Quotes About Reconstruction

the walls were down, the only thing I could do was rebuild.

Go home all you boys who fought with me and help build up the shattered fortunes of our old state

The identity and infrastructure of the nations of Europe had to be rebuilt, and the restitution of artwork was a vital component.

La vida tenía que destruirte para que tú pudieras reconstruirte mejor.

Life's had to break you down so you could be rebuilt

The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him.

Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.

By the end of Grant's second term, white Democrats, through the "redeemer" movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states' rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, "I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.

The president was running out of room to maneuver as the country backed away from further federal interference in the South. The outcry over Louisiana began to ring down the final curtain on Reconstruction. Southern whites increasingly substituted the word "Redemption"—a restoration of white rule—for the hated term "Reconstruction.

By 1872, under Grant's leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.)

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?

capture the Republican nomination instead of Grant. With Johnson acquitted, everyone knew, Grant would get the party nod. Significantly, the seven Republicans who voted for acquittal all campaigned for Grant after he secured the nomination. They also extracted a critical pledge from Johnson that he would cease interfering with congressional action on Reconstruction.

In giving the South negro suffrage, we have given the old slave-holders forty votes in the electoral college. They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction."58 Just

The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics...Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him. (The Nation, progressive periodical of our day, published demeaning, racist opinions of Black Americans during Reconstruction (ie pg. 854 softcover)

In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments. By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction's lofty aims. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations.

When the country surrendered its educational institutions—in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up—to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be "reconstructed" according to the pragmatist image of man.

A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.

Once the fabric of a just society is undone, it takes generations to weave it back together.

We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

Aangezien wanhoop een buitensporigheid was die hij niet kende, boog hij zich over datgene wat er was overgebleven van zijn leven, en begon dat opnieuw te verzorgen, met de onwrikbare vasthoudendheid van een tuinman aan het werk, de ochtend na de storm.

The family that moved into a house and sound out several days later, in the worst way you can imagine, that their sewer line said nothing hooked up. True. And the crane did fall on the house, it was a town house, and the owners don't aren't in. True. And don't forget the house they had to knock down and start over. True.

It's a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there's a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. But I guess that's how some of us conduct our lives.

Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.