiendishly perpetuated upon them by the oligarchism of the slaveholders."
Change "slaveholders" to "Big Business" and you've got a pretty good description of today's tea-baggers!