On Tuesday, Heidi Cruz got slammed after she told the Cruz’s campaign National Prayer Team that their efforts to restore conservatism to the nation were only a part of a sustained effort that would take years, the kind of sustained effort that it took to eradicate slavery.
Ms. Cruz stated, “I don’t want you to feel like any of this was in vain. I believe in the power of prayer. This doesn’t always happen on the timing of man, and God does not work in four-year segments. Be full of faith and so full of joy that this team was chosen to fight a long battle. Think that slavery — it took 25 years to defeat slavery. That is a lot longer than four years.”
Reaction from the left was predictable, savaging Cruz for supposedly misrepresenting the amount of time it took to eradicate slavery as well as slamming her for making a “comparison” between the Cruz campaign and the fight to end slavery:
Of course, leftists are generally ignorant of history; Ms. Cruz wasn’t far off when she said 25 years. The abolitionist movement began in the early 1830’s and Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Technically, once the Civil War was over in 1865, and the nation was united, slavery was legally dead. As the History.com explains:
Although abolitionist feelings had been strong during the American Revolution and in the Upper South during the 1820s, the abolitionist movement did not coalesce into a militant crusade until the 1830s. In the previous decade, as much of the North underwent the social disruption associated with the spread of manufacturing and commerce, powerful evangelical religious movements arose to impart spiritual direction to society. By stressing the moral imperative to end sinful practices and each person’s responsibility to uphold God’s will in society, preachers like Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Charles G. Finney in what came to be called the Second Great Awakening led massive religious revivals in the 1820s that gave a major impetus to the later emergence of abolitionism as well as to such other reforming crusades as temperance, pacifism, and women’s rights. By the early 1830s, Theodore D. Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright, Jr., all spiritually nourished by revivalism, had taken up the cause of “immediate emancipation.”
Those who choose to interpret Ms. Cruz’s remarks as revolving around her husband’s campaign alone rather than as part of a larger movement to restore conservative values to a lost nation are simply being disingenuous. Ted Cruz’s fealty to conservatism has fueled his entire career, and his wife’s statement was simply reflective of the need for conservatives to never give up the fight.