Reconstruction Quotes

“Before the Civil War, Mark Twain would write, “there was nothing resembling a worship of money or its possessor” among Americans. But the politicians and financiers “reversed the commercial morals of the United States. . . . The people had desired money before his day,” but now they had been “taught . . . to fall down and worship it.”2”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History

“The end of Reconstruction is often spoken of in psychological terms, as a collapse of white Americans’ nerve, or as a failure of Republican political will, when in cold truth Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction, much less a bourgeois one.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History