Reunion and Reaction Quotes

“Lamar related the Texas & Pacific bill to the national political crisis by presenting it as a means of “reconciliation” between the sections, “material reconstruction” of the South, and a way of restoring “mutual respect and affection” at a moment when those sentiments were desperately needed.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

“It is substantially a proposition,” concluded the two Northern Democrats and three Republicans, who signed the Minority Report on the bill, “to build this road and the branches on Government credit without making them the property of the Government when built. If there be any profit, the corporations may take it; if there be loss, the Government must bear it.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

“If state rights and laissez faire meant an end to force bills, removal of Federal troops from Southern state capitals, and abandonment of intervention in local politics and race discriminations, the South was for them strong. On the other hand the South had no patience with state rights and laissez faire if they implied abandonment of Federal subsidies, loans of credit, and internal improvements. Of these the South believed she had not had anything like her just share and she meant to have a lot more.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

“Despite its professed radicalism, the Republican party had obviously become the conservative party, spokesman of vested interests and big business, defender of an elaborate system of tariffs, subsidies, currency laws, privileged banks, railroads, and corporations, a system entrenched in the law by Republicans while the voters were diverted by oratory about Reconstruction, civil rights, and Southern atrocities.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

“There was something else at stake, and it was probably of more consequence in the long run than any of the previous considerations. This was the question of whether the country could regain the ability to settle Presidential elections without the resort to force.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction

“On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction