More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 3 - March 27, 2023
Oliver Goldsmith,
According to the teachings of Friends, men and women were equal in the eyes of God, and everyone contained a divine spark—an “inner light.”
suasion.”
They rejected the belief in a holy trinity and the doctrine of eternal damnation, preached the inherent goodness of all people and salvation through social action, and they took part in temperance, abolition, women’s rights, and other reforms.
Henceforth, women would plead “the cause of the oppressed in our land” by using the one legal tool available to them—the right of the people, enunciated in the First Amendment, to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman,
Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
avoirdupois
Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth,
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last of the Barons,
Abigail Adams
warned John Adams not to give husbands undue power, saying, “All men would be tyrants if they could.”
“a bright sunbeam, in high or lowly home”—the
“to comfort man on earth and smooth his path to heaven.”
“neat as a bandbox in their persons and dress.”
Auburn System
puerperal fever
One impeccably credentialed authority advised feeding newborns no more than a tablespoonful of milk every four hours. Angelina Grimké, who had conscientiously followed that advice, credited her sister Sarah with saving the life of her first child, whom she had almost starved to death.
Abigail Adams, “Men have framed laws I believe to uphold themselves in their wickedness.”
In terms of industrial progress, the state was a hundred years behind New York, and the blight of slavery was pervasive.
principle of natural rights: life, liberty, and the consent of the governed.
Lydia Maria Child, the author of the 1835 The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations;
Margaret Fuller, who had published Woman in the Nineteenth Century
He titled his address “Freedom in the Territories,” but it instantly became known as the “Higher Law” speech.
James Bowley was elected to the General Assembly in South Carolina, during Reconstruction, when freed men briefly served on juries, worked on county and state commissions, and held state and national office.
“there never was a man whose good temper was proof against a missing button.”
John Stuart Mill,
parvenues.”
‘To look unmoved on the degradation and wrongs of a fellow creature, because burned by a fiercer sun, proves us strangers to justice and love.’ ”
“I’ve heard Uncle Tom’s Cabin read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe’s pen hasn’t begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I’ve seen the real thing, and I don’t want to see it on no stage or in no theater.”
“how foolish it was just for temper to make mischief.”
John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Hymn of the Kansas Emigrant,”
After Rev. Beecher said he believed there was more moral power in one Sharps than in a hundred Bibles, the rifles came to be known as Beecher’s Bibles.
Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina cried, “You dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
she felt like a Quaker minister who went to meeting because he was curious about what he was going to say.
“bluestocking.”
“Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right.”
“Mad men North, and mad men South, are working together to produce a dissolution of the Union, by civil war. The present administration, and the incoming one, unite in devolving on me the responsibility of averting those disasters.”
“If there is no struggle there is no progress.… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Havelocks,
I feel incapable of giving or receiving pleasure.”
“I am always for bringing men and States into this Union, never for taking any out.”
Jefferson,
“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”
Buckra
White man.
“They may send the flower of their young men down South, to die of the fever in the summer, and the ague in the winter.” They could send them year after year, until they used up all the young men. “All no use! God’s ahead of master Lincoln. God won’t let master Lincoln beat the South ’til he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he’s a great man, and I’m a poor Negro, but this Negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free.”
“Our masters, they have lived under the flag, they got their wealth under it, and everything beautiful for their children. Under it they have grind us up, and put us in their pocket for money. But the first minute they think that old flag mean freedom for we colored people, they pull it right down, and run up the flag of their own.”
Lincoln harshly addressed northerners who still opposed emancipation: “You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem to be willing to fight for you. When victory is won, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue and clenched teeth, and steady eye and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on this great consummation. I fear, however, that there will also be some white ones, unable to forget that with malignant heart and deceitful speech, they strove to hinder it.”
“The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed
