Eric Foner > Quotes

“Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.”
― Eric Foner, Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World

“The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln's growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln's beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman dorm. Are we the ones keeping Lincoln's memory alive? Or are we burying it?”
― Eric Foner, Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World

“Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.13”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Frederick Douglass, who had encountered racism even within abolitionist ranks, considered Lincoln a fundamentally decent individual. “He treated me as a man,” Douglass remarked in 1864, “he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome, Elements of Political Economy, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.)”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“partial exception to this pattern was the Catholic Church, which generally did not require black worshippers to sit in separate pews (although its parochial schools were segregated). Some freedmen abandoned Catholicism for black-controlled Protestant denominations, but others were attracted to it precisely because, a Northern teacher reported from Natchez, “they are treated on terms of equality, at least while they are in church.” And Catholicism retained its hold on large numbers of New Orleans free blacks who, at least on Sunday, coexisted harmoniously with the city’s French and Irish white Catholic population.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Belknap replied, “Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion.” Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement’s greatest orator, was “to alter public opinion,” to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically “possible,” the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.42”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“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”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Even after slavery ended in New York, the South’s peculiar institution remained central to the city’s economic prosperity. New York’s dominant Democratic party maintained close ties to the South, and some local officials were more than happy to cooperate in apprehending and returning fugitive slaves. Abraham Lincoln carried New York State in the election of 1860 thanks to a resounding majority in rural areas, but he received only a little over one-third of the vote in New York City. More than once, proslavery mobs ran amok, targeting abolitionist homes and gatherings and the residences and organizations of free blacks.12”
― Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“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”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed - something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation's public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished. From the enforcement of the rights of citizens to the stubborn problems of economic and racial justice, the issues central to Reconstruction are as old as the American republic, and as contemporary as the inequalities that still afflict our society.”
― Eric Foner

“Our government,” Lincoln declared, “rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.” The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats’ “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion” until it no longer valued the central ideal of equality.52 Like the abolitionists, Lincoln saw public sentiment as the terrain on which the crusade against slavery was to be waged.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Republicans, white and black, heaped scorn upon “respectables” who did not participate directly in the violence but “could not stop their sons from murdering their inoffensive neighbors in broad daylight.” Yet their complicity went beyond silence in the face of unspeakable crimes. Through their constant vilification of blacks, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Reconstruction, the “old political leaders” fostered a climate that condoned violence as a legitimate weapon in the struggle for Redemption.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“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.”
― Eric Foner

“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”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“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).”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“John F. Couts, member of a prominent Middle Tennessee planter family, confirmed that for many whites the Bureau’s presence was a humiliation: The Agent of the Bureau … requires citizens (former owners) to make and enter into written contracts for the hire of their own negroes… . When a negro is not properly paid or fairly dealt with and reports the facts, then a squad of Negro soldiers is sent after the offender, who is escorted to town to be dealt with as per the negro testimony. In the name of God how long is such things to last?”
― Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction

“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”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“These victories arose from the determined efforts of a group of lawyers who risked public odium by defending fugitive slaves in court and challenging the long-standing system of black indentured servitude. John M. Palmer, Gustave Koerner, and Orville H. Browning, all future Republican politicians, argued that blacks held to long-term indentures were free, and fought their cases in court without charge. In the 1850s, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon represented fugitive slaves pro bono.”
― Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery