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...
Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shi...
By the end of the war, small groups of freedmen were already learning their first lessons in political participation. At Mitchelville, in the South Carolina Sea Islands, blacks, under army supervision...
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...
Confederacy. Mountainous Rabun County, Georgia, was almost a unit against secession, and secret Union societies flourished in the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas, from which 8,000 men eventually...
Even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic. Condemnations
The potent cry of white supremacy provided the final ideological glue in the Democratic coalition. Sometimes the appeal to race was oblique. The Democratic slogan, The Union as It Is, the Constitution...
Our government, Lincoln declared, rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government. The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats’ gradual and steady debauchi...
Only once before, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review, had the Court invalidated an act of Congress on constitutional grounds. John McLean of...
New laws also redefined in the interest of the planter the terms of credit and the right to property—the essence of economic power in the rural South. Lien laws now gave a landlord’s claim to his shar...
Ironically, as Illinois Sen. Richard Yates pointed out, opponents of expansionism employed arguments extremely reminiscent of proslavery ideology, while its supporters upheld the principle that nonwhi...
I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from ev...
The world, declared the Radical Chicago Tribune, commenting on the draft, needed to be shown that the American government can confidently command the support of its citizens, and make the duty of the...
The assumption that the slave is in a better condition than the hired laborer, includes the further assumption that he who is once a hired laborer always remains a hired laborer; that there is a certa...
In keeping with the exceptionalist vision of nationhood so common in postrevolutionary America, he proclaimed that the founders had put in place a political system more conducive to liberty than any i...
Reconstruction revisionism arose in tandem with and provided a usable past for the civil rights movement. More than most historical subjects, Reconstruction history matters. Whatever the ebb and flow...