AUGUST 31

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY : AUGUST 31, 1864 Democrats nominated for vice president a racist who opposed abolishing slavery August 31st 1864, the Slavery Party's national convention nominated for vice president a racist who opposed emancipation. George Pendleton also advocated Confederate independence."How can I hold that all men are created equal when here before me stands, stinking, the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio? Proof that some men ARE inferior, endowed by their maker with dim wits, impermeable to reason, with cold, pallid slime in their veins instead of hot, red blood! YOU are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you! "Yet even YOU, Pendleton – who should have been gibbetted for treason long before today – even worthless, unworthy you ought to be treated equally before the law! And so again, sir, and again and again and again, I say, I do not hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the law!"In later years, a Democrat-controlled Ohio legislature elected Pendleton to the Senate and a Democrat president named him ambassador to Germany.