Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“God was gone, and not simply in an intellectual sense either, not in the God-is-dead style of coffee-shop existentialists, but really gone, ripped from humanity’s very viscera, a howling silence at the center of some of the worst suffering men and women have known.”

“Every man has a man within him who must die.”

“art is so often better at theology than theology is”

“"Believing, then, that this is the best proposition that can be made effectual," Stevens explained, "I accept it." To allow it instead to die would have "postponed the protection of the colored race perhaps for ages." He would not "throw away a great good because it is not perfect. I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times."”

“Unfortunately, he had been compelled to recognize, the halfway measure being considered was "all that can be obtained in the present state of public opinion" because "the public mind has been educated in error for a century" and was therefore unreceptive to guaranteeing fully equal rights to all men.”

“Stevens acknowledged the shortcomings of the proposed amendment... It was "not all that the committee desired, it falls far short of my wishes." He had long believed that the founding fathers "had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration [of Independence], and wait for their full establishment till a more propitious time." That time, Stevens thought, should by now have arrived.”

“the Joint Committee subsequently reported out a weaker version of the amendment providing that a state's House delegation be reduced only in proportion to the number of adult male citizens specifically barred from the polls. Stevens acknowledged the shortcomings of the proposed amendment on May 8, 1866. It was "not all that the committee desired," he said, and it "falls far short of my wishes." ”

“Unless something were done about it, a southern state would now benefit from the full number of its black residents even though blacks could not vote in that state. Ironically, thus, the extinction of the three-fifths clause would strengthen the political hand of freed-people's former masters. Congress could have solved this problem by placing enfranchisement of southern black men in the proposed... amendment”

“The Constitution originally based the size of a state's House delegation on "the whole Number of free Persons" plus "three fifths of other Persons" (that is, slaves) living therein. In the antebellum era, that so-called three-fifths clause had thus given southern white citizens disproportionate representation in the House and the Electoral College. Emancipation now threatened to increase that power.”

“The proposed amendment... barred from state or national office all men who had previously sworn allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, as either military or political officials, but had gone over to the rebellion. And it changed the way that the size of any state's delegation in the House of Representatives (and therefore the Electoral College, too) would be calculated.”

“[the amendment] did thereby overturn the Dred Scott decision. The amendment also forbade states to "make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens" or to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" or to deprive them of "the equal protection of the laws."”

“it altered the Constitution's stand concerning the nature and inclusiveness of citizenship, the role and power of the federal government in protecting citizens' rights, and the basis for allocating congressional power among the various states. The amendment extended citizenship in both the country and their states of residence to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States..."”

“Enactment of the civil rights bill constituted an important step forward for the cause of legal equality in the South. But everyone in Washington knew that a law passed by Congress, even over a presidential veto, could still be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court or rescinded by later Congresses. To avoid future reversal, Republicans moved to enshrine the contents of the Civil Rights Act in the Constitution”

“On April 6, 1866, the Senate voted to override the veto of the civil rights bill, with all but four Republicans and one independent unionist voting to do that. Three days later, the House voted to override as well, with only one northern Republican (Henry Raymond) and six border-state unionists joining Democrats in Johnson's support. And so the [Civil Rights] bill became law.”

“Johnson vetoed that civil rights bill...denouncing it as a violation of constitutional federalism, an invasion of the rights of states. He objected...to..."a perfect equality of the white and colored races," since recently freed slaves could not possibly "possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizenship of the United States." ”

“in...1866, both houses passed a momentous civil rights bill. Designed to specify the nature and extent of the freedom granted in the Thirteenth Amendment, this legislation broke sharply and in a number of ways with previously dominant conceptions of constitutional federalism, dramatically increasing the role of the national government in protecting individual rights.”

“[Congress] reconvened in...1865, and the first question posed for Republicans was whether to admit or exclude the men who claimed to represent the ex-Confederate states. To seat them, Republicans feared, might return control of Congress and the White House to an alliance of northern and southern Democrats. That, Stevens warned, would ... ensure "the oppression of the freedmen and the re-establishment of slavery."”

“While southern state and local governments took aim at freed-people's rights, bands of whites enraged by defeat and emancipation assaulted them physically. Stevens heard from a former Union officer still living in North Carolina that "the Southern people are Especially bitter against the negro (though afraid of him) because he has been made free... ”

“black codes laid...claim to the bodies of children, depriving parents of the legal means to defend their families. A North Carolina law enabled officials to remove black children from their families and "apprentice" them to someone else "when the parents ... do not habitually employ their time in some honest, industrious occupation." When courts did place such children... they typically chose a child's former owner”

“Freed people judged to be without appropriate types of employment could be arrested, jailed, and fined. If unable to pay that fine, they would be hired out to an employer who assumed responsibility for the fine and deducted it from the workers' wages.”

“Many localities forbade blacks to take any jobs but field labor and domestic service. Several state codes imposed lengthy hours of labor and work duties and specified the servile demeanor expected.”

“Details varied from state to state, but most of these [black] codes included the same basic elements. Denying that African Americans were citizens, states passed laws that sharply limited or flatly withheld many of the rights associated with citizenship-to serve on juries, to own land or guns, to select one's place of residence and occupation, and even to pick one's employers and negotiate terms.”

“Southern state governments...began to pass legislation inspired by the planters' agenda, New laws, known collectively as "black codes," aimed to create a malleable and dependent black labor force. Those codes acknowledged the end of slavery and stipulated freed people's right to own some forms of property, make contracts, obtain legal marriages, and gain limited access to the courts.”

“Black landlessness...It seemed essential...to make it impossible for blacks to obtain any decent land to farm, so that they would have no alternative to working for the whites...Colonel Thomas explained, "The whites know that if the negro is not allowed to acquire property or become a landholder he must return to plantation labor and work for wages that will barely support himself and his family..."”

“although whites now recognized that they could no longer own individual black people, "they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large." If permitted, they would return black people to a condition as close as possible to slavery. To do that they would, as a conservative New Orleans newspaper anticipated, create a new labor system "prescribed and enforced by the state."”

“A northern reporter touring the postwar South found that opinion as strong as ever. Planters "have no sort of conception of free labor. They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the law of force." ”

“Wealthy southerners and their political representatives soon revealed definite plans for using their reacquired political power. They aimed first and foremost to maintain or regain their plantations... But how...would southern landowners find the kind of labor force that they believed profitability required,...who could be induced to do an extraordinary amount of work at comparatively small cost to the landowners?”

“I feel a strong need—an imperative, really—to believe something in common; indeed, I feel that any belief I have that is not in some way shared is probably just the workings of my own ego, a common form of modern idolatry.”

“"From the time that Mr. Johnson commenced his indiscriminate system of pardoning all who made application," Botts recounted, the southern elite "became bold, insolent, and defiant," and since then "the spirit of disloyalty and disaffection has gone on increasing day by day, and hour by hour, until among the leaders generally there is as much disaffection and disloyalty as there was at any time during the war...”

“The southern elite soon recognized Johnson's presence in the White House as a godsend. Ex-Confederate leader Howell Cobb advised friends "to yield to our destiny with the best possible grace — recognize as fixed fact the abolition of slavery-conform in all respects to the new state of things." They should "take the amnesty oath when permitted to do it" or "apply for special pardons."”