Ecstatic Nation Quotes

“DeBow’s Review noted with contempt. “It is a melancholy exemplification of the facility with which a philanthropist, who devotes himself exclusively to the eradication of one form of evil, can deceive himself, and come to regard any means justifiable, in the pursuance of a supposed good end,” the reviewer said. “That subtle analyst of character, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has ably dissected this species of delusion in the Blithedale romance.” He recommended that Stowe”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“Hence the deal: the Constitution would protect the African slave trade until 1808, when, presumably, Congress would regulate it. (James Madison, a slaveholder, gloomily predicted, “twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves.” He was right.)”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“Speaking before the New York State legislature, William Henry Seward, one of the younger eulogists to whom Adams had entrusted the future, would remember Adams as someone who “knew that the only danger incident to political reform, was the danger of delaying it too long.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“in 1839 Adams had offered a doomed amendment to the Constitution declaring that from July 4, 1842, onward, there should be no hereditary slavery in the United States; that on that day and afterward, every child born in the United States should be free; and that no state should be admitted into the United States that tolerated slavery.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“he bequeathed to his son Charles Francis Adams the words that he believed he and the country should live by: “a stout heart and a clear conscience, and never despair.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“No is the wildest word we consign to the language,”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery also managed to perpetuate the fatal compromise of the Constitution, which had counted the slave as only three-fifths of a person, and that is no person at all.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“And the black abolitionist James McCune Smith noted that even if Congress passed a constitutional amendment forbidding slavery, “the word slavery will, of course be wiped from the statute book, but the ‘ancient relation’ can be just as well maintained by cunningly devised laws.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877

“What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Douglass trenchantly asked in 1852. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
― Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877