Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Cox therefore pressed Stevens "to give up his idea of the equality of the black and white races before the law." To which Stevens tersely replied, "I won't do it."”

“Stevens replied that he stood not for "equality in all things—simply equality before the laws." Cox understood, however, that equality before the laws was no small thing. It would mean not only freedom from enslavement but also equal treatment by the laws and in the courts—an end to discriminatory legislation and penalties and the rights to sue, testify, and sit on juries.”

“Thaddeus Stevens rejected Lincoln's reconstruction policies as far too lenient. He called for increasing and exerting the power of the federal government, for enforcing the subordination of rebels, and for guaranteeing not only personal freedom but equal legal rights to the emancipated. He showed no interest in offering concessions to the slaveholders.”

“Meanwhile, he accepted General William T. Sherman's field order provisionally allotting much southern acreage to freed people. The president was also warming to the idea of limited suffrage for blacks. In March 1864, he suggested privately that Louisiana, once reintegrated into the Union, grant the vote to well-educated black men as well as to "those who have fought gallantly in our ranks." ”

“[Lincoln] permitted Confederate official John A. Campbell to call Virginia's Confederate state legislature into session for the purpose of formally surrendering to the Union. But Lincoln had no intention of permitting that rebel legislature to remain in session, much less in power, indefinitely. So when Campbell tried to use his gesture to accomplish just that, Lincoln shut the whole operation down.”

“During the final months of his life, Lincoln's policy continued to evolve. Conciliatory gestures toward rebels mixed with heightened consideration for the plight of freed people. In early February 1865, he suggested to his cabinet that the federal government compensate rebellious masters for the loss of their slaves, abandoning that proposal only when cabinet members balked. ”

“In a second overture to rebels, Lincoln said that while ex-Confederates reentering the Union must swear to abide by the Union's wartime antislavery measures, they need honor that oath only "so long and so far as" those measures were "not repealed, modified, or held void by congress, or by decision of the supreme court."... these words suggested that they might yet avoid emancipation altogether.”

“Personally, Lincoln acknowledged, he would rather see black laborers treated "precisely as I would treat the same number of free white people in the same relation and condition." But he would now mute that preference in hopes that his "acquiescence" in the wishes of "the deeply afflicted [white] people in those States' would speed their return to the United States.”

“We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed.”

“But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.”

“Lincoln excluded from his offer of blanket pardon all members of the Confederacy's governmental, diplomatic, and military elite; those who had resigned seats in the U.S. Congress or commissions in the U.S. armed forces in order to join the rebellion; and those who had mistreated Union prisoners of war”

“Pardoned rebels would enjoy "restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves." People freed during the war, he affirmed, must remain free. Any other policy, he said, would constitute "a cruel and astounding breach of faith." ”

“1863 unfolded, the importance of black soldiers to the Union cause increased... Lincoln returned to...immediate emancipation. On December 8, he spelled out how he would treat Confederates who returned to the Union and on what terms they could "inaugurate loyal state governments." The president offered "a full pardon" to all rebels who swore to "henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution...”

“Planters in Mississippi and Alabama sought the same kinds of accommodation. In the political sphere, leading members of that class sought to regain control of their state and local governments. Only that would enable them to exercise the power they craved over the black population.”

“They submit to the terms dictated by the Government, because obliged to do so." But "the spirit of Slavery still lives among them." One group of Louisiana slaveowners thus promised to accept the coming of "free labor" if that freedom were strongly qualified—if the U.S. military would "compel the negroes to work" and to work "diligently and faithfully" for the whites.”

“Acutely conscious of slavery's breakdown... and determined to counter the freed people's growing assertiveness, the southern white elite formulated its own aims in opposition. Having always regarded slavery as essential to profitable southern agriculture, landowners considered it impossible to proceed without restoring bondage or at least imposing something like it in its place.”

“In January 1865, a Convention of the Colored Men of Ohio declared "that the safety of the Republic demands that, in the Territories, in the rebel States, when reorganized, and throughout the entire nation, colored men shall exercise the elective franchise, and be otherwise fully clothed with the rights of American citizens."”

“By 1864, African Americans were calling specifically for voting rights. Two citizens of New Orleans met with Lincoln that March and urged him to endorse the enfranchisement of Louisiana's black males. The Syracuse convention called for "political equality," including both equality before the law and the right to vote.”

“Through...occupied parts of the South...black people were striving to obtain an education. When the first fugitives entered Fort Monroe in Virginia in 1861, a white official already found them anxious to learn to read. Wherever other officials went they encountered freedpeople "eager to obtain for themselves, but especially for their children, those privileges of education which have hitherto been [denied] them.""

“They wanted to rebuild and obtain legal recognition for their families, which slavery had denigrated and dismembered. People who had regularly suffered whippings and other physical punishments now refused to allow employers to harm them or their family members or otherwise interfere in their family lives.”

“He had looked to the day when the United States would bring its laws and government into accord with the Declaration of Independence's assertion of human equality. To realize that dream now, Republicans would not only have to abolish slavery but also to "work a radical reorganization in Southern institutions, habits and manners" and "revolutionize their principles and feelings."”

“Stevens recalled one day, he had "fondly dreamed that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for a while the foundation of our institutions, and released us from obligations" to the slaveholders, then "the intelligent, pure and just men of this Republic... would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression."”

“"a lover of slavery or a demagogue, will attempt to maintain the position that any of the soldiers who bear their arms in battle shall be treated as inferior to any other men who stand up by their side. I care not whether the soldiers are of Milesian, Teutonic, African, or Anglo Saxon descent."”

“By the war's end, some 200,000 black men had served in the Union army or navy, the overwhelming majority of them recruited in slave states. Should we "lose the colored force," Lincoln warned conservative critics, we would be "powerless to save the Union." Keep that force, "and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it."”

“Confiscation and emancipation naturally raised another major question—whether to employ freed slaves as soldiers. From the start of the war, black men in the North had been trying to don Union uniforms. And in the summer of 1861 Thaddeus Stevens foresaw the day when "every bondman in the South... shall be called upon to aid us in war against their masters, and to restore this Union."”

“spiritual experience...deeply felt and necessary,...unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God”

“I begin to think that anything that abstracts us from the physical world is "of the devil," as we said in the baked—and sometimes half-baked—plains of West Texas”

“Simone Weil says that "Absence is the form God takes in this world," which, like every profound human conception of God, is at once true and untrue. It is true insofar as God does not appear to us in any form beyond the forms of the world. It is false insofar as it assumes that God is not present in the forms of the world, in ways that require a lifetime of looking and praying to recognize.”

“The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within.”

“One of the great impoverishments of contemporary Western Christianity, or at least of liberal Protestantism, is its ignorance of, or allergy to, mysticism. I do think that much of any genuine Christian experience is mystical, which is to say that it is timeless, personal, and that it suggests—or, more accurately, brings to fruition—an essential unity between man and God.”