Every Democrat in Congress voted against the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which aimed to guarantee equal protection of the law and voting rights for freed slaves. The Lincoln-era Republican Party passed them anyhow.
John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships offers a comprehensive portrait of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the last slave ships to dock in New York Harbor.
A leading historian of 19th century US history reviews two recent books on Lincoln and John Brown, charting the background to the Civil War and its lingering heritage today.
Today Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including historians, consider the militant abolitionist John Brown mad. Yet, according to two authors of new books on Lincoln and Brown, their chosen paths eventually seemed to converge.
A self-funding national infrastructure bank modeled on the “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt would help solve not one but two of the country’s biggest problems.
The Enlightenment and other liberation ideologies had put slavery under fire. “This was the international context of insurgent liberalism that the Confederacy sought to reverse with its bid for a reactionary slaveholders’ republic..
Her originalism ignores the significance of the second American Revolution -- the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Amid national crises, Lincoln and his Republicans remade the Supreme Court to fit their agenda
There was slavery in Illinois for more than 100 years. Even after Illinois entered the Union, loopholes in its laws allowed the practice to continue, making the future Land of Lincoln a quasi-slave state.
Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after the Civil War, Eric Foner, the American historian, has also helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.
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