Eric Foner Quote

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 stand up declaring that all men are created equal…. I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.20

Eric Foner

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 stand up declaring that all men are created equal…. I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.20

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About Eric Foner

Eric Foner (; born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner is the first to associate the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Foner has published several books on the Reconstruction period, starting with
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. His online courses on "The Civil War and Reconstruction", published in 2014, are available from Columbia University on ColumbiaX.
In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Foner previously won the Bancroft Prize in 1989 for his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution - 1863–1877. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.