Quotes from Eric Foner

Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where "freedom songs" were sung and soldiers delivered "speeches of the most inflammatory kind.

By all accounts, the Northern men who leased plantations were "an unsavory lot," attracted by the quick profits seemingly guaranteed in wartime cotton production. In the scramble among army officers illegally engaged in cotton deals and Northern investors seeking to "pluck the golden goose" of the South, the rights of blacks received scant regard.

By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also "quite incidentally" from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, "the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.

In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough "equality" of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.

Nothing in all history," exulted William Lloyd Garrison, equaled "this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves…. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, December 1, 1862

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. Lincoln

A Northern teacher in Florida reported how one sixty-year-old woman, "just beginning to spell, seems as if she could not think of any thing but her book, says she spells her lesson all the evening, then she dreams about it, and wakes up thinking about it.

By the war's end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army—over one fifth of the nation's adult male black population under age forty-five.

Alvan Stewart, a prolific writer and speaker against slavery from New York, developed the argument that the Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which barred depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property" without due process of law, made slavery unconstitutional. Slaves, said Stewart, should go to court and obtain writs of habeas corpus ordering their release from bondage.

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. Seward. Under President Grant, the government attempted to annex the Dominican Republic.

The war vindicated their conviction, itself a product of the slavery controversy, that freedom stood in greater danger of abridgment from local than national authority (a startling reversal of the founding fathers' belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that centralized power posed the major threat to individual liberties).

So profound were these changes that the amendments should be seen not simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a "second founding," a "constitutional revolution," in the words of Republican leader Carl Schurz, that created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.1

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 record of abusive treatment—mentions of scars and other injuries that would help identify the runaway—that provided powerful

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 lacking in enthusiasm."57