417 “It is our general belief”: Quoted in Joe Gray Taylor, “New Orleans and Reconstruction,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 9 (Summer 1968), 195.
417 “Reconstruction in Louisiana”: W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1990), 482.
417 “no riot”: Quoted in Report of the Select Committee on the New Orleans Riots, 351.
419 “just like any nigger”: Quoted in Hans Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 242.
419 Duplicating the civil rights bill: The second section of the amendment reduced Southern representation in the House—unless the state granted the black man suffrage. This was a compromise measure intended to placate both moderate and radical ends of the Republican party, for not everyone could yet agree that granting suffrage fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government. The third section disenfranchised former Confederate military personnel and political officeholders, though there too there was compromise, for the franchise could be reinstated by a two-thirds vote of Congress. The fourth section of the amendment declared Confederate debts null and void and did not authorize compensation for the loss of slavery or slaves.
420 “We have at last agreed”: William Salter, The Life of James W. Grimes (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1876), 292.
420 “there is no possibility”: John B. Pickard, ed., The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 89.
421 “I have been opposed”: Ibid., 132.
421 “If he left Washington”: Ibid., 133.
421 “didn’t like attending”: Quoted in George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 4, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 103.
421 “a National disgrace”: Ulysses S. Grant, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 16, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 308.
422 “Hang Jeff Davis”: Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Philip and Solomons, 1871), 135.
422 “If there is any man”: Donald E. Reynolds, “The New Orleans Riot of 1866, Reconsidered,” Louisiana History 5 (Winter 1964), 15.
422 “sunk the Presidential office”: William T. Sherman and John Sherman, The Sherman Letters: The Correspondence of General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, ed. Rachel Sherman Thorndike (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 278.
422 “Does Seward mean”: Quoted in Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography, 264.
422 “coppery”: “The Seward-Johnson Reaction,” North American Review 103 (October 1866), 524.
423 “Thomas Nast has been”: Quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine, Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 69.
423 Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby: Locke’s Nasby was an unrepentant racist “who allus tuk his likker straight.” Satirizing slavery, white supremacy, defeatism, and Copperheads, Locke once explained that “I can kill more error by exaggerating vice than by abusing it.” Likened by some to Cervantes, he’d been publishing his Nasby letters since 1860 in the Toledo Blade, and soon they were reprinted throughout the North and collected in book form in 1864. Union soldiers loved the Nasby letters, for Nasby was the dissipated Kentucky Democrat so devoted to bigotry that he made it ludicrous. Lincoln too loved the Nasby letters, which he purportedly read before each cabinet meeting. Charles Sumner, a bit too stiff for that, nonetheless remembered Lincoln saying that “for the genius to write such things, I’d give up my office.” At the war’s end, George S. Boutwell, who had been in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, said that three things had been responsible for the North’s victory: the army, the navy, and the Nasby letters.
423 “I have great confidence”: Petroleum V. Nasby [David Ross Locke], Andy’s Trip to the West, Together with a Life of Its Hero (New York: J. C. Haney and Co., 1867), 38.
424 “These poor men”: Quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 230.
424 “If we had looked”: “The Seward-Johnson Reaction,” North American Review 103 (October 1866), 539–40.
425 “To fight out a war”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Richard A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81.
426 “set Zionsward”: Quoted in John Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed. Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettlinger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 101.
426 “May I ask my friend”: Quoted in Eric Foner, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” in The Hoftstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 167.
426 “strip the Southern”: “Confiscation at the South,” The New York Times, May 2, 1867.
426 “A deep-seated prejudice”: Quoted in James Albert Woodburn, The Life of Thaddeus Stevens: A Study in American Political History, Especially in the Period of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1913), 429–30.
426 “This doctrine”: Ibid., 430.
426 As one historian later noted: See Foner, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” 174.
426 “whole countenance”: “Interview of a Southern Editor with Hon. Thaddeus Stevens,” The New York Times, June 22, 1867.
426 And in spite of: See “The Fallen Oak,” The Independent, Aug. 20, 1868, 4.
427 “I repose in this quiet”: Thomas F. Woodley, Great Leveler: The Life of Thaddeus Stevens (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937 ), 414.
428 “beggary, starvation, death”: Henry Timrod, The Poems of Henry Timrod, with a Sketch of the Poet’s Life, ed. Paul H. Hayne (New York: E. J. Hale & Son, 1873), 45.
428 “we have eaten”: Ibid., 46.
428 a pretext for war: Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat & Co, 1866), 47.
428 “The extreme Black Republican party”: Ibid., 746.
429 “No history is a matter”: James Branch Cabell, Let Me Lie: Being in the Main an Ethnological Account of the Remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia and the Making of Its History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 74.
429 “Civil wars, like private quarrels”: Pollard, The Lost Cause, 729.
CHAPTER 19: POWER
430 “Society in America”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Novels, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 937.
431 “The truth is”: William T. Sherman and John Sherman, The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, ed. Rachel Sherman Thorndike (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 258.
433 “By means of railroads”: Quoted in Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 100.
433 “But if we stay at home”: Henry David Thoreau, A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985), 396.
433 “We have bound”: Walt Whitman, “Passage to India,” in Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White, vol. 3 (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 565–68.
434 Though railroads were destroyed: See Richard White’s superb Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 43. See also James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 621–30.
434 “trade dominates the world”: Charles F. Adams, “A Chapter of Erie,” The North American Review 109 (July 1869), 36–37.
434 “Great Barbecue”: Vernon L. Parrin
gton, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930), 7–47.
434 “I am duly thanking”: Quoted in Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 45–46.
435 “the emigration of the Yankees”: Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 6.
435 Then there was Garth Wilkinson “Wilkie” James: Named for a disciple of the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, Wilkie James was trying to tap the power within, which is what his enlightened father, Henry, Sr., had taught him to cherish. But Henry, Sr., seemed to favor his older sons, William and Henry, Jr., over the two younger ones, Wilkie and Robertson. Unlike Wilkie and Bob, neither William nor Henry had fought in the war, but, as their father said, Wilkie and Bob were not “cut out for intellectual labors.” See, for instance, Paul Jerome Croce, “Calming the Screaming Eagle: William James and His Circle Fight Their Civil War Battles,” New England Quarterly 76 (March 2003), 13.
436 “We came down”: Quoted in Jane Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James (New York: Archon Books, 1986), 84.
436 “We are at the mercy”: Ibid.
436 “freed negro under decent”: Quoted in Powell, New Masters, 29.
437 “the freedmen who labor”: Thomas W. Conway, “On the Introduction of Capital and Men from the Northern States and from Europe, into the Southern States of the Union,” in Annual Report of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, vol. 8 (New York: John W. Amerman, 1866), 64.
437 “Cotton is gold”: Ibid., 64; see also Powell, New Masters, which focuses on this issue.
437 “politically and privately”: Quoted in Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes, 106.
437 “The persons mainly responsible”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The Case of the Carpet Baggers,” The Nation, March 2, 1899, 162.
437 “The men of the better class”: Ibid., 163.
437 “What most men mean”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Too Many Compliments,” The Independent, Oct. 26, 1865, 4.
438 “What a bitter dose”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 4, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 147.
438 “The President”: Quoted in Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 90.
438 “I fear he is among”: Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 4, 150.
439 “I can but regard”: Quoted in Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster), 451.
439 “Stick”: See Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 313.
440 “bundle of generalities”: Quoted in Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson, 80. This is the single best account of the impeachment and, more specifically, of the complex political divisions within the Republican Party both before and during impeachment.
440 “A moral principle”: CG, 39th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 7, 1866, 705.
440 “If the great culprit”: Quoted in Michael Les Benedict, “From Our Archives: A New Look at the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson,” Political Science Quarterly 113 (Autumn 1998), 504.
441 “construed by him”: CG, 40th Congress, 2nd session, Feb. 24, 1868, 1386.
441 Johnson’s defense: Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 506. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson (New York: Times Books, 2011), 120–39. Also: if Johnson had sent the act to the Supreme Court, he would have been sending Reconstruction there too, for if the Court had found the act unconstitutional, Johnson could continue to fire army officers who opposed his plans, such as Sheridan and perhaps even Grant.
441 “The dignity of the nation”: “The Impeachment and the People,” The New York Times, April 5, 1868, 4.
442 Representative James Garfield speculated: For a fine analysis of the fiscal issues and their relation to impeachment, see Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson, in particular chaps. 4 and 5.
442 “I see little hope”: Quoted in Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 244.
442 “May God save”: Quoted in ibid., 333.
442 “Safe deliverance”: Andrew Johnson, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 14, ed. Paul Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 113.
442 “Radicalism has gone to h—”: “Impeachment,” Memphis Daily Avalanche, May 19, 1869.
442 “will only be to inflict”: Quoted in “The President’s Acquittal,” The Sun [Baltimore], May 19, 1868, 1.
442 Yet Johnson had become: See Homer Adolph Stebbins, A Political History of the State of New York, 1865–1869 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1913), 331–35.
443 “What can we do with him”: Quoted in Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, 327.
443 “Nobody feels more deeply”: John Murray Forbes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, vol. 2, ed. Sarah Forbes Hughes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 164–65.
443 “on every man’s tongue”: “How the Victim Was Chosen,” The Independent, July 13, 1868, 4.
444 “People don’t like”: Quoted in Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1907), 68.
444 “C. is as radical as ever”: Quoted in ibid., 69.
444 “Chase is out of the question”: Samuel J. Tilden, Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, vol. 1, ed. John Bigelow (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), 229.
445 “Everybody is heartily tired”: “The Week,” The Nation 1 (July 6, 1865), 1.
445 Or, as Henry Adams: Adams’s depiction of Grant as “uniquely stupid” has been expertly analyzed in Brooks D. Simpson, “Henry Adams and the Age of Grant,” Hayes Historical Journal 8 (Spring 1989), 5–23. See also The Political Thought of Henry Adams (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), and The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). In addition, the derogation of Grant is well analyzed in Joan Waugh’s fine U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009).
446 “put eight holes”: Quoted in Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes, 103.
446 “There is going on”: Frederick Douglass, “Horatio Seymour’s Letter of Acceptance,” The Independent, Aug. 20, 1868, 1.
446 “To tell the plain truth”: Quoted in Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes, 104.
446 According to the Radical Republican: See Albion W. Tourgée, Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée, ed. Mark Elliott and John David Smith (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 47–51.
447 “Do not understand me”: Quoted in Maher, Biography of Broken Fortunes, 104.
447 “No Northern man”: Charles Stearns, The Black Man of the South and the Rebels (New York: American News Co., 1872), 457.
447 “This is about as bad”: Ibid., 162.
448 “forced into it”: Quoted in Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant: The American Presidents Series: The 18th President, 1869–1877 (New York: Times Books, 2004), 81; this is an excellent, short, and well-written biography.
448 “It is difficult to comprehend”: George S. Boutwell, The Lawyer, The Statesman, and the Soldier (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), 170.
448 “Does anybody want”: Frederick Douglass, “Horatio Seymour’s Letter of Acceptance,” 1.
449 “He could depend”: Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 1, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 83.
CHAPTER 20: DEEP WATER
450 “I have argued”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences, vol. 2, e
d. Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), 105.
450 “Our fossil is first amazed”: Eleanor Kirk, “Two Women of the Present: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,” The Phrenological Journal and Packard’s Monthly 50 (July 1870), 58.
451 “Men came to Oberlin”: Quoted in Nancy A. Hardesty, Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 31.
452 “I forged the thunderbolts”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815–1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: European Publishing, 1897), 165.
452 “No matter what is done”: Quoted in Anna Howard Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915), 232.
452 “Failure is impossible”: “Susan B. Anthony: An Appreciation and an Appeal,” The Westminster Review 165 (May 1906), 547.
453 “The right of woman”: Quoted in William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 268.
453 “If that word ‘male’ ”: See the important Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 61.
453 “The disfranchised all make”: Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences, vol. 2, 110.
454 This was the nation’s hour: See Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 28. See also Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009).
454 Everyone walks through the door: See Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), for a particularly illuminating analysis of the radical and liberal feminism created at this juncture.
Ecstatic Nation Page 73