Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes
Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and John Yemma. Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon. Knopf, 2009.
Samuel Colt, 1814–1862, was the inventor and manufacturer of the six gun which was available for about half a cowboy’s monthly wage ($17) and, in effect, put all men on an equal footing in individual conflicts.
Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.
At the time, the prevailing federal policy was to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Lincoln was intent on keeping Kentucky and Maryland, both slave states, in the union, even at the cost of returning fugitive slaves. Shortly after, he came up with the policy of always returning fugitive slaves except in the rebellious states of the confederacy where the slaves were legally defined as ‘contraband’—war material, and thus could be seized by Union forces. Many fugitive slaves were thus employed by the Union for construction projects. Later, the Emancipation Proclamation set the slaves of the Confederacy free.
Lincoln, just before the Civil War, quoted Jefferson that if slavery were not ended in America the results would be disastrous. But Lincoln at the time probably did not imagine how right Jefferson was, and Jefferson himself probably 1 how terrible the Civil War would be.
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He rediscovered the earliest African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
