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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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—...
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...
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...
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...
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
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 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...
Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.
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
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...
Taken by surprise, as he put it, and unwilling to see the possibility of electing an antislavery senator disappear, Lincoln ordered his backers to cast their votes for Trumbull, ensuring his victory o...
Max Weber defended the social utility of the politician’s calling and identified three qualities required for success: devotion to a cause; a sense of responsibility; and judgment, or being attuned to...
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...
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...