Reconstruction Quotes

“Frederick Douglass, who had encountered racism even within abolitionist ranks, considered Lincoln a fundamentally decent individual. “He treated me as a man,” Douglass remarked in 1864, “he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Nothing in all history,” exulted William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“A Northern teacher in Florida reported how one sixty-year-old woman, “just beginning to spell, seems as if she could not think of any thing but her book, says she spells her lesson all the evening, then she dreams about it, and wakes up thinking about it.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough “equality” of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“By all accounts, the Northern men who leased plantations were “an unsavory lot,” attracted by the quick profits seemingly guaranteed in wartime cotton production. In the scramble among army officers illegally engaged in cotton deals and Northern investors seeking to “pluck the golden goose” of the South, the rights of blacks received scant regard.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Republicans, white and black, heaped scorn upon “respectables” who did not participate directly in the violence but “could not stop their sons from murdering their inoffensive neighbors in broad daylight.” Yet their complicity went beyond silence in the face of unspeakable crimes. Through their constant vilification of blacks, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Reconstruction, the “old political leaders” fostered a climate that condoned violence as a legitimate weapon in the struggle for Redemption.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“partial exception to this pattern was the Catholic Church, which generally did not require black worshippers to sit in separate pews (although its parochial schools were segregated). Some freedmen abandoned Catholicism for black-controlled Protestant denominations, but others were attracted to it precisely because, a Northern teacher reported from Natchez, “they are treated on terms of equality, at least while they are in church.” And Catholicism retained its hold on large numbers of New Orleans free blacks who, at least on Sunday, coexisted harmoniously with the city’s French and Irish white Catholic population.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army—over one fifth of the nation’s adult male black population under age forty-five.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Even as the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress reached its climax, the United States acquired Alaska, one part of an imperial agenda long advocated by Secretary of State William H. Seward. Under President Grant, the government attempted to annex the Dominican Republic.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“One citizen of Winston County in the northern Alabama hill country believed yeomen had no business fighting for a planter-dominated Confederacy: “All tha want is to git you … to fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin’ you may kiss their hine parts for o tha care.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Another, recognizing his former master among a group of military prisoners, exclaimed: “Hello massa; bottom rail top dis time!”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Fundamentally, however, blacks resented not only the incidents of slavery—the whippings, separations of families, and countless rituals of subordination—but the fact of having been held as slaves at all. During a visit to Richmond, Scottish minister David Macrae was surprised to hear a former slave complain of past mistreatment, while acknowledging he had never been whipped. “How were you cruelly treated then?” asked Macrae. “I was cruelly treated,” answered the freedman, “because I was kept in slavery.”4”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“The tide of change rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“On the West Coast, Democrats added antiChinese appeals, arguing that the Republican doctrine of “universal equality for all races, in all things” would lead to an “Asiatic” influx and control of the state by an alliance of “the Mongolian and Indian and African. ”61”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Because they failed to come to grips with the plantation itself, the leaders of Presidential Reconstruction lacked a coherent vision of Southern progress.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“Uncompromising opposition to slavery's expansion, emancipaion, the arming of black troops - all enjoyed little support when first proposed, yet all had come to be embraced by the mainstream of Republican opinion. "These are no times of ordinary politics, " declared Wendell Phillips. "These are eformative hours: the natinal purpose and thought grows and ripens in 30 days as much as ordinary years bring it forward."...Whatever the merits of legal and political equality for blacks, a correspondent of moderate Ohio Senator John Sherman noted, "if you reconstruction upon any principle short of this, you cause a continuous political strife which will last until the thing is obtained.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“Black suffrage, of course, was the most radical element of Congressional Reconstruction, but this too derived from a variety of motives and calculations. For Radicals, it represented the culmination of a lifetime of reform. For others, it seemed less the fulfillment of an idealistic creed than an alternative to prolonged federal intervention in the Southh, a means of enabling blacks to defend themselves against abuse, while relieving the nation of that responsibility. Many Republicans placed utopian burdens upon the right to votet. "The vote," Radical Senator Richard Yates exclaimed, "will finish the negro question; it will settle everything connected with this question...We need no vast expenditures, we need no standing army....Sir, the ballot is the freedman's Moses." When such expectations proved unrealistic, disillusionment was certain to follow.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“For like the [American] Revolution, Reconstruction was an era when the foundations of public life were thrown open for discussin. Republicanism offered a potent argument for black suffrage, but ruled out the massive disengranchisement of Southern whites.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law respected." - Frederick Douglass”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“The [Republican] party's mainstream option was probably voiced by Massachusetts Congressman Henry L. Dawes, who admitted the "medicine" was "extreme" but asked whether any alternative existed: "Am I to abandon the attempt to secure to the American citizen these rights, given to him by the Constitution?"
[Note: in reference to Enforcement Acts of 1870/71]”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“By this time, everyone understood that [President] Hayes would adopt a new Southern policy. "As matters look to me now," wrote the chariman of Kansas' Republican state committee on February 22 [1877], "I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves." (p.581)”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

“As Georges Clemenceau, reporting on Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after the war, “Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm.”57”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“The world, declared the Radical Chicago Tribune, commenting on the draft, needed to be shown that the American government “can confidently command the support of its citizens, and make the duty of the individual to the state a debt to be collected.” Such views were forcefully echoed among Northern reformers and intellectuals”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“On the eve of the Civil War, the federal government was “in a state of impotence,” its conception of its duties little changed since the days of Washington and Jefferson. Most functions of government were handled at the state and local level; one could live out one’s life without ever encountering an official representative of national authority. But the exigencies of war created, as Sen. George S. Boutwell later put it, a “new government,” with a greatly expanded income, bureaucracy, and set of responsibilities.40”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“New laws also redefined in the interest of the planter the terms of credit and the right to property—the essence of economic power in the rural South. Lien laws now gave a landlord’s claim to his share of the crop precedence over a laborer’s for wages or a merchant’s for supplies, thus shifting much of the risk of farming from employer to employee. North Carolina’s notorious Landlord and Tenant Act of 1877 placed the entire crop in the planter’s hands until rent had been paid and allowed him full power to decide when a tenant’s obligation had been fulfilled—thus making the landlord “the court, sheriff, and jury,” complained one former slave.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax reduction to white voters who associated expensive government with new state programs that primarily benefited corporations and blacks, and who feared that high taxes threatened both planters and yeomen with the loss of their land. And with Republicans proposing as an economic program little more than a milder version of “reform,” they had little to offer white voters to counteract Democrats’ racist appeals.64”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Issues that agitate American politics—who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism—are Reconstruction questions.”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

“Ironically, as Illinois Sen. Richard Yates pointed out, opponents of expansionism employed arguments extremely reminiscent of proslavery ideology, while its supporters upheld the principle that nonwhites could be successfully incorporated into the body politic. (No people, quipped Nevada Sen. James W. Nye, were “too degraded” for citizenship: “We have New Jersey, and all things considered, it has proven a success.”)”
― Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877