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Both parties war-torn, increasingly feeble

My dad’s grandmother lived more than 80 years, and never voted for a Democrat. On the porch of her farmhouse near Independence, Iowa, in election year 1928 she told him why: “The Democrats killed two of my brothers.”

They were on her porch 63 years after the Civil War, but the emotional wounds of our nation’s costliest conflict were kept fresh by post-war politicians to prolong the divisive hate for political purposes. General Ulysses Grant’s partisans in his 1868 presidential campaign proclaimed: “Behind every rebel rifle there was a Democrat. Vote as you shot.”

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