The idea that citizenship extends to everyone born on U.S. soil has precedents stretching back to the Founding.
Their move had come because the elite enslavers who controlled those southern states believed that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marked the end of their way of life.
Slavery by Another Name (1911), Who Wrecked the Trains? (1961), It Isn’t Easy to Get the Goods on Corporate Crime (1976), ‘Too Horrifying to Broadcast’ (1966), A Great and Good Man, but No Saint (1876)
How the cruelty of the Confederacy’s prison camps gave rise to the rules of war
Hell No We Won’t Go! (1966), A Titan of a President (1809), What Part of ‘War Crime’ Don’t You Understand? (1976), Bringing NYC to Its Knees (1946), Kidnappers Go to Hell! (1851), A Woman in Revolt (1986), ‘No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger’ (1966)
Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.
Maine's petition for statehood was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state” resulting in the infamous "Missouri Compromise."
What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery. The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on God-ordained economic inequality.
The party needs to take its cue from America’s most celebrated leaders, who had no fear of talking directly to the public about the Constitution.
From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.
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