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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steven Hahn
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July 26 - September 4, 2025
In the past two generations, the study of American history has been transformed. Increased attention to the experience of previously-neglected groups, such as women, African Americans, and Latinos, new subfields, including the history of the family and of American capitalism, and new perspectives, notably a “global” approach to U.S. history,
slavery was national, not sectional, during the first six decades of the nineteenth century,
I term this bloody episode, as many supporters of the Union did at the time, the “War of the Rebellion” (not the “Civil War”) and treat the “Confederacy” as a rogue rather than a legitimate state, in good part because no other state power in the world ever recognized it
The bitter conflicts erupting almost continuously across the American interior during the nineteenth century were effectively over which form of social organization would prevail. It was only during the War of the Rebellion, when a new type of central state took hold, that the balance decisively tipped.
the United States had the most violent labor history of any society in the industrializing world at this time—that
among the Comanche, wealth acquired social meaning chiefly when it was given away.
although antislavery sentiment brewed in Mexico City and legislators both outlawed slave trading and prescribed the emancipation of slave children at age fourteen, Austin was able to offer colonists an extra 80 acres for every slave they brought in.
That Jefferson the slaveholder could imagine an “empire of liberty” suggested the many contradictions that beset the American project from the first.
Perhaps no figure embodied the activist projects of the American imperial vision better than Andrew Jackson.
by the mid-1820s Cherokee society in the Southeast had come—quite consciously—to look very much like the white American society that surrounded it.
One of the American commanders could observe that “this . . . is a negro war, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on their slave population.”
For his part, Jackson regarded the Court’s decision as simply one interpretation of the Constitution and refused to enforce it.
Imperious in aura and demeanor, Santa Anna might appear among the least likely to launch an assault on slavery and racial exploitation,
For the next decade, Texas would be more of an imagined space than a sovereign state, with boundaries that were endlessly porous, ever shifting, and almost impossible to discern.
Although he (like most Quakers) believed that slaveholding was a sin, he thought that any plan of emancipation had to unfold slowly and include the removal of the emancipated black population from the United States.
reflected a deepening consensus among juridically free Americans that the country—whatever its dimensions—would be ruled in the interests of white people; others would be required to leave or submit.
By the time Garrison left Baltimore for Boston in 1830, he had abandoned gradualism and colonization and was ready to take his emancipationist ideas in new, and far more radical, directions.
the first and most continuous combatants in the fight against slavery were the slaves themselves.
Not one of the emancipation statutes freed any slave, providing instead for the liberation of the children of those who were enslaved (known as post-nati emancipation), and only when they reached a certain point in their adulthood: age twenty-one, twenty-five, or twenty-eight depending on the state and their gender.
abolitionists never captured the support of more than a tiny minority of the white American public.
To many white Americans, the abolitionists not only appeared to be demanding the elevation of a degraded subject race but also seemed to be heralding a new—and threatening—social and political order.
Abolitionist conventions were broken up, their property and newspaper presses destroyed, their meeting halls burned to the ground, their bodies tarred and inked, and local blacks (conceived as allies) harassed and beaten.
anti-abolitionism represented one component in a wider surge of political violence and vigilantism in the 1830s—against Mormons, Catholics, foreigners, slaves, and free people of color—that together suggested how deeply embedded organized violence, coercion, and paramilitarism were in the conduct of American politics more generally.
Congress, in the so-called gag rule of 1836, agreed to receive abolitionist petitions and then immediately table them so that they would not be considered, and federal authorities (the postmaster general in particular) agreed to tolerate the refusals of local postmasters to deliver abolitionist publications.
some of them—and their intellectual and clerical allies—began to build an explicit defense of slavery that was simultaneously sacred and secular, tuned to the logic of the Bible and the modern world.
slavery’s defenders commenced to reject the egalitarianism that the Declaration of Independence had enshrined.
Perhaps their easiest task was demonstrating the compatibility between slavery and the Bible and showing their critics’ “palpable ignorance of the divine will,” as Virginia’s Thornton Stringfellow bellowed.
At no point did abolitionists present a program of emancipation, a way of making immediatism operational.
by 1840, when railroads increasingly overshadowed them, canals cut through nearly 3,500 miles of the American interior.
Money, as most Americans of the early nineteenth century understood it, came in the form of gold and silver coins.
He went on to raise doubts about the Supreme Court’s judgment in McCulloch v. Maryland and insisted that “it is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them.”
Entry into the slaveholding class, even in the boom times, was not easy for those born outside it. A well-placed marriage was a far better gateway than years of hard work and risk taking.
Indeed, the notion of the country’s “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent,” articulated famously by the Jacksonian journalist John L. O’Sullivan in 1845, was very deeply laid in the political culture and embraced virtually across the political spectrum.
centuries—it was already driving the dispossession
“Our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country,” General Winfield Scott recorded in early 1847.
Unease or outright opposition to annexing Mexican territory south of the Rio Grande—expressed in both parties—made more military campaigns pointless.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (as it has come to be known) gave Polk most of what he wanted and all of what he had demanded.
incorporating new populations with complex ancestries confounded the racial and constitutional sensibilities of those devoted to the project of building a “white man’s republic.”
the rush may well have been the most culturally kaleidoscopic event in the history of the United States up to that time, and given the brief duration it might never be surpassed.
As one Missourian put it, “If we can’t all go there on the same string, with all our property of every kind, I say let the Indians have it forever. They are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”
No year passed during the decade when an invasion of Cuba, or some other part of the Caribbean basin, was not being planned or carried out.
The volume of immigration to the United States grew steadily during the 1820s and 1830s from roughly 10,000 each year to nearly 100,000.
But the late 1840s and early 1850s saw an influx of immigrants that, to this day, remains unprecedented in scale relative to the size of the American population.
In Pennsylvania, as well as in North Carolina and Tennessee, where free people of color had been able to cast ballots, the expansion of the white male franchise was accompanied by the elimination of the black.
The road to women’s rights invariably passed through the portals of abolitionism.
secessionism, quietly discussed for a number of years, had nonetheless gained new life. Secessionists from the Deep South and Virginia had begun to create something of a political network.
further willing to endorse a constitutional amendment, passed by the House of Representatives and sent out for ratification (the first Thirteenth Amendment) that would have forever prevented the federal government from abolishing slavery there.
the patrician lawyer George Templeton Strong wondered in disgust if “the bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers.”
In truth, although their party platform conjured an activist state, Republicans and the Lincoln administration had relatively little with which to work.
Lincoln was at once decisive and reserved. He was acting in unprecedented ways and without congressional authority, yet he hardly seemed a tyrant or central state builder in the making.
