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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5851847 | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 25ac571 | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| c694edd | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| b4956e9 | 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 | Eric Foner | ||
| fa4aba6 | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 0d8433a | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| a395012 | 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" | Eric Foner | ||
| 6a11ef4 | 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.")" | Eric Foner | ||
| 72b8202 | 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 | Eric Foner | ||
| 5598614 | 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 | Eric Foner | ||
| b794cb5 | Richard Reid, "A Test Case of the 'Crying Evil': Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War," NCHR, 58 (Summer 1981), 234-62;" | Eric Foner | ||
| 28931a6 | 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. | Eric Foner | ||
| f376320 | 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. | Eric Foner | ||
| 23d84e3 | The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, "the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party." | Dinesh D'Souza | ||
| c7e81fe | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 994fc1c | 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 | Eric Foner | ||
| 793dc44 | 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." | Eric Foner | ||
| 4755f8a | James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59-82. | Eric Foner | ||
| f8ad9bb | 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 ".. | Eric Foner | ||
| dceea3e | 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 | Eric Foner | ||
| 6302090 | The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction--they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South. Let us consider these two approaches one by o.. | Dinesh D'Souza | ||
| 427dfde | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 065a9f7 | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 63b941f | 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. | Eric Foner | ||
| f3c3dc3 | I always try to turn the spotlight on the other person." Truly confident people often do this. They know they grow more by listening than talking." | Leil Lowndes | ||
| c052288 | 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). | Eric Foner | ||
| 0b5344c | 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." | Eric Foner | ||
| 15d216f | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| d7bd502 | 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. | Eric Foner | ||
| 7f1f537 | 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." | Eric Foner | ||
| 2523f04 | 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.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 85e4235 | Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state. | Eric Foner | ||
| 33a25c7 | White men alone must manage the South," Johnson remarked in 1865. Two years later, in 1867, the president asserted that blacks were incapable of self-government. "No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands," Johnson wrote in his annual message. "On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism." It was, the historian Eric Foner.. | Jon Meacham | ||
| 9934039 | 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. | Eric Foner | ||
| 997b49b | John F. Couts, member of a prominent Middle Tennessee planter family, confirmed that for many whites the Bureau's presence was a humiliation: The Agent of the Bureau ... requires citizens (former owners) to make and enter into written contracts for the hire of their own negroes... . When a negro is not properly paid or fairly dealt with and reports the facts, then a squad of Negro soldiers is sent after the offender, who is escorted to town.. | Eric Foner | ||
| f028ae0 | One can begin with the expansion of the source base available to scholars brought about by the digital revolution. When I began work on Reconstruction, the World Wide Web did not exist (nor did email, so that scholars wasted a lot less of their time than nowadays). | Eric Foner | ||
| 12d2149 | Even as the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress reached its climax, the United States acquired Alaska, one part of an imperial agenda long advocated by Secretary of State William H. Seward. Under President Grant, the government attempted to annex the Dominican Republic. | Eric Foner | ||
| 071d735 | I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.58 | Eric Foner | ||
| 0cc9ccf | Reconstruction is part of our lives even today. 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. Reconstruction is embedded in our judicial processes. Every session of the Supr.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 98eaf66 | East Tennessee would remain the most conspicuous example of discontent within the Confederacy. From this area of bridge burning and other acts of armed resistance, thousands of men made their way through the mountains to enlist in the Union army. But other mountain counties also rejected secession from the outset. One citizen of Winston County in the northern Alabama hill country believed yeomen had no business fighting for a planter-domina.. | Eric Foner | ||
| 51afd27 | the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race. | Eric Foner | ||
| 32496f8 | Reconstruction revisionism arose in tandem with and provided a usable past for the civil rights movement. More than most historical subjects, Reconstruction history matters. Whatever the ebb and flow of historical interpretations, I hope we never lose sight of the fact that something very important for the future of our society was taking place during Reconstruction. | Eric Foner | ||
| f755858 | On the eve of the Civil War, the federal government was "in a state of impotence," its conception of its duties little changed since the days of Washington and Jefferson. Most functions of government were handled at the state and local level; one could live out one's life without ever encountering an official representative of national authority. But the exigencies of war created, as Sen. George S. Boutwell later put it, a "new government,".. | Eric Foner | ||
| dce1bd3 | As late as December, the President signed an agreement with an entrepreneur of dubious character for the settlement of 5,000 blacks on an island off Haiti. (Four hundred hapless souls did in fact reach ile a Vache; those fortunate enough to survive returned to the United States in 1864.) | Eric Foner |