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;
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...
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...
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...
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...
James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59–82.
Successful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 a...
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...
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...
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...
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 fou...