Eric Foner Quotes

Shortly before the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery like Lincoln, who worked within the political system rather than outside it. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of 'translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action'. The constitution barred interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to "ultimate extinction", a phrase he borrowed from Henry Clay. Ultimate extinction could take a long time. Lincoln once said that slavery might survive for another hundred years. But to the South, Lincoln seemed as dangerous as an abolitionist, because he was committed to the eventual end of slavery. This was why his election in 1860 led inexorably to secession and civil war.

If Robert E. Lee, who rebelled against the American government, deserves one, then why doesn't Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion?

America at the turn of this century is a far freer, more egalitarian society than in 1900.

Andrew Johnson lacked Lincoln's qualities of greatness. While Lincoln had been open-minded, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and able to get along with all elements of his party, Johnson was stubborn, deeply racist, and insensitive to the opinions of others. If anyone was responsible for the wreck of his presidency, it was Johnson himself, first by establishing new governments in the South in which blacks had no voice whatsoever, and then refusing, when these governments sought to reduce freedpeople to a situation akin to slavery through the Black Codes, to heed the rising tide of northern concern. As congressional opposition mounted, Johnson refused to budge.

In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy. It aimed to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.

The Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class.

Grant's famous motto, "Let us have peace", adorns the entrance to his tomb in New York City. Brands rightly emphasizes that this was a call not simply for national reconciliation but also for consolidation of what had been won in the war. Union and emancipation. By the time Grant died, the first was secure. It took a long time for the nation to try once again to fulfill the promise of the second.

Alone among the societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, for a moment, offered the freedmen a measure of political control over their own destinies.

Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.

Slavery, Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens proudly affirmed, was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Accordingly, slavery's disintegration compelled the Confederate government to take steps to save the institution, and these policies, in turn, sundered white society.

The vast majority of white southerners, supported vociferously by the Democratic Party of the north, were deeply opposed to any equality for the former slaves.

Now, as then, commerce unrestrained by social control ends up stripping economic relations of all moral content, while the drive toward fulfilling market demands at the lowest possible price creates widespread indifference to the conditions under which marketable goods are produced. Today’s Chinatown sweatshops and Third World child labor factories are the functional equivalents of colonial slavery in that the demands of the consumer and the profit drive of the entrepreneur overwhelm the rights of those whose labor actually produces the salable commodity.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. challenged the underlying premise of prevailing Civil War scholarship. The South, he pointed out, had shown no evidence of a willingness to end slavery; indeed, over time it had become ever more hysterical in its defense. With one eye firmly on the recent past, Schlesinger insisted that a society closed in support of evil could not be appeased, and if it was worth a war to destroy Nazism, surely it was worth one to eradicate slavery. But not until the 1960s, under the impact of the civil rights revolution, did historians en masse repudiate a half-century of Civil War scholarship, concluding that the war resulted from an irreconcilable conflict between two fundamentally different societies, one resting on slavery, the other on free labor. Historians pushed Emancipation to the center of their account of the Civil War, and it has remained there ever since.

American ideas about freedom certainly resonate abroad. Eastern Europeans embraced them after the collapse of Communist rule. Indeed, the years since 1989 have witnessed an unprecedented internationalization of current American concepts of freedom.

The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became.