Reconstruction Quotes

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“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.” (Reconstruction 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

“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

“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.” (Reconstruction Quotes)
Eric Foner
Reconstruction

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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