A Nation Without Borders Quotes

“Capitalism set out as the opponent of privilege and the champion of freedom,” Rauschenbusch wrote, “it has ended by being the defender of privilege and the intrenchment of autocracy.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, “reserv[ing] and set[ting] apart for the settlement of the negroes . . . the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida,” to be subdivided “so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Although a handful of Radical Republicans hoped to dismantle the plantation sector (and the planter class with it) through some type of land reform and create a social order in the slave South that more closely mimicked their own, most Republicans believed that a resurrected cotton economy was crucial to the future prosperity of the nation, and they worried that a landed black peasantry would devote their energies to raising food rather than market crops.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Thus, just as he once concluded that “colonization” was the proper solution to the dilemmas of white and black in the United States, so he regarded “the plan of concentrating Indians and confining them to reservations” as the “fixed policy of the government.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Lincoln pledged, “If we get through this war and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed.” But Lincoln also wholly embraced the image of Indians as “savages” and found it difficult to imagine them as part of the “people of the United States.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“they be prepared to organize themselves into family units, embrace the requirements of monogamous marriage, and accept the obligations of parenting after the experience of slavery had officially denied all of this to them?”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Did they understand the nature of private property, of “meum” and “tuum,” as one northern observer put it, or would they be prone to thieving? Would”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“This was a world of multiple sovereignties in which very few people of African descent had “rights that whites were bound to respect” or could be citizens of the United States. At best, policy makers imagined them, as Lincoln did in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, as laboring people who would now work for “reasonable” wages. A powerful logic associated freedmen and freedwomen with a life of labor, chiefly on the agricultural lands of the southern states. No one could deny that the cotton plant had fueled the engine of antebellum economic growth, and most policy makers in the Union envisioned a revitalized cotton economy as a central element in the future prosperity of the country.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Worries about annexing a land overrun by Catholics and racial inferiors found expression even among Whigs of an antislavery disposition.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, who had opposed the war to begin with, warned of the cultural and political mire that awaited annexationists. The United States, Calhoun declared on the floor of the Senate, had never “incorporated any but the Caucasian race. To incorporate Mexico would be the first departure of the kind, for more than half its population are pure Indian and by far the larger portion of the residue mixed blood. Ours is a government of white men.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“The last order of civilization, which is the democratic, received its first permanent existence in this country,” John L. O’Sullivan wrote in the 1840s, “and her example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchies, and oligarchies, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Democrats appealed to constituencies either harmed or bypassed by market intensifications and left reeling by the effects of the panic. They were dubious about the benefits of expanded market exchanges and suspicious of government involvement in economic infrastructure projects. They regarded banks as privileged institutions that enriched themselves at popular expense and viewed paper money as the means by which banks drew hardworking producers into their grasp. They were oriented either to local or to international markets and opposed protectionism as a threat to their trading relations. And they were generally hostile to the culture of evangelical Protestantism and especially to its reformist initiatives. Democrats were most numerous in the states that supported slavery and/or felt the strong influence of slavery, in port cities that thrived on international trade and had large, multiethnic (and non-Protestant) working populations, and in rural districts either dominated by cotton plantations or on the edges of the market economy and less receptive to evangelical revivalism.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“The Whig Party came to appeal to those who were benefiting from the market intensifications of the era; who welcomed the expanded market exchanges and the development of transportation and communication networks even if the government (at all levels) played an important hand in paying for them; who saw banks as promoting capital accumulation and paper money as expanding access to wealth; who looked chiefly to the domestic market as the engine of their advancement and favored protective tariffs to limit foreign competition; and who were drawn to evangelical Christianity and its social reformist impulses.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“To many white Americans, the abolitionists not only appeared to be demanding the elevation of a degraded subject race but also seemed to be heralding a new—and threatening—social and political order.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Some would even support the reopening of the African slave trade so that men like them could expand their labor force and non-slaveholders might have the opportunity to join the slaveholding class.”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

“Rallying to the cry of “free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men,”
― Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910