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 lifes...
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,...
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...
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 reac...
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 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—...
Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.
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 rel...
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....
As Georges Clemenceau, reporting on Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after the war, Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered la...
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...
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 f...
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 th...
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 f...
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
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
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 h...
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, wou...
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 m...
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...
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