James Oakes > Quotes

“Societies that robbed humans of what they had rightfully earned by the sweat of their brows paid a steep price for this theft. They destroyed the individual’s incentive to work, undermined the general prosperity, and thereby doomed themselves to poverty and famine.”
― James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

“Slave autonomy and resistance altered the shape and course of slaveholding in America. For all the masters who took up the lash to suppress the bondsman’s “insolence,” there were others who were compelled to recognize the dignity of their slaves as workers. Still others came to a standoff. One traveler found the slaveholders so afraid of their bondsmen that they were prevented from inflicting punishment “lest the slave should abscond, or take a sulky fit and not work, or poison some of the family, or set fire to the dwelling, or have recourse to any other mode of avenging himself.”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“Benjamin Fitzpatrick was admitted to the practice of law in Alabama in 1821. Within five years, having participated in some law suits regarding conflicting property claims among slaveholders, he had built up a clientele sufficiently broad to allow him to begin acquiring slaves. In 1826 Fitzpatrick purchased three slaves for a thousand dollars; in 1827 he bought a fifteen-year-old boy for four hundred dollars. The following year he spent over five hundred dollars on a seventeen-year-old girl and her six-month-old son, $975 on a sixteen-year-old girl along with a twelve-year-old mulatto and a nine-year-old boy. Later in 1828, he added a boy named Peter and a woman named Betsey”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.”
― James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics

“That’s because the Constitution—the Constitution as Lincoln and the Republicans understood it—was an antislavery document. To be sure, the founders had made compromises with slavery in order to create the Union, but those proslavery clauses were exceptions in a Constitution whose general rule was freedom. This was antislavery constitutionalism, and it saturated the Republican Party platforms of 1856 as well as 1860. Both platforms asserted that the principles of fundamental human equality and universal liberty “promulgated” in the Declaration of Independence were literally “embodied in the Constitution.” Debates over the meaning of the Declaration were commonplace”
― James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

“A Florida planter defended his management practices by pointing to his slaves’ “natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120.” A Georgia overseer informed his employer that with good management his plantation could produce much more cotton. “The increase of your negroes,” he added, “(& they increase like rabbits) would soon carry the figures much higher.”43”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“A Florida planter defended his management practices by pointing to his slaves’ “natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120.” A Georgia overseer informed his employer that with good management his plantation could produce much more cotton.”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“For Lincoln state constitutions were the key to abolition.”
― James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

“proclaimed”
― James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

“So widespread was slaveholding among Native Americans that when the Civil War broke out, southern tribes almost universally supported the Confederacy. To be sure, they had no good reason to side with the government that had oppressed them for decades. But their reasoning went well beyond revenge: “Our geographical position, our social and domestic institutions, our feelings and sympathies, all attach us to our Southern friends,” the Chickasaw Nation declared. “As a Southern people we consider their cause our own.”22 Free black slaveholders”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“1856 a Virginia master offered “a reward of six cents for the apprehension of his boy ‘Sam,’ who absconded some time in the month of March.… He has a down look, and, on his back, wears the stripes of a recent whipping. One tooth is knocked out, and I believe he has a scar under the left”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“group whose remarkably swift adaptation to slaveholding put them quickly into the front ranks of wealthy and powerful slaveholders. Scottish settlement took two distinct forms: Highlanders re-established their agricultural economy in the New World and built upon their experience as herdsmen to make their way into the slaveholding class. By contrast, the commercial activity of the Lowland Scots contributed incalculably to the expansion of slavery across the southern frontier before the Revolution.”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“IN 1860 Abraham Lincoln ran for president on a Republican Party platform that proved Hale’s point by repeatedly invoking a Constitution that favored freedom over slavery. It proclaimed freedom to be the “normal condition of all the territory of the United States.” The Republicans did not directly call on Congress to pass a law banning slavery from the territories. What they actually said was that Congress had no authority “to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.” It wasn’t that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery, it was that Congress had no constitutional power to allow slavery into the territories.”
― James Oakes, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

“no master could be isolated from the dehumanizing effects of the rigorous discipline of the slave regime or from the disruptive intrusions of the market economy upon which that regime thrived. These central features of slavery, punishment and profit, destroyed for most slaveholders whatever remained of the elemental principle of the paternalist ethos: that masters were obliged to look to the needs of the slaves in return for the diligence and fidelity of the bondsmen.”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“In some of the most heavily populated slave states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia—between thirty-five and fifty percent of the white families held slaves in 1860.”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race

“The ownership of slaves became for many immigrants the single most important symbol of their success in the New World, although few of them ever participated in the economy of the large plantation. The small slaveholding culture of the colonial frontier had been largely responsible for the initial expansion of the antebellum South, and that culture persisted. The comments of travelers are confirmed by the census returns and tax records: these people only infrequently became large planters. Furthermore, their ethnicity survived until the last decades of the antebellum”
― James Oakes, The Ruling Race