Eric Foner
Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography. (Eric Foner Quotes)
“A Northern teacher in Florida reported how one sixty-year-old woman, “just beginning to spell, seems as if she could not think of anything but her book, says she spells her lesson all the evening, then she dreams about it, and wakes up thinking about it.” (Eric Foner Quotes)
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Alvan Stewart, a prolific writer and speaker against slavery from New York, developed the argument that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which barred depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law, made slavery unconstitutional. Slaves, said Stewart, should go to court and obtain writs of habeas corpus ordering their release from bondage.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“As a Whig, Lincoln had seen the slavery question as a threat to party unity and economic policy as a source of party strength. Now, he realized, the situation was reversed. He worked to ensure that the new party with its heterogeneous membership ignored divisive issues like the Whig economic agenda, which he had strenuously advocated for two decades but which would alienate former Democrats.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“As Georges Clemenceau, reporting on Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after the war, “Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Because they failed to come to grips with the plantation itself, the leaders of Presidential Reconstruction lacked a coherent vision of Southern progress.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society and a repudiation of a long history of equating citizenship with whiteness.”
Eric Foner
Give me liberty!
“Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“By all accounts, the Northern men who leased plantations were “an unsavory lot,” attracted by the quick profits seemingly guaranteed in wartime cotton production. In the scramble among army officers illegally engaged in cotton deals and Northern investors seeking to “pluck the golden goose” of the South, the rights of blacks received scant regard.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Even after slavery ended in New York, the South’s peculiar institution remained central to the city’s economic prosperity. New York’s dominant Democratic party maintained close ties to the South, and some local officials were more than happy to cooperate in apprehending and returning fugitive slaves. Abraham Lincoln carried New York State in the election of 1860 thanks to a resounding majority in rural areas, but he received only a little over one-third of the vote in New York City. More than once, proslavery mobs ran amok, targeting abolitionist homes and gatherings and the residences and organizations of free blacks.” (Eric Foner Quotes)
Eric Foner
Gateway to Freedom
“Even as the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress reached its climax, the United States acquired Alaska, one part of an imperial agenda long advocated by Secretary of State William H. Seward. Under President Grant, the government attempted to annex the Dominican Republic.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“Frederick Douglass, who had encountered racism even within abolitionist ranks, considered Lincoln a fundamentally decent individual. “He treated me as a man,” Douglass remarked in 1864, “he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough “equality” of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. “They are just what we would be in their situation,”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“Nothing in all history,” exulted William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“So profound were these changes that the amendments should be seen not simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a “second founding,” a “constitutional revolution,” in the words of Republican leader Carl Schurz, that created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.”
Eric Foner
The Second Founding
“The “underground railroad” should be understood not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law.”
Eric Foner
Gateway to Freedom
“The first emancipation proclamation in American history preceded Abraham Lincoln’s by nearly ninety years. Its author was the Earl of Dunmore, the royal governor of colonial Virginia, who in November 1775 promised freedom to “all indentured servants, negroes, or others” belonging to rebels if they enlisted in his army.”
Eric Foner
Gateway to Freedom
“The Fourteenth Amendment was a crucial step in transforming, in the words of the Republican editor George William Curtis, a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” (Eric Foner Quotes)
Eric Foner
The Second Founding
“The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law respected.” – Frederick Douglass”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“The problem is that we tend too often to read Lincoln’s growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincoln’s beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“The tide of change rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape.”
Eric Foner
Reconstruction
“These victories arose from the determined efforts of a group of lawyers who risked public odium by defending fugitive slaves in court and challenging the long-standing system of black indentured servitude. John M. Palmer, Gustave Koerner, and Orville H. Browning, all future Republican politicians, argued that blacks held to long-term indentures were free, and fought their cases in court without charge. In the 1850s, Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon represented fugitive slaves pro bono.”
Eric Foner
The Fiery Trial
“Who owns history? Everyone and no one–which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.”
Eric Foner
Who Owns History?
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