Stephen Berry > Quotes

“People who fail are rarely the subjects of biographies.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Quickly elected mayor (technically “intendant”), Rivers became one of the first Black mayors in the United States, and Hamburg became one of the country’s first Black-led towns, antedating the more famous examples of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Eatonville, Florida, by sixteen years.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“The young Bloods of the South,” he said, “as long as they have good horses, plenty of Forage, and an open country, they are happy. . . . They are splendid riders, shots, and utterly reckless. . . . They are the best Cavalry in the world.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Beaufort’s white men were equally obsessed with sport, another sure sign that they had too much time on their hands.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“As to actual discipline,” Higginson said after watching Rivers put the men through yet another drill, “it is doing no injustice to the line officers of the regiment to say that none of them receive from the men more implicit obedience than Color-Sergeant Rivers.”22”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“This, then, is the story of the Hamburg Massacre, a story set in motion by two idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying everything.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“All of a sudden,” Polite said, “we knew that that flag belonged to us and that for the first time we had a country of our own—and nothing could keep us from singing it out.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“For the second time in his life, Rivers had a petition denied. He could feel the window closing, time becoming inelastic. Now, he said, it will be a hundred years.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“The most important story we could tell is the story of The Black Prince himself. Prince Rivers may be the most consequential American about whom Americans know nothing.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Focusing on white generals rather than Black communities, historians have largely failed to appreciate the role of men like Rivers in establishing what became the United States Colored Troops.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“The bureaucratic whip hand of the slave regime had always been the Big Four—the coroner, the sheriff, the trial justice, and the head of the local militia.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“What Rivers had accomplished in Hamburg was precisely what the opposition press most hated and feared: a functioning interracial democracy deep in the heart of Dixie.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“The entire arc of Rivers’s life—from carriage driver to soldier to legislator to mayor to carriage driver again—encapsulates the window of opportunity that opened and closed on a remarkable generation of African Americans.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Some men genuinely enjoy being assholes.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“The Union army saved the Union. Men like Rivers made the Union “forever worthy of the saving.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Military men don’t trust butterflies. They trust plans.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“The answer is simple: Whatever one’s political acumen, there is one universal truth—no system can be idiot proofed when idiots are such geniuses.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“chronic hemorrhoids, an (understandably) understudied aspect of being a Confederate cavalryman.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“This accent would prove an occasional embarrassment to him in public life, just as, much later, it proved an embarrassment to another South Carolina native, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“no injustice to the line officers of the regiment to say that none of them received from the men more implicit obedience than Color-Sergeant Rivers.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Higginson had a massive amount of what we now call “emotional intelligence.” His gift wasn’t just his boldness but his empathy and his capacity for carrying empathetic arguments.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“Black leader. Rivers’s political experience had been forged as a color-bearer and provost sergeant for his regiment. His political vision, instincts, and abilities all ran in one direction: toward creating a well-oiled, well-disciplined Black community that included a minority of white allies.”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“What South Carolina was to the nation,” one historian has concluded, “Edgefield was to South Carolina.”17”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg

“the only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa . . . who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands”
― Stephen Berry, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg