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...
Richard Reid, A Test Case of the ‘Crying Evil': Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War, NCHR, 58 (Summer 1981), 234–62;
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...
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...
James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59–82.
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 o...
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 thi...
Successful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history.
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 govern...
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 servi...
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 we...
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...
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 thro...
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 eme...
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 nation...
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...
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 situatio...
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, fr...
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 chall...
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,...
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