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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steven Hahn
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July 26 - September 4, 2025
A federal state with an immensely expanded reach and capacity would emerge, connected in significant ways to powerful private interests.
In an important sense, it was just the sort of thing that John Brown had hoped to see from the slaves in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
“The Constitution as it is; the Union as it was; the negroes where they are” became their slogan,
the Louisiana Native Guards, a unit of free people of color from New Orleans, had been mustered into service in the spring of 1861 (well before the U.S. made comparable moves),
Finally, the War Department stepped in and ordered several regiments of U.S. soldiers from the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg to occupy New York City in a show of force and determination.
a fair number were “shrewd in their small way” and perhaps “a great deal shrewder and smarter” than poor southern whites.
In that the arming of African American men came at a time of military stalemate and low morale in much of the North, their participation proved to be a tipping point in the war,
Army lines thus made for the first large-scale African American political meeting grounds enabled by the war and emancipation.
he expressed a clear desire “to live by ourselves . . . rather [than] scattered among the whites
Eventually, men of foreign birth and African descent would compose more than half of the Union army.
“the National Government could . . . have prescribed no conditions for the return of the Rebel States which they would not have promptly accepted.”
Whereas Lincoln had spoken a language of generosity and reconciliation, Johnson’s was a language of punishment and retribution.
The very rapid and apparent volte-face on Johnson’s part surprised many rebels in the South and has confused scholars since,
the Georgia legislature sent Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, to take a seat in the U.S. Senate.
the government controlled more than 900,000 acres of rebel land with authority—included in the legislation creating the Freedmen’s Bureau—to divide it into 40-acre tracts for distribution among the freedpeople.
Now former slaves would count as five-fifths, like all free people, the states of the South would gain more representation, and if freedmen did not achieve civil and political standing, the former slaveholders and their allies could have much more political power in the country than they had before the rebellion.
Over the following months, the U.S. Army carried out the first voter registration in American history.
he soon imagined being at the helm of a great northwestern rail corridor, possibly involving the annexation of western Canada, which, to him, “could be done without any violation of treaties” simply by encouraging the “quiet emigration over the border of trustworthy men with families.”
Whatever the political course of the country, the railroads would have been powerful exemplars of and pacesetters for an American capitalism that was beginning to take hold around mid-century.
Sherman’s Field Orders No. 15, which made 400,000 acres of prime rebel land available for black settlement, was soon rolled back, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which did have the official responsibility for redistributing nearly half a million acres of other rebel land held by the federal government, focused chiefly on supervising and enforcing labor contracts.
Where mechanization or the division of labor had become most advanced (as in textiles and the garment trades), the workforce would chiefly comprise women and children;
craft workers were steadily being replaced by operatives whose tending skills enabled them to handle machines in a variety of industries.
What gave industrialists special leverage over time were migrations on a scale the country had never before seen.
Well over half of the entire population of Europe was on the move over the course of the nineteenth century, searching for secure berths in the rapidly changing countryside or relocating to the cities where commerce and industry offered the prospect of work.
Spencer’s views both preceded and anticipated Darwinism and suggested that The Origin of Species (1859) emerged in an environment in which a good deal of the intellectual material had been prepared in the cauldrons of natural science, political economy, and British industrialism.
“The survival of the fittest,” in fact, became something of a catchphrase and mantra for those who came to sit atop the unprecedented wealth they accumulated during the Gilded Age.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court thus found a law requiring remuneration in cash “degrading and insulting” to the workers, for it attempted to “prevent persons who are sui juris from making their own contracts.”
Nationwide, the number of guardsmen/militiamen grew to over 100,000, and everywhere their main purpose was to serve as state police officers in the control and suppression of labor unrest.
Sheridan nonetheless helped ship armaments to the forces of the deposed liberal president, Benito Juárez, who would eventually drive the French out and have Maximilian’s head.
Never before or since has a section of the American working class been as closely aligned with a political party as former slaves were with the Republicans. But it was not “their” party.
As these states began to hold elections under new constitutions that enfranchised African American men and disfranchised some of the rebels, the Republicans then won control of the governorships and legislatures almost everywhere (Virginia was the exception)
they could attend more fully to the “interests” of their black supporters and risk alienating their white ones, not to mention the national leadership; or they could try to curry the favor of moderate Democrats by cutting taxes and spending, decrying “corruption,” championing “reform,” and offering Democrats a share of the patronage and offices. Most chose the latter—reflecting
But the long-term interests of the Republican Party were increasingly on the side of property and capital, not of the black laborers who had made the revolution possible and whose lives and rights were most in jeopardy.
As the commissioner of Indian affairs put it, “Tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed and the family and autonomy of the individual substituted.”
the western territories were distinguished not only by their physical size but also by the extended period of time that elapsed between their initial organization by Congress and their eventual admission to the Union as states.
Utah presented many of the same challenges that the states of the rebellious South did and, as a consequence, underwent a similar process of “reconstruction.”
the Mormons’ staunchest opponents were members of the new Republican Party who saw a strong connection between slavery and plural marriage.
Before the end of the century, more than one-third of the Mexican landmass was owned by foreigners, most of which—130 million acres—was in American hands:
Yet as was true for Native Americans, the cultural and political accommodationism of the Hawai’ians proved to be a weak barrier against the American developmental juggernaut.
By 1890, less than half the population of the islands was native Hawai’ian.
He had also cooled on an early goal of having Canada and Mexico join the Union.
Nation-states, as William Seward presciently glimpsed, are perpetually and necessarily colonizing their own domains even as they prepare to find new ones.
Unions had customarily been built around specific trades and skilled workers who sought protection from the assaults of their employers as well as the incursions of those capable of diluting the integrity and respectability of their crafts: the unskilled, women, and blacks chief among them.
the members of the Knights were of one mind when it came to the Chinese. They were to be utterly excluded from the order.
More than a few supporters of Chinese exclusion saw themselves completing the work of abolitionism, extirpating the final vestiges of slavery from the land.
class lines but often reached the constabularies
nationwide agitation and expectation over the central labor issue of the postbellum era: the eight-hour workday.
there was in the air a mix of Karl Marx, revolutionary French republicanism, and Tom Paine,
Indeed, if any part of the country approximated the image of the Paris Commune, it was the urban and rural South, most notably in an arc stretching from Virginia out to Texas.
The reestablishment of “home”—meaning white Democratic—rule in the former rebellious states of the South was a process of signal importance in the political history of the United States.
