Hindsight is 20-20

While I had heard of the Birchers previously, my theory of Us and Them was formulated independently while I was in the army, and I joined the Birchers a few years afterwards.  I remember hearing people talk about Joe McCarthy when I was quite young, but I didn't learn any of the details until much later.  The Birchers I knew were still McCarthy fans long after most people had turned against him, but I never formed an opinion of him one way or another.  The way I understand it, he started investigating Communist infiltration of our government and then just went nuts with it.  I can see how that could happen, because the Commies had been our allies in World War II, and then turned into our enemies a few years later.  My theory is that there actually were some Commies in the woodpile left over from the days when it was fashionable.  McCarthy likely over reacted to this discovery, which caused a backlash that drove him even farther over edge.  Some people do not respond graciously to constructive criticism you know.

Like I said, slavery was a divisive issue that easily could have derailed the effort to form a United States of America.  Our Founding Fathers were kind of in a hurry to put this thing together because they were worried that England might come back and try to re-take their former colonies, which it almost did in the War of 1812.  The US was losing that war, you know, until the English decided that they really didn't want those troublesome Americans back in their empire and let us off the hook.  If it wasn't for that, we might all be speaking English today.

"Suffrage" is an old fashioned word that used to mean granting somebody the right to vote.  I think it derives from "suffer", which used to mean "allow".  You may remember that, In the King James Bible, Jesus said "Suffer the little children to come to me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."  Therefore, the Constitution did not allow women's suffrage until the 19th Amendment was passed.  Previous to passage of the 15th Amendment, each state had the power to decide who got to vote.  The 15th prohibited the states from denying their citizens the vote because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude", and the 19th prohibited them from denying it because of sex.  Prior to that, some states were already allowing women to vote, I believe Colorado was the first.  The 19th Amendment just made it uniform throughout the republic.