Reconstruction Era Quotes

Reconstruction did not fail. It was overthrown.

As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists.

Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men.

I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

It was not a business with which the Federal Government had properly anything to do; but it was very properly taken up by the Freedman’s Bureau.

I did this whole series on the buffalo soldiers-on black soldiers-I did another series on black cowboys, and I presented myself to the gallery system, and all these people with these massive collections didn't know there were black cowboys or black soldiers. I ended up hitting a niche I didn't know was there.

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

The animosities inflamed by a four years' war, and its distressing incidents, cannot be easily overcome. But they extend beyond the limits of the army, to the people of the north. I have read in southern papers bitter complaints about the unfriendly spirit exhibited by the northern people — complaints not unfrequently flavored with an admixture of vigorous vituperation. But, as far as my experience goes, the "unfriendly spirit" exhibited in the north is all mildness and affection compared with the popular temper which in the south vents itself in a variety of ways and on all possible occasions. No observing northern man can come into contact with the different classes composing southern society without noticing it. He may be received in social circles with great politeness, even with apparent cordiality; but soon he will become aware that, although he may be esteemed as a man, he is detested as a "Yankee

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that Slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interest of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this that I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered all that I have suffered to have this object attained.

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.

As a schoolboy, I read most of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

Negrophobia tended to hold even sparse Reconstruction institutions ... at low throttle, and played a part in Reconstruction’s incompleteness

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

I'm Beginning To Wonder If It Would Have Been Best Had The South Won The Civil War.

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.

I must tell you something about the Ku Klux, they are raging on the other side of the River. They have whipped several white men, whipped and killed several Negroes. They whipped Colonel Huggins, the Superintendent of the free schools nearly to death, and everybody rejoiced when they heard it, for everybody hated him. He squandered the public money, buying pianofortes, organs, sofas, and furniture for the Negro School house in Aberdeen. The people are taxed beyond endurance. The Ku Klux gave him seventy lashes, and then gave him ten days to leave the country. he left and went to Jackson. There was a Regiment of Militia came into Aberdeen Friday. They are sent here to put down the Ku Klux. Huggins has come back with the Militia, but I wouldn't give a straw for his life, for he will be killed. It is the opinion of most everybody there will be war. the Yankees coming here will make the Negroes more insolent. With Country full of Yankees, things are going too far, for the free whites of the South are determined not to put up with it.

By a series of legislative acts, by executive proclamations, by military orders, and by the adoption of the amendment to the Constitution by the people of the United States, the gigantic system of human slavery that darkened the land, controlled the policy and swayed the destinies of the Republic, has forever perished.

To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).

So about 80 years after the Constitution is ratified, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it of course; just kinda on paper. And that of course was at the end of the Civil War. Now there is another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one: "Civil War." Do you think anybody in this country could ever really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me?" (shoots gun) "I'm awfully sorry. Awfully sorry."

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.

I am sworn to uphold the Constitution as Andy Johnson understands it and interprets it.