33 Quotes About Reconstruction


  • Author W E B Du Bois
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    Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. Not that the Negroes could not and would not fight, for these same blacks, largely under their own officers, had beaten back Louisiana whites at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies.

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  • Author W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Quote

    IX. THE PRICE OF DISASTERThe price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.

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  • Author Douglas A. Blackmon
  • Quote

    Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.

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  • Author Eric Foner
  • Quote

    By this time, everyone understood that [President] Hayes would adopt a new Southern policy. "As matters look to me now," wrote the chariman of Kansas' Republican state committee on February 22 [1877], "I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves." (p.581)

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