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The Republican Party Endangers the Union

The Republican Party which formed out of the ashes of the Whig Party and combined with the Know-Nothing and Free Soil political organizations, was seen as a harmless lunatic fringe in 1856. But by the national election of 1860 it appeared to many that their broad support in the North might enable them to win. And if they were victorious, their platform pledged them to arrest, jail and possibly execute anyone who disagreed with their views on the Kansas Territory. This purely sectional party never promoted a peaceful or practical solution to the African slavery they found in their midst, and claimed was the reason they hated the South with such intensity.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

The Republican Party Endangers the Union

“Buchanan stated the keynote of his campaign in these words: “The Union is in danger and the people everywhere begin to know it. The Black Republicans must be, as they can be with justice, boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be reiterated again and again.”

Forget the past, bury the bank, the tariff, and the rest of the historic fossils. The Democrats must publicize the statements of “the abolitionists, free soilers and infidels against the Union,” to show that the Union was in danger. “This race ought to be run on the question of Union or disunion.”

The Democratic press generally adopted this campaign them, and devoted columns to the antiunion pronouncements of prominent Republicans. Ohio’s Representative Joshua R. Giddings had announced “I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South; when the black man . . . shall assert his freedom, and wage a war of extermination against his master; when the torch of the incendiary shall light up the towns of the South, and blot out the last vestige of slavery; and though I may not mock at their calamity, nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet I will hail it as the dawn of the millennium.”

New York’s Governor William H. Seward asserted that “there is a higher law than the Constitution,” and hoped soon to “bring the parties of the country into an aggressive war upon slavery.” Speaker of the House Nathaniel P. Banks said frankly that he was “willing . . . to let the Union slide.” Judge Rufus S. Spalding declared that if he had the alternatives of continuance of slavery or a dissolution of the Union, “I am for dissolution, and I care not how quick it comes.”

Editor James Watson Webb predicted that if the Republicans lost the [1860] election, they would be “forced to drive back the slavocracy with fire and sword.” A Poughkeepsie clergyman prayed “that this accursed Union may be dissolved, even if blood have to be spilt.”

O.L. Raymond told an audience in [Boston’s] Fanueil Hall, “Remembering that he was a slaveholder, I spit upon George Washington.”

(President James Buchanan: a Biography, Philip S. Klein, American Political Biography Press, 1962, excerpts pp. 257-258)

New England Sets the Example for the South

Lord Acton writes that “secession is not a theory of the Constitution, but a remedy against a vicious theory of the Constitution” — the right of a minority to withdraw from a political agreement which they no longer wish to be part of, and to escape the tyranny of the majority. Even a nationalist like Hamilton saw the balance necessary between national and State governments, and that both will be prevented from trespassing on each one’s constitutional limitations. The States would be further protected by the strictly delegated, and few, powers of the general government.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

New England Sets the Example for the South

As a consequence of troubles between Napoleon’s Berlin decree and the British response, President Jefferson determined to lay an embargo on all American vessels – with a subsequent Bill passed December 22, 1807.

“The embargo was a heavy blow to the ship-owning States of New England . . . the others were less affected by it. “The natural situation of this country,” says Hamilton, is to divide it interests into . . . navigating and non-navigating States. This difference in situation naturally produces a dissimilarity of interests and views respecting foreign commerce.”

Accordingly the law was received in those States with a storm of indignation. Quincy, of Massachusetts, declared in the House: “It would be as unreasonable to undertake to stop the rivers from running into the sea, as to keep the people of New England from the ocean . . .”

The doctrine of State-rights, or nullification, which afterwards became so prominent in the hands of the Southern party, was distinctly enunciated on behalf of the North on this occasion.

Governor Trumbull, of Connecticut, summoned the legislature to meet, and in his opening address to them he took the ground that, in great emergencies, when the national legislature had been led to overstep its constitutional power, it became the right and the duty of the State legislatures “to interpose their protecting shield between the rights and the liberties of the people, and the assumed power of the general government.”

They went farther and prepared to secede from the Union, and thus gave the example which has been followed, on exactly analogous grounds, by the opposite party.

John Quincy Adams declared in Congress that there was a determination to secede. “He urged that a continuance of the embargo much longer would certainly be met by forcible resistance, supported by the legislature, and probably by the judiciary of the State . . . Their object was, and had been for years, a dissolution of the Union, and the establishment of a separate confederation.”

Twenty years later, when Adams was President, the truth of this statement was impugned. At that time the tables had been turned, and the South was denying the right of Congress to legislate for the exclusive benefit of the North Eastern States, whilst these were vigorously and profitably supporting the Federal authorities.

It was important that they should not be convicted out of their own mouths, and that the doctrine they were opposing should not be shown to have been inaugurated by themselves.

(The Civil War in America: Its Place in History; Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Volume I, Essays in the History of Liberty, J. Rufus Fears, editor, Liberty Fund, 1985, excerpts pp. 231-234)

 

Kentucky’s Vichy Government

Kentucky Governor Beriah Magoffin replied to Lincoln’s illegal request for troops in April 1861 with “I will send not a man nor a dollar for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister Southern States.” His State government tried in vain to maintain neutrality while he personally championed a peaceful settlement between North and South, and acceptance of the Crittenden Compromise proposed by fellow Kentuckian, John J. Crittenden. With the increasing number of Northern troops in his State and the consequent political intimidation, he was forced from office in favor of a Lincoln-appointed military proconsul.  By waging war against a State and adhering to its enemies, Lincoln committed treason as defined in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Kentucky’s Vichy Government

“On August 18, 1861, a meeting was held in Scott County, Ky., of a number of prominent Democrats; and after a full discussion of the situation, it was determined to send commissioners to Washington and Richmond, with a view to ascertaining, if possible, whether the neutrality of Kentucky would be respected by both sides.

Upon the recommendations of this conference, Governor Magoffin appointed Frank K. Hunt and W.A. Dudley, both Union men, as commissioners to Washington, and George W. Johnson commissioner to Richmond.

In the letter to President [Jefferson] Davis sent in response to that written him by Governor Magoffin, an borne by Mr. Johnson, appears the following language, which certainly very logically and properly summed up the situation:

“The government of the Confederate States has not only respected most scrupulously the neutrality of Kentucky, but has continued to maintain the friendly relation of trade and intercourse which it has suspended with the United States generally. But neutrality, to be entitled to respect, must be strictly maintained by both parties . . .”

Mr. Lincoln replied that he did not believe that it was “the popular wish of Kentucky that the Federal force already there should be removed, and with this impression I must decline to remove it.”

This declaration made it plain to men of all shades of political opinion in Kentucky that the occupation of the State by Federal troops would be continued, and that their number would be increased, not only to completely suppress any sentiment in favor of the Confederacy and action taken in that behalf, but in order to make Kentucky a base of military operations against the States further South.

In a very short time after this declaration by Mr. Lincoln, numerous arrests were made of Kentuckians of known Southern sympathies, or of prominent men who ventured even to question the legality of the aggressive acts committed by Union leaders.

George W. Johnson was one of the first and boldest to denounce such tyranny. He escaped arrest by quitting his home and seeking the Tennessee border within a few hours before the soldiers who were ordered to make him a prisoner arrived at his house.”

(Reminiscences of General Basil W. Duke, CSA, Cooper Square Press, 2001 (original 1911), excerpts, pp. 148-149)

A Tradition of Anti-Southern Hatred

In a fit of anti-South hatred, the radical Parson Brownlow of Tennessee told his pro-Lincoln audience that “we will crowd the rebels into the Gulf of Mexico and drown the entire race, as the devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee.” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips received cheers from his audience when he called for the near-extermination of American Southerners “and no peace until 347,000 men of the South are either hanged or exiled.” The blue clad soldiers of Sherman and Sheridan practiced wanton destruction of towns, cities and farms where they marched, slaughtering livestock indiscriminately, and leaving little of nothing for women and children – black or white — to eat.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

A Tradition of Anti-Southern Hatred

“Hatred of the South is not new, and examples of it are legion. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “If it costs ten years, and ten to twenty to recover the general prosperity, the destruction of the South is worth so much.” Prior to the War for Southern Independence, and Englishman stated that there was nothing Northerners “hate with so deep a hatred” as Southerners.

In 1862, Gen. Benjamin “Beast” Butler of Massachusetts added the lynch rope to the arsenal of weapons used against the South. A Southern youth made the mistake of removing the invaders flag from a building in occupied New Orleans. He paid dearly for his patriotic enthusiasm [as Butler] ordered the young Southerner hung by the neck until dead!

Such is the tradition of anti-Southern hatred, a tradition inherited and perpetuated by the liberal establishment. To perpetuate [the] liberal myth of history, the liberal establishment, like any other empire, requires a monopoly in the marketplace of ideas . . . [and] controls access to the media. The liberal propagandist rings the bell “slavery” and the masses respond with an outpouring of anti-Southern venom.

Imagine how embarrassing it would be for the liberal establishment if there were general knowledge that Massachusetts was the first colony to engage in the slave trade, that much of the capital used to build the industrial Northeast was amassed from profits of the New England slave trade, that it was primarily the Northern colonies which refused to allow a section in the US Constitution outlawing the slave trade, or that the thirteen stripes on the US flag represent thirteen slave-holding colonies, the majority of which were Northern colonies!”

(Driving Dixie Down – the Destruction of Southern Culture; Why Not Freedom! America’s Revolt Against Big Government, James & Ronald Kennedy, Pelican Publishing, 1995, excerpts pp. 367-369)

Yankee Slave Trader Gordon

In late February 1862, Yankee slaver trader Nathaniel Gordon of Portland, Maine, was hung in the stone courtyard of the Tombs, in New York City, convicted of “piratically confining and detaining Negroes with the intent of making them slaves.” Ironically, New York’s own Declaration of Independence signer, Phillip Livingston, made his own vast fortune in the slave trade, as did many other New Englanders. A further irony is that soon Lincoln would be formulating a plan to foment race war in the American South, replicating the emancipation edicts of Royal Governor Lord Dunmore in 1775, and Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane in 1814. It was England and New England that brought shiploads of enslaved Africans to work Southern and South American plantations, and both would later demand liberty and the rights of man for those they had placed in bondage. See: Hanging Captain Gordon, Ron Soodalter, 2006 for deeper reading.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Yankee Slave Trader Gordon

“In November 1861 a Yankee slave trader was captured on the high seas with a boat load of slaves bound for the West Indies. Trading in slaves had been illegal for years, although the New England slave ships had been carrying on clandestine slave trading with considerable success for Cuba and Brazil but not the South, which was not interested.

It is commonly but erroneously assumed that slave trading was a Southern occupation, but in fact almost all slave trading, when it was legal and later illegal, was from ships of New England registry with Northern crews.

The Yankee slave trader Nathaniel Gordon, who was originally from Maine, was tried before a federal judge in New York and sentenced to be hanged on 7 February 1862. It was the first and only time such a sentence was handed down and carried out.

Realizing the undue harshness of the sentence, 25,000 New Yorkers petitioned Lincoln to commute Gordon’ sentence to one of life imprisonment. There was nothing to be lost by Lincoln doing this, but Lincoln refused to commute the sentence. (Later, when another slave trader was caught, Lincoln went to the other extreme and granted a pardon).

There were many vociferous abolitionists who called for the hanging to be carried out, and Lincoln yielded to their demands. He did, however, grant a cruel delay of thirteen days so that the execution would not take place until 20 February. Lincoln explained his course of action in these words: “In granting this respite [thirteen days] it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that relinquishing all expectation of pardon by human authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the common God and Father of all men.”

It would seem that mercy from God, to be realistic, would have to come through men, and in this case, Lincoln. Where was the “mercy of the common God” when Lincoln had him hanging from a rope until dead? What is the logic of this cruelty?”

(When in the Course of Human Events, Arguing the Case for Secession, Charles Adams, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000, excerpts pp. 209-210)

New England’s Perpetuation of Slavery

There is little question that the origins of the American Revolution, and the later War Between the States, are rooted in New England’s illicit trade in slaves and molasses, and England’s efforts to stop the maritime competition with the mother country. By 1750, Rhode Island had become the center of the transatlantic slave trade, surpassing Liverpool for the dubious honor.

The author below writes: “nine-tenths of the colonial merchants and skippers had become smugglers as the break with England neared. Such men as John Hancock, a prince of contraband traders, on the eve of Paul Revere’s ride had for counsel before the Admiralty Court in Boston none other than John Adams, answering for him a half-million dollar suit in penalties as a smuggler.” He went on that “One-quarter of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were bred to commerce, to the command of ships and to contraband trade.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

New England’s Perpetuation of Slavery

“In accord with the spirit of the times the British Parliament passed a series of statutes in 1633 providing, among other things, that nothing could be brought into the colonies that wasn’t carried there in British ships, “whereof the master and three-fourths of the crew are English.”

[Concerned about the rise of illicit maritime trade of New England] the shipbuilders of the Thames district met in London in the winter of 1724-1725 and formally complained to the Lords of Trade:

“In the eight years ending in 1720 we are informed that seven hundred sail of ships were built in New England, and that in years since, as may if not more; and that the New England trade, by the tender of extraordinary inducements, has drawn over so many working shipwrights that there are not enough left to carry on the work [in England].”

Linked inseparably with the venture south to the [West] Indies the colonists’ brisk trade in rum and what they were in the habit of calling “Black Ivory.” For the Indies trade was a three-cornered affair hinging on rum, slaves and molasses. Together they comprised the foundation for more ships and hence more trouble than all the politicians ashore put together.

The New Englanders had Indian slaves as early as 1637 . . . and more or less formal business developed, with traders nabbing Indians along the banks of the Kennebec River in Maine and selling them into slavery up and down the coast. It was the black ivory from Africa, however, that turned the trick in the West Indies trade and established Southern slavery on a solid and enduring footing.

The mechanics of this all-important trade worked like this: molasses was brought to New England and made into rum; the rum, highly prized among Negroes on the west coast of Africa, brought its own price among the drinkers, a price that included any of their relatives or friends who might have the bad judgment to be lying about, and the resultant human cargoes were disposed of profitably in Boston, Newport [Rhode Island] and on south.

Not all the West Indies rum was drunk by Negroes. A flourishing local trade in fur was conducted with the Indians by the extremely profitable exchange of a few bottles of cheap rum or whiskey for the entire season’s catch of its drunken owner. The tribal chiefs . . . in 1726, begged without avail to have the sale of firewater to the young braves stopped.

It is hardly surprising, then, that among the first real troublemakers of all the British efforts to raise money [to support the colonies] was a new Molasses Act, for it was molasses brought in from the French West Indies from which New England rum was made. To put teeth into the effort Parliament authorized the use of writs of assistance, a sort of search warrant covering an entire community that gave British customs officials the right to search any ship, warehouse or even private home for smuggled goods.

When the harried Board of Trade and Plantations finally decided to act, its attempt to enforce the Navigation Acts [to restrict New England’s rum and slave triangle] was the spark in the touchhole that set the guns to booming.”

(Yankee Ships, an Informal History of the American Merchant Marine, Reese Wolfe, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1953, excerpts pp. 39; 43-44; 49-51)

Jul 14, 2018 - Antebellum Economics, Economics, New England History, Northern Culture Laid Bare, Race and the North, Sharp Yankees, Slavery Worldwide    Comments Off on Illicit Trade in Slaves and Opium

Illicit Trade in Slaves and Opium

The Fells Point shipyard of Baltimore builder William and George Gardner built many fast merchantmen during the 1830s, as well as for the slave and opium trade. One Fell’s Point free black carpenters was Fred Bailey (later Fred Douglass) who helped build the slavers Delorez, Teayer, Eagle at Price’s Shipyard, plus the Laura at Butler & Lamdin yard in the same city. In 1844, Bostonians George and John Dixwell of Augustine Heard & Co. ordered fast clippers built by the Gardner’s to carry Bombay opium to China, where it was outlawed. One of their most notorious opium clippers built for the Dixwell’s was the “Frolic,” despite an 1844 treaty forbidding American ships carrying in into China.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Illicit Trade in Slaves and Opium

“Probably the most notorious slave ship ever built in the United States, the Venus, was widely discussed in the newspapers at the time. On July 4, 1838, the Venus reached completion at Fells Point . . . the Venus was neither a warship nor a merchantman, but a slave ship in disguise. Indeed, like the merchant traders of New England, Baltimore shipbuilders had a long tradition of employing ruses to conduct their craft in defiance of the law.

The Gardner’s were careful; to protect themselves by selling the slave ships they built to foreign buyers. These transactions through intermediaries, though contrived and transparent, sufficed to enable the Gardners and other Baltimore builders to construct the world’s most profitable slavers while remaining officially and legally ignorant.

As soon as the Venus was ready to be launched, [owner] Lambert Giddings [transferred] the vessel to Jose Mazorra, a notorious [Cuban] slave trader. As the Venus left Havana “with equipment for the slave trade,” we may assume that during her nineteen-day layover in Cuba carpenters were busy fitting her out with platforms in her hold and tons of iron shackles and chains.

On November 5, the Venus, still under the American flag, arrived at Lagos on the West African coast . . . and departed Lagos with a cargo of about 1,150 slaves. The American flag and papers had provided protection for the vessel until the slaves were driven aboard, whereupon the vessel was given over to an agent of Jose Mazzora who carried . . . fraudulent papers . . . disguised as a wholly different vessel.

Continued “foreign” orders for slavers during 1838 and 1839 helped the Gardners’ business survive the financial panic of 1837. [The slaver Venus] would bring international recognition to the Gardners – and ultimately an order for two opium clippers from John and George Dixwell of Augustine Heard & Co. [of Canton, China and Ipswich, Massachusetts].”

(The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade, Thomas N. Layton, Stanford University Press, 1997, excerpts pp. 41-43)

 

Constitutional Convention on the Battlefield

The war of 1861-1865 seemed a violent replay of the 1800 election between Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson – and settling the question of whether New England or Virginia would dominate and guide the country. Author Russell Kirk observed in 1953 that “The influence of the Virginia mind upon American politics expired in the Civil War,” and that it would take 100 years for the ideas of a limited central government and free market ideas to begin a recovery.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Constitutional Convention on the Battlefield

“Beginning with the modern civil-rights movement in the late 1950s, it became popular and “politically correct” to proclaim that the Civil War was fought for the purpose of abolishing slavery and therefore was a just and great war. This gave the civil-rights movement much of its momentum, but it also served to injure race relations severely, and further, to mask the immense and disastrous costs of the Civil War, which included the deaths of 620,000 soldiers.

The destruction of the South and its Jeffersonian ideals of a free market, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and a limited central government were replaced by the ideals of Hamilton, thereby completely transforming the American government created by its founders.

The Civil War was, in effect, a new constitutional convention held on the battlefield, and the original document was drastically amended by force in order to have a strong centralized federal government, which was closely allied with industry in the North.

Foreign policy would now become heavily influenced by the economic interests of big business rather than by any concern for the freedom of the individual. Domestic policies of regulation, subsidy and tariff would now benefit big business at the expense of small business and the general population.

Beginning with the end of the Civil War, the American mind and policy would become molded into the image of Hamilton rather than Jefferson.”

(The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Denson, editor, 1999, Transaction Publishers, 1999, excerpts pp. 27-28)

Ben McCulloch’s Visit to New England

Ben McCulloch (1811-1862) of Tennessee was a soldier in the Texas Revolution, a Texas Ranger, major-general in the Texas Militia, a major in the US Army during the Mexican War, a US marshal, and lastly a brigadier-general in the Confederate States Army. He was killed in action by an Illinois sniper at the battle of Pea Ridge in March of 1862. McCulloch’s prewar visit to New England in mid-1856 allowed him to view that region’s notable historic and transatlantic slave trade sites. His younger brother Henry served in both Houses of the Texas Legislature and was also a Confederate brigadier; their father Alexander was a Yale graduate, ancestor of George Washington, and veteran of the Creek War of 1813.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Ben McCulloch’s Visit to New England

“Increasingly contemptuous of the North and its institutions, and set in his belief that an abolitionist conspiracy was in place not only to end slavery but to destroy the South’s political liberties, Ben recommended to Henry, then a member of the Texas legislature, that he introduce a joint resolution appointing commissioners to negotiate with the owners of Mount Vernon for its purchase by the State of Texas. “It would be a proud day for our State when it was proclaimed that she owned the Tomb of Washington. Besides,” he wrote, we may want a campaign ground near the city in the event of the election of a Black Republican candidate.”

During the final weeks of June 1856, with [Franklin] Pierce’s term of office drawing to a close and the great regional controversy over the expansion and perpetuation of slavery reaching a crisis, McCulloch took his first trip into New England. After spending no longer in Boston than required to visit “the monument on Breed’s Hill, Faneuil Hall, the Commons, etc.,” Ben reported to Henry that “the whole population looked as though they were just returning from a funeral. Too puritanical in appearance to be good neighbors or patriotic citizens.”

[In Albany, New York, Whig presidential candidate Millard Fillmore] told the North that the South “would not permit a sectional president of the north to govern them.” McCulloch shared this opinion most earnestly, and he vowed to be “the first to volunteer my services as a soldier to prevent it, and would rather see the streets of this city knee deep in blood than to see a black republican take possession of that chair.”

(Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition, Thomas W. Cutrer, UNC Press, 1993, excerpts pp. 140-141)

The Cornerstone of New England Prosperity

The primary reason for the large number of slaves in the Southern colonies, despite their repeated complaints to the Crown, was the British colonial labor system supporting large plantations in the South – all to the benefit of England. Although Massachusetts and Rhode Island abolished slavery, their slave trading on the coast of Africa continued unabated. Jefferson castigated George III for waging a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people [Africans] who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

The Cornerstone of New England’s Prosperity

“The relation between master and slave had practically continued in every one of the American provinces, until the close of the Revolution in 1783. Immediately after that event, it was decided by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts that slavery had been, in fact, abolished in that State by the operation of the State Constitution, adopted in the year 1790.

In all of the other original thirteen provinces north of Mason and Dixon’s line, except Delaware . . . legislative measures were taken, shortly after the Revolution, for either the immediate or gradual extinction of slavery. The sum total of the slaves in all these Northern States in 1790, was 49,240. The rest of the slaves in the States, amounting to 648,657, were distributed between Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, except 8,887 in Delaware.

[Interestingly, the Northern States, when involved in establishing the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution] did not deem themselves authorized to meddle with [slavery] outside of their several State jurisdictions.

Mr. Jefferson, indeed, gave a reason for this reticence imputing it to the indirect interest of the Northern maritime States, in the transportation of African slaves to the Southern States. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence he had inserted an article unqualifiedly reprobating the foreign slave trade, and urging the protection afforded to it by the King as one powerful motive for the rebellion.

He finally withdrew this clause from the document, and his reason, recorded by himself, appears in explanation of his conduct. After alluding to the disposition of some of the Southern States to keep up the slave trade, he continues:

“Our Northern brethren, also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures, for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others [Jefferson’s Works, I., p. 15].”

(Origin of the Late War: Traced from the Beginning of the Constitution to the Revolt of the Southern States; George Lunt, Crown Rights Book Company, 2001, (original D. Appleton, 1866), excerpt pp. 10-11)

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