118 “it was a violation of the Constitution”: Ibid.
119 what he called the “startling” idea: Message to Congress, July 17, 1862, CW, 5:328–331.
119 He would “not conserve slavery much longer”: John Hay to Mary Jay (daughter of John Jay), July 20, 1862, Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 23.
119 The draft ended with the clear promise: Lincoln later entitled this draft “Emancipation Proclamation as first sketched and shown to the Cabinet in July 1862,” CW, 5:336–337.
119 “I said to the Cabinet”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 21.
120 he also brought up the political risk: Ibid.
120 “organize and arm the slaves” themselves: John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, 5 vols. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), 1:351.
120 “I put the draft of the proclamation aside”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 22.
121 “to curb and restrain the impatience”: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890), 6:148–149.
121 “with public sentiment, nothing can fail”: From Lincoln’s reply at the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, CW, 3:27.
121 Lincoln launched into a frosty, patronizing lecture: For a modern reinterpretation of the meeting, the delegation, and their status, see Kate Masur, “The African American Delegation to Abraham Lincoln: A Reappraisal,” Civil War History 56 (June 2010): 117–144, esp. 131; CW, 5:372.
122 “sacrifice something of your present comfort”: Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Free African Americans, August 14, 1862, CW, 5:373.
122 Douglass had told an Independence Day audience: Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor, eds., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Library of Black America Series (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000); Frederick Douglass, “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” speech at Himrods Corner, New York, July 4, 1862, and “The President and His Speeches,” Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862.
123 Historian Eric Foner has aptly pointed out: Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 225–226.
123 “How much better would be a manly protest”: David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York: Long, Green, 1954), 112–113.
123 Differences in social status: Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the majority of any group has an intuitive tendency to assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status. See Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012).
124 “all attempts to put down the Rebellion”: Horace Greeley, “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” New York Tribune, August 20, 1862.
125 “My paramount object in this struggle”: Lincoln to Greeley, August 22, 1862, CW, 5:388.
125 “His mind was fixed”: Welles, Diary, 1:143. For a riveting account of the historic cabinet meeting, see John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (1963; reprint, Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995), 42–45.
126 “I cannot make it better known”: Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, CW, 5:534–535.
126 Records show that they suffered: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (Albany, NY: Albany Publishing, 1889), cited in the New York Times, April 3, 2012.
127 “It is true that the President”: Douglass speech at Rochester, New York, March 25, 1862, Foner and Taylor, Frederick Douglass, 491.
127 “Read the proclamation,” he urged: Ibid.; Douglass’ Monthly, October 1862.
128 Douglass replied with a detailed memorandum: Douglass to Lincoln, August 29, 1864, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.
128 “In giving freedom to the slave”: Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, CW, 5:537.
129 “a group of negro men, women and children”: William Lloyd Garrison to Lincoln, January 21, 1865, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.
129 “I’m not an abolitionist”: Lucy N. Coleman recollection quoted in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words of Lincoln (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 116.
129 “the spirited and admirable painting”: Lincoln to William Lloyd Garrison, February 7, 1865, CW, 8:265–266.
130 “O symbol of God’s will on earth”: Reprinted in Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 83.
132 “I account partially for his kindness to me”: Frederick Douglass in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: Century, 1888), 193.
132 “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground”: Speech at the dedication of the Freedom Memorial statue by Thomas Ball, Washington, DC, April 14, 1876, Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor, eds., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Library of Black America Series (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000), 621.
Notes to Chapter Seven
133 “he who moulds public sentiment”: From the first Lincoln-Douglas debate at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), hereafter cited as CW, 3:27.
134 “a struggle for maintaining in the world”: Special Message to Congress, July 4, 1861, CW, 4:438.
134 “War at the best, is terrible”: Remarks at the Great Central Sanitary Fair, Philadelphia, June 16, 1864, CW, 7:394.
135 he was an unrelenting warrior: Two important, and excellent, 2008 books shed considerable light on Lincoln’s military leadership. See James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2009); and Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U. S. Navy, and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
135 “advancement of the noblest of cause”: Lyceum address, CW, 1:114.
135 he operated largely by instinct and energy: For Clausewitz, see McPherson, Tried by War, 6. For Lincoln’s book borrowing, see Earl Schenk Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), 3:88.
136 officers who were “zealous & efficient”: Lincoln to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, August 7, 1861, CW, 4:475.
136 “a remarkable, superior mind”: On War, quoted in T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 7.
136 to “condole,” as once put it: Lincoln actually used the word condole to acknowledge the loss of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase’s sister in 1865. See Lincoln to Chase, January 2, 1865, CW, 8:195.
136 “We accepted this war for an object”: Remarks at the Great Central Sanitary Fair, Philadelphia, June 16, 1864, CW, 7:395.
136 “This government must be preserved”: Speech to the 148th Ohio Regiment, August 31, 1864, CW, 7:528; letter to the New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association, March 21, 1864, CW, 7:259.
137 “Four score and seven years ago”: Gettysburg Address, CW, 7:23.
140 abundant evidence that Lincoln well understood: Edward Everett copy of the Gettysburg Address, CW, 7:21; Bancroft copy, CW, 7:22; and revised Bancroft copy (now in the White House), CW, 7:23.
141 “The nation’s condition is not what either party”: Lincoln to Hodges, April 14, 1864, CW, 7:282.
142 “prophetic interpretation of American history”: Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 118.
142 “One-eighth of the whole population”: Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, CW, 8:332–333.
143 Lincoln ended his Second Inaugural Address: Ibid., 333.
144 “He answered all the objec
tions”: Ibid.; Douglass quoted in Rice, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 191.
145 “The world has never had a good definition”: Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, April 18, 1864, CW, 7:301–302.
145 they saw nothing incompatible in the founding vision: For the conflicting notions of liberty, North and South, during the secession crisis and beyond, see the excellent book by James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. Chapters 7–8.
146 “Are you not over-cautious”: Lincoln to General George B. McClellan, October 13, 1862, CW, 5:460.
146 “I have just read your dispatch”: Lincoln to McClellan, October 24 [25], 1862, CW, 5:474.
146 In a memorandum to his generals: Memorandum on furloughs, November 1862, CW, 5:484.
147 “I state my general idea of this war”: Lincoln to Brigadier General Don C. Buell, January 13, 1862, CW, 5:98.
147 “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond”: Lincoln to General Joseph Hooker, June 10, 1863, CW, 6:257.
147 “I do not believe you appreciate”: Lincoln to General George G. Meade, July 14, 1863, CW, 6:328.
148 “A self-taught strategist with no combat experience”: James McPherson, “Commander in Chief,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 2009, 38.
149 “[T]he judgments of the Lord”: CW, 8:333.
151 “all provisions and stock should be removed”: Ulysses S. Grant to Halleck, July 15, 1864, http://gathkinsons.net/sesqui/?p=6646.
152 “Give the enemy no rest”: Philip Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1888), 1:486.
152 “With great pleasure I tender to you”: Lincoln to Grant, October 22, 1864, CW, 8:73.
152 “God alone can claim it”: Lincoln to Hodges, April 14, 1864, CW, 7:282.
152 he could describe himself as God’s agent: Ibid.
154 “General Sheridan says ‘if the thing is pressed’”: Lincoln to Grant, April 7, 1865, CW, 392.
154 God was responsible for continuing the war: See Lucas Morel, Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), esp. Chapter 5, “The Political Limits of Reason and Religion: An Interpretation of the Second Inaugural Address.”
154 “Fondly do we hope”: Second Inaugural Address, CW, 8:333.
154 “Mine eyes have seen the glory”: The latest book on Julia Ward Howe’s song is John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis, The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Howe’s meeting with Lincoln is described on page 82.
155 “With malice toward none”: Second Inaugural Address, CW, 8:333.
156 The funeral train traveled: http://www.history.com/topics/president-lincolns-funeral-train.
156 For this moment in time: James L. Swanson, Bloody Crimes (New York: Harper and Collins, 2011), 293.
Notes to Chapter Eight
162 “The revolt of a State”: Washington National Republican, February 11, 1862.
162 “The action of the government”: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890), 6:47–48.
163 “henceforth faithfully protect and defend”: Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), hereafter cited as CW, 7:53–56.
164 “There were men in Congress”: Gideon Welles quoted in Edmund G. Ross, History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States (Project Gutenberg ebook, December 2000), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2442/2442-h/2442-h.htm, Chapter 1.
165 an extraordinarily resistant white South: For a more detailed discussion of the reconstruction period, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revelation, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, Oxford History of the United States Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
165 “Sir: I got your letter”: The letter appeared in the August 22, 1865, edition of the New York Daily Tribune. The newspaper suggests the letter was a collaboration between Jourdon and his friend Valentine Winters. Anderson asked his former master to send his wages to Valentine Winters, a barrister in Dayton, Ohio’s Third Ward.
169 Perhaps the clearest evidence: Walter Dean Burnham, Democracy in Peril: The American Turnout Problem and the Path to Plutocracy (Roosevelt Institute, Working Paper No. 5, December 1, 2010).
170 Literally within the span of a generation: US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1975), 2:728–731, 693–694, 667, 1:224.
170 A major source of labor: Ibid., 1:105–106.
171 Economic life also began to be organized: Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 143–144, 190–191.
171 Enormous amounts of money: Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, Norton Paperback Series (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 117.
171 when he described a society: CW, 5:52.
171 the size of the federal government also expanded: Historical Statistics of the United States, 2:1104.
172 the middle-class ideal gave way: Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day (Hartford: American Publishing, 1874).
172 “The right of each man”: Foner, Story of American Freedom, 120.
174 “By the end of the 1880s”: David Montgomery, “Labor in the Industrial Era,” Richard B. Morris, ed., A History of the American Worker (originally published as The U.S. Department of Labor History of the American Worker [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983]), 96; Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865–1920 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 19.
174 the new economic doctrine insisted: John G. Sproat, Best Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 166.
175 “tell us what to eat, drink, avoid”: Ibid., 210–211.
175 Darwin’s new theory of evolution: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York and London: Mentor, 1958).
175 “Social Darwinism” saw human economic life: Herbert Spencer coined the term in volume 1 of his Principles of Biology, published in 1864. See Spencer, The Principles of Biology (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 1:444. On Spencer’s influence in America, see Richard Hoftstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 31–50.
176 Any interference in the natural human competition: Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1908), 2:607–608.
176 some self-styled “reformers”: Foner, Story of American Freedom, 119–20.
177 laissez-faire came to reign: Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 3.
177 “neither party has any principles”: Louis Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House, 2004), 79.
178 “Though the people support the Government”: Sproat, Best Men, 166.
178 In 1895 the US Supreme Court ruled: Robert G. McCloskey, The American Supreme Court, 2nd ed., revised by Sanford Levinson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 84.
178 In Lochner v. New York: Ibid., 102–107; Richard A. Posner, ed., The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 306.
Notes to Chapter Nine
182 “The tremendous and highly complex”: Theodore Roosevelt, First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1901, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=940.
183 “the most formidable industrial deadlock”: Walter Wellman, “The Progress of the World,” American Monthly Review of Reviews (October 1902).
183 “three parties affected by the situation”: New York World, October 4, 1902.
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183 For Roosevelt and his supporters: For a detailed discussion of Roosevelt’s role, see Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 311–319.
183 Roosevelt set forth a new agenda: Theodore Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message,” December 3, 1901, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29542.
184 Roosevelt radically redefined the role: Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 47–53, 217–219.
186 “If our political institutions were perfect”: President Theodore Roosevelt speech’s at Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/06/archives-president-teddy-roosevelts-new-nationalism-speech.
188 They presented themselves as valiant underdogs: The story of prewar benevolence and postwar dignity under duress gained new momentum in 1936 with the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s book Gone with the Wind. The enormous success of the novel, which received the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, was due largely to reader sympathy for its Southern belle heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, in her on-again, off-again love affair with the handsome but imperfect blockade runner Rhett Butler. But there was no mistaking the underlying message of Southern grit, determination, and goodwill in the Civil War and reconstruction period—complete with the reinvigoration of the myth of the grateful and loyal slave. Mitchell’s story of the positive lifelong relationship between Scarlett O’Hara and her black nanny did more than anything else to support the myth of the benevolent attitude of upper-class Southern society toward the subservient black population.
When Gone with the Wind was made into the most successful movie of the twentieth century, the story of Southern grit and benevolence became widely accepted in the largely segregated North as well as the South. Arguably, Margaret Mitchell went a long way to help the South compete successfully in the “war of words” (and images) over the causes and consequences of the Civil War.
Even more important, a number of important historians took up the cudgels to describe the Civil War as an unnecessary war. Writing in 1942, David M. Potter, professor of history at Yale University, argued that Lincoln erred in wrecking the effort to forge a compromise solution to the major issues dividing the North and South in 1861. Perhaps the strongest academic criticism of Lincoln’s policies was offered by Avery Craven, professor of history at the University of Chicago and president of the Organization of American Historians. In his 1947 article entitled “The Civil War and the Democratic Process,” Craven argued that the war marked a breakdown of the democratic process of rational discussion of issues and compromise of differences. He argued that both Lincoln and the leaders of secession were responsible for believing that “the totality of right and justice was on their side” and consequently “faced each other with a willingness and determination to use violence for the achievement of their ends.” Craven and the new group of revisionist historians blamed Lincoln and his supporters for reducing the business of politics to “abstract” issues of “right and wrong” rather than “practical” tasks of finding compromise solutions. The revisionist historians provided new arguments in the continuing “war of words” over the causes of what they now described as the “War between the States.” See Norton Garfinkle, Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1958), 66–69, 77–79.
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