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c967f83
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We shall lie down," Lincoln warned, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln"
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Eric Foner |
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9fd92d4
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Lincoln, who had always craved recognition, had found his life's purpose. The "higher object of this contest," he wrote, "may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But...I am proud...to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see." There was no mistaking that the "consummation" Lincoln envisioned was the eventual eradication of slavery, not simply a halt to its..
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Eric Foner |
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a17da73
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He accused Democrats of attempting to "dehumanize the negro--to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man...to make property, and nothing but property of the Negro in all the states of this Union." In the rhetorical high point of the seven debates, he identified the long crusade against slavery with the global progress of democratic egalitarianism: That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country ..
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Eric Foner |
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3b5e508
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But the abolition laws of the other northern states freed no living slave. Rather, slave children born after a specified date would work for the mother's owner as indentured servants until well into adulthood (age twenty-eight, for example, in Pennsylvania, far longer than what was customary for white indentured servants), and only then would become free. Most Latin American nations also allowed slaveholders to retain ownership of existing ..
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Eric Foner |
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7be71a0
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Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.... The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, December 1, 1862
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Eric Foner |
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fa6e16d
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Max Weber defended the social utility of the politician's calling and identified three qualities required for success: devotion to a cause; a sense of responsibility; and judgment, or being attuned to the consequences of one's actions. These usefully define Lincoln's own qualities as a politician. Yet Weber concluded by noting the symbiotic relationship between political action and moral agitation. "What is possible," he wrote, "would not h..
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Eric Foner |
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c40fcdb
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Taken by surprise," as he put it, and unwilling to see the possibility of electing an antislavery senator disappear, Lincoln ordered his backers to cast their votes for Trumbull, ensuring his victory on the next ballot.23 If this episode demonstrated anything, it was that prior political affiliations constituted a major obstacle to antislavery cooperation. The outcome left Lincoln bitterly disappointed. But his willingness to sacrifice pers..
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Eric Foner |
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ad348f2
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The assumption that the slave is in a better condition than the hired laborer, includes the further assumption that he who is once a hired laborer always remains a hired laborer; that there is a certain class of men who remain through life in a dependent condition.... In point of fact that is a false assumption. There is no such thing as a man who is a hired laborer, of a necessity, always remaining in his early condition. The general rule ..
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Eric Foner |
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204acef
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How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it come..
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Eric Foner |
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f5d8cb3
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As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats.
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Eric Foner |
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e1fc8e8
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A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in cou..
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Eric Foner |
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0e9bc28
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Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation,"
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Eric Foner |
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177bc3e
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Our government," Lincoln declared, "rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government." The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats' "gradual and steady debauching of public opinion" until it no longer valued the central ideal of equality.52 Like the abolitionists, Lincoln saw public sentiment as the terrain on which the crusade against slavery was to be waged."
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Eric Foner |
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350aa5f
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In keeping with the exceptionalist vision of nationhood so common in postrevolutionary America, he proclaimed that the founders had put in place a political system more conducive to liberty than any in history. His generation's duty was to preserve this "political edifice" and bequeath it to the future. The greatest danger to its continued existence lay within: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher." Where..
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Eric Foner |
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5851847
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It does not stop with the negro.... So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can.... Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position.... Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more sta..
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Eric Foner |
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25ac571
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Abolitionists seized on the weapons available to them--petitions, lectures, and the newly invented steam press, which made possible the mass production of pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides--to challenge the conspiracy of silence that increasingly barred discussion of slavery from the national public sphere.43 The movement appealed simultaneously to the hearts and minds of Americans, excoriating slaveowners and exposing the brutal realit..
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Eric Foner |
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c694edd
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Despite the onset in 1857 of an economic downturn whose effects still lingered in Illinois, the candidates completely ignored economic matters. As Blaine recounted, they did not mention "protection, free trade, internal improvements, the subtreasury, all the issues, in short, which had divided parties for a long series of years." The debates focused on "one issue" and one alone, Blaine continued, thus reflecting "the public mind" of the lat..
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Eric Foner |
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b4956e9
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Only once before, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review, had the Court invalidated an act of Congress on constitutional grounds. John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts dissented; Curtis was so outraged by the decision that he resigned from the bench. Much
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Eric Foner |
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fa4aba6
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Even after slavery ended in New York, the South's peculiar institution remained central to the city's economic prosperity. New York's dominant Democratic party maintained close ties to the South, and some local officials were more than happy to cooperate in apprehending and returning fugitive slaves. Abraham Lincoln carried New York State in the election of 1860 thanks to a resounding majority in rural areas, but he received only a little o..
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Eric Foner |
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0d8433a
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Confederacy. Mountainous Rabun County, Georgia, was "almost a unit against secession," and secret Union societies flourished in the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas, from which 8,000 men eventually joined the federal army.25 Discontent developed more slowly outside the mountains, with their cohesive communities of intense local loyalties, where slaves comprised only a tiny fraction of the population. It was not simply devotion to the Un..
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Eric Foner |
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a395012
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Newspaper advertisements seeking the recapture of fugitives frequently described runaways as "cheerful" and "well-disposed," as if their escapes were inexplicable. But these notices inadvertently offered a record of abusive treatment--mentions of scars and other injuries that would help identify the runaway--that provided powerful"
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Eric Foner |
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6a11ef4
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Ironically, as Illinois Sen. Richard Yates pointed out, opponents of expansionism employed arguments extremely reminiscent of proslavery ideology, while its supporters upheld the principle that nonwhites could be successfully incorporated into the body politic. (No people, quipped Nevada Sen. James W. Nye, were "too degraded" for citizenship: "We have New Jersey, and all things considered, it has proven a success.")"
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Eric Foner |
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72b8202
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Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember
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Eric Foner |
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5598614
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With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. Lincoln
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Eric Foner |
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b794cb5
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Richard Reid, "A Test Case of the 'Crying Evil': Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War," NCHR, 58 (Summer 1981), 234-62;"
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Eric Foner |
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28931a6
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Issues that agitate American politics--who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism--are Reconstruction questions.
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Eric Foner |
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f376320
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Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son's eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs--storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor--essential to the market economy.
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Eric Foner |
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c7e81fe
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Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax red..
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Eric Foner |
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994fc1c
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There is an excellent account of the coming of emancipation in Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New York, 1975), 226-61. 12. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen (New
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Eric Foner |
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793dc44
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The first emancipation proclamation in American history preceded Abraham Lincoln's by nearly ninety years. Its author was the Earl of Dunmore, the royal governor of colonial Virginia, who in November 1775 promised freedom to "all indentured servants, negroes, or others" belonging to rebels if they enlisted in his army."
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Eric Foner |
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4755f8a
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James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59-82.
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Eric Foner |
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f8ad9bb
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Americans, Lincoln warned, had fallen victim to "wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of the courts." If respect for the rule of law disintegrated, the stage would be set for the emergence of an ambitious tyrant, a "towering genius" who would seek to gain a place in history even greater than the founders by "emancipating slaves or enslaving free men." The remedy was for Americans to rededicate themselves to the rule of "..
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Eric Foner |
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dceea3e
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even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic. Condemnations
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Eric Foner |
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427dfde
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New laws also redefined in the interest of the planter the terms of credit and the right to property--the essence of economic power in the rural South. Lien laws now gave a landlord's claim to his share of the crop precedence over a laborer's for wages or a merchant's for supplies, thus shifting much of the risk of farming from employer to employee. North Carolina's notorious Landlord and Tenant Act of 1877 placed the entire crop in the pla..
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Eric Foner |
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065a9f7
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These victories arose from the determined efforts of a group of lawyers who risked public odium by defending fugitive slaves in court and challenging the long-standing system of black indentured servitude. John M. Palmer, Gustave Koerner, and Orville H. Browning, all future Republican politicians, argued that blacks held to long-term indentures were free, and fought their cases in court without charge. In the 1850s, Lincoln's law partner Wi..
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Eric Foner |
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63b941f
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The minimum capital requirement of $50,000 and a proviso barring national banks from holding mortgages on land restricted these institutions to large cities. The system both promoted the consolidation of a national capital market essential to future investment in industry and commerce and placed its control firmly in the hands of Wall Street.
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Eric Foner |
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c052288
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The war vindicated their conviction, itself a product of the slavery controversy, that freedom stood in greater danger of abridgment from local than national authority (a startling reversal of the founding fathers' belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that centralized power posed the major threat to individual liberties).
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Eric Foner |
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0b5344c
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The potent cry of white supremacy provided the final ideological glue in the Democratic coalition. Sometimes the appeal to race was oblique. The Democratic slogan, "The Union as It Is, the Constitution as It Was," had as its unstated corollary, blacks as they were--that is, as slaves. Often, it was remarkably direct. "Slavery is dead," the Cincinnati Enquirer announced at the end of the war, "the negro is not, there is the misfortune."
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Eric Foner |
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15d216f
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The fundamental underpinning of this interpretation was the conviction, to quote one member of the Dunning School, of "negro incapacity." The childlike blacks, these scholars insisted, were unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. The fact that blacks took part in government, wrote E. Merton Coulter in the last full-scale history of Reconstruction written entirely wit..
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Eric Foner |
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d7bd502
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In 1863 West Virginia was admitted to the Union as a separate state, with the proviso that it abolish slavery. A popular referendum then approved a plan whereby all blacks born after July 4, 1863, would enjoy freedom. By the end of the war, complete emancipation had been enacted.
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Eric Foner |
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7f1f537
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The "underground railroad" should be understood not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law."
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Eric Foner |
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2523f04
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These are the times foretold by the Prophets, 'when a nation shall be born in a day'," declared the call for a black political gathering in 1865. A Tennessee newspaper commented in 1869 that freedmen habitually referred to slavery as Paul's Time, and Reconstruction as Isaiah's Time (referring perhaps to Paul's message of obedience and humility, and Isaiah's prophecy of cataclysmic change brought about by violence). God, who had "scourged Am..
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Eric Foner |
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85e4235
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Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.
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Eric Foner |
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9934039
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By the end of the war, small groups of freedmen were already learning their first lessons in political participation. At Mitchelville, in the South Carolina Sea Islands, blacks, under army supervision, had elected a mayor and city council, who controlled local schools and the administration of justice. On Amelia Island, Florida, blacks voted alongside whites in a local election.
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Eric Foner |