These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Kansas, left to decide whether it would enter the Union as a free or a slave state, broke out in outright war. Southerners moved into Kansas to vote for slavery; northerners moved into Kansas to vote against it. Eventually, they began shooting one another. Horace Greeley dubbed it “Bleeding Kansas.” Soon there would be blood on the Senate floor. Lincoln privately confided his despair about what he described as the nation’s “progress in degeneracy,” a political regression: As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.