Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“A Union officer in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, underlined the point by reporting that slaves were "the only friends we find." Union commanders found those friends very useful. Some brought with them wagons, horses, or food from their masters' larders. Others helped Union soldiers locate hidden weapons or foodstuffs or to identify the most militant Confederate partisans in an area.”

“We are driven ceaselessly onward in this life and are certain of our desires only until we realize them, at which point they seem to dissolve and shimmer farther off, like a heat mirage on a road down which we can’t stop racing.”

“Meister Eckhart: "It is not that we should abandon, neglect, or deny our inner self, but we should learn to work precisely in it, with it, and from it in such a way that interiority turns into effective action and effective action leads back to interiority, and we become used to acting without any compulsion."”

“"God forbid that I should ever agree" that slaves once confiscated "should be restored again to their masters!" The seizure of any slaves by Union armies, Stevens insisted, must signify their full liberation. "One of the most glorious consequences of victory," he declared, would be "giving freedom to those who are oppressed." ”

“To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence.”

“There is a distinction to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to—and, if attended to, discloses—our souls.”

“But God speaks to us by speaking through us, and any meaning we arrive at in this life is composed of the irreducible details of the life that is around us at any moment.”

“Benjamin Butler's ad hoc decision in May 1861 to give sanctuary to runaway slaves at Fort Monroe and the Union government's approval of that decision were important first steps toward a new policy. Another came ...months later when the War Department authorized all army commanders to make use of fugitives who offered their services to Union armies. But that, too, fell far short of a general proclamation of freedom.”

“But "gradually, it became clear to every candid mind that slavery, untouched, constituted the strength of the rebellion; but that slavery, touched, would constitute its weakness."”

“Carl Schurz himself later acknowledged the pragmatic, step-by-step manner in which Union policy had eventually evolved. "We went into the war for the purpose of maintaining the Union, and preserving our nationality." Even though all knew that "it was the slave-power which had attempted to break up the Union," the Union government did not at first plan to assault slavery.”

“Even after a year of war, in fact, the Republican New York Times was still arguing that "the rebellion is not immediately the work of the Southern slaveholding class, nor of the masses of the Southern people. It is due to the intrigues, falsehoods and bad ambition of a class of political leaders, who precipitated a reluctant community into insurrection."”

“Confiscation Acts would allow U.S. armies and navies penetrating the Confederacy to seize enemy property and slaves used in support of the rebellion. Many Republicans had warned the South before the war that secession would bring on slavery's swift destruction. Slaveholders who rebelled against the lawful national government would thereby pull themselves out from under the Constitution's protection.”

“the Republican Congress would also pass a series of laws that gave to commercial and industrial development the kind of boost that advocates like Stevens had sought but which Southerners and their northern allies had blocked... construction of transportation facilities, banking, a national currency, land grant colleges, and tariffs... Stevens and his Ways and Means Committee were at the center of much of that work.”

“The meanings that God calls us to in our lives are never abstract. Though the call may ask us to redefine, or refine, what we know as life, it does not demand a renunciation of life in favor of something beyond it. Moreover, the call itself is always composed of life. That is, it is not some hitherto unknown voice to which we respond; it is life calling to life.”

“the soul is the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality—or the self and other selves—possible. It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even if it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion.”

“the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality—or the self and other selves—possible. It is the soul that turns perception into communication, and communication—even if it’s just between one man and the storm of atoms around him—into communion.”

“winning over the public increased Stevens's influence in Congress. "Some of the papers call me 'the leader of the House,' Stevens told a journalist late in life. "I lead them, yes; but they never follow me or do as I want them until public opinion has sided with me." ”

“When those initiatives came under attack ... Stevens was often the quickest to respond. He thereby not only gave direction to less experienced and less perspicacious allies; he also raised spirits when theirs flagged. As a chronicle of the wartime Congress would later put it, "The timid became bold and the resolute made stronger in seeing the bravery with which he maintained his principles." ”

“Stevens became a pivotal figure in the wartime House of Representatives in early July 1861, when he assumed the chairmanship of its Ways and Means Committee... that committee wielded considerable legislative power, and the chairmanship made Stevens the top Republican floor leader in the House, equivalent to a modern majority leader.”

“Lincoln thought the [abolition] process might take many decades. The slaveholders responded to that reform project with armed rebellion. That rebellion, and the war it spawned, changed not only the means with which the conflict was waged but its very significance, forcing open the door not to slavery's very gradual, eventual disappearance but to its uncompensated destruction within just a few years.”

“This second American revolution would also reshape national politics. It would deprive the southern elite of the control it had so long exercised over the federal government, transferring that control to the representatives of commercial, financial, and manufacturing interests based in the North.”

“At the start of 1861 four million human beings — one out of every three people in the South — were enslaved. During the years that followed, those millions would emerge from bondage into legal freedom. Their liberation would strip the South's ruling families of the principal source of their wealth.”

“[Stevens] was among the first to champion the confiscation of slaves... to demand full legal freedom for those confiscated, to call for widening the scope of emancipation to embrace all slaves within the rebellious states, and then to press for the abolition of slavery throughout the United States as a whole. As Stevens came to recognize, these measures would mean a radical transformation of southern society.”

“Determined as Lincoln was to suppress the slaveholder rebellion, however, he did not at first seek to use the war to emancipate those in bondage. The military effort he oversaw aimed initially only to defend the union, and Lincoln hoped that early battlefield successes would help keep that conflict brief and limited.”

“Lincoln delivered a conciliatory inaugural address, but the rebellious states had no intention of either returning to the Union or permitting the U.S. government to maintain military installations on their soil. They demanded that the federal garrison abandon Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.”

“"You are lying about that, and you were lying about Mrs Whatsit!" she screamed. "Mrs Whatsit hates you," Charles Wallace said. And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said, automatically, "Mrs Whatsit loves me; that's what she told me, that she loves me," suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.”

“"You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?" "Yes," Mrs Whatsit said. "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you." ”

“Aunt Beast spoke to the others. "The child is distraught Don't judge her harshly. She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can't know what spiritual damage in leaves even when physical recovery is complete."”

“The gentle words, the feeling that this beast would be able to love her no matter what she said or did, lapped Meg in warmth and peace.”

“the 20th century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually... it breaks.