Quotes from Richard White

At least on paper, Congress had dramatically enlarged federal power and black rights. In December 1866 only about 0.5 percent of black adult males could vote. In December 1867 the figure rose to 80.5 percent, with the entire increase coming in the old Confederacy.

In the Northeast there was $77 in circulation per inhabitant. As late as 1880, the South had a quarter of the country's population but only 10 percent of its currency.

Congress also refused to give the South subsidies proportional to those that went to the West and Northeast.

Southern rivers, ports, and harbors received a fraction of the funds devoted to the Eastern and Pacific states, and even the critical levees along the Mississippi River languished. For the rest of the century Southerners contended that the banking system, the tariff, and federal subsidies for internal improvements discriminated against the South, and they clearly did.

What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor.

In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary. The government then redistributed these ceded or conquered lands to white citizens. Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men.

I have known tolerably well, a good many "successful" men—" big" financially—men famous during the last half-century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting.

In 1800 the United States had a birth rate higher than any ever recorded for a European country, but it fell steeply and consistently throughout the century. The total fertility rate, which is the average number of children borne by a woman before she reaches menopause, had fallen 50 percent by 1900.

American exports reduced the cost of food in Europe faster than at any time since the Neolithic era. European peasants could not compete with cheap American grain and meat. Forced off the land, many of them immigrated to the United States. Some became American farmers; more became American workers.16

if America means anything at all, it means the sufficiency of the common, the insufficiency of the uncommon.

Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living

Sumner asserted that without equality of citizens before the law and full consent of the governed, a government could not be considered republican. It defined a standard that the North no more met than the South.3

With settlers starting farms in the West, the South rebuilding, and northern industry expanding, the economy would soon need all the available money supply.

These setbacks depleted liberal confidence in both Grant and the U.S. Treasury Department and made them even more enamored of the gold standard. Already Anglophiles, they tended to trust the Bank of England more than the secretary of the treasury.

The gold standard created what economists have called a "golden straitjacket." Debtor nations would exchange control over their monetary policy for capital mobility and stable exchange rates. Although the cost of borrowing abroad would fall, the United States would lose the ability to drive domestic interest rates below international interest rates. Gold dollars would flee abroad if interest rates elsewhere were higher.

Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.

You can't trust the government to do anything right-except, of course, to conspire and cover up. Then it becomes diabolically efficient. The very people who are wildest for government conspiracies are often the same people who believe the government is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently.

History is the enemy of memory.

Sound familiar? Rutherford B. Hayes was someone who thought that attracting opposition from nearly every direction meant that he was right. James A. Garfield, watching the president flounder in big things and small, thought that the "impression is deepening that he is not large enough for the place he holds" and that his election "has been an almost fatal blow to his party.

A European visitor in the 1880s remarked that the only sense not offended by American cooking was hearing.

South Carolina, the Tweed Ring, the New York City riots, and Santo Domingo fanned the fire of liberal rebellion; the only source of liberal outrage not yet prominent in the newspapers was the ubiquitous corruption of the Grant administration itself, which was as yet largely known only to insiders.

When whiskey was supposed to be taxed at $2 a gallon and sold for $1.25 a gallon, it did not take advanced math to guess something was amiss.

The great ironist quite unironically boiled "American" down to liberal and reduced the Republicans to a lazy betrayal and a policy of drift that allowed too many of the policies put in place during the war to endure and the problems that arose in the wake of war to fester.

Liberal" in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe designated people who in many, but not all, respects would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights; they attacked slavery, aristocracy, monarchy, standing armies, the Catholic Church, and hereditary authority.