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

“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