Quotes from Eric Foner

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.

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 nonwhites could be successfully incorporated into the body politic. (No people, quipped Nevada Sen. James W. Nye, were "too degraded" for citizenship: "We have New Jersey, and all things considered, it has proven a success.")

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 as It Was," had as its unstated corollary, blacks as they were—that is, as slaves. Often, it was remarkably direct. "Slavery is dead," the Cincinnati Enquirer announced at the end of the war, "the negro is not, there is the misfortune.

Birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society and a repudiation of a long history of equating citizenship with whiteness.

By this time, everyone understood that [President] Hayes would adopt a new Southern policy. As matters look to me now, wrote the chariman of Kansas' Republican state committee on February 22 [1877], I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves. (p.581)

The [Republican] party's mainstream option was probably voiced by Massachusetts Congressman Henry L. Dawes, who admitted the medicine was extreme but asked whether any alternative existed: Am I to abandon the attempt to secure to the American citizen these rights, given to him by the Constitution? [Note: in reference to Enforcement Acts of 1870/71]

The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law respected. - Frederick Douglass

For like the [American] Revolution, Reconstruction was an era when the foundations of public life were thrown open for discussin. Republicanism offered a potent argument for black suffrage, but ruled out the massive disengranchisement of Southern whites.

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, would enjoy freedom. By the end of the war, complete emancipation had been enacted.

Because they failed to come to grips with the plantation itself, the leaders of Presidential Reconstruction lacked a coherent vision of Southern progress.

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 flagrant violations of the law.

While freedom can be achieved, it may also be reduced or rescinded, It can never be taken for granted.

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

Richard Reid, "A Test Case of the 'Crying Evil': Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War," NCHR, 58 (Summer 1981), 234–62;

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 relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism—are Reconstruction questions.

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 the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats.

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 lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs—storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor—essential to the market economy.

On the West Coast, Democrats added antiChinese appeals, arguing that the Republican doctrine of "universal equality for all races, in all things" would lead to an "Asiatic" influx and control of the state by an alliance of "the Mongolian and Indian and African. "61

Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. "They are just what we would be in their situation

from local than national authority.

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 made Illinois a slave State." Lincoln

Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.

The Fourteenth Amendment was a crucial step in transforming, in the words of the Republican editor George William Curtis, a government "for white men" into one "for mankind."34

As history shows, progress is not necessarily linear or permanent. But neither is retrogression.