Manisha Sinha > Quotes

“Southern nationalism found its first home in those states that had the greatest stakes in slavery.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The bureaucratic and institutional structures of the government allow not only for systemic administrative control, but also for colonized people to use it for their own ends.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“period between the so-called Mississippi Plan of 1875 and the overthrow of the last Reconstruction state governments in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina after the presidential elections of 1876, was the crucible moment.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Secession represented the overthrow rather than the fulfillment of Jacksonian democracy”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“For its part, the retreating Confederate army killed and enslaved free black men, women, and children, carrying its captives back south. It was literally an army of enslavement.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Grant’s reelection in 1872 should have signaled, as most African Americans and radicals hoped, that the federal government’s commitment to Reconstruction would remain in place, or at least would not collapse. Yet”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Slavery was more than a topical issue in the sectional conflict. It lay at the heart of southern nationalists’ understanding of their cause.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The desire to ground Reconstruction in the Constitution led to the passage of the most important amendment to the Constitution, to that point or since, and the single most significant act of the Thirty-Ninth Congress: the Fourteenth Amendment.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Slavery, they claimed, had an indispensable role to play in the “progress” of “civilization”; it was to be a bulwark against communism, free lovism, and all the heresies of modernity that challenged traditional social and political relations.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Ironically, secessionists laid as much stress on the fact that Lincoln had been a “rail splitter” as his Republican Party managers in the North, obviously with opposite effect.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“proslavery thinkers developed a systematic critique of the Declaration of Independence and natural rights theory.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“the transformation of the Republican Party from the party of antislavery to the party of big business.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“The age of democratic revolutions inaugurated by the American revolution made the existence of slavery and servile labor questionable for the first time in western history”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“ideological division between intersectional abolitionist feminism and feminism “pure and simple.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“It should come as no surprise that the defense of racial slavery gave rise to a profoundly reactionary worldview.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The war had formally ended on April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox courthouse”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“wartime reconstruction inaugurated a new and incipient conception of the federal government as the guardian of all its citizens’ welfare.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“The election campaign of 1832 was the bloodiest in the state’s history. Duels, which were usually personal affairs of honor, became the stuff of politics”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Even though Republican political culture was “integrated” in the South, factionalism within the party still provided conservatives with an opening.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“The Jim Crow South and genocidal warfare against Indians would inspire the Nazis in Germany, as well as the apartheid state of South Africa.14”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, using increasingly elitist arguments to oppose giving black and immigrant men the right to vote before women.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Born in the year Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868, and dying during the March on Washington in 1963, DuBois, more than any other black leader, personified the ongoing African American struggle for freedom and equality.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“However, I do insist that the political ideology of slavery be seen as developing in opposition to rather than as a variant of political liberalism.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Proslavery ideology in South Carolina reflected the deeply reactionary values of a slave society and departed fundamentally from both the revolutionary heritage and contemporary notions of democracy.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“The Lost Cause mythology of the South was not just nostalgic window dressing for sordid industrialization. It became its ideological handmaiden.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“The reconstruction of American democracy began not with the Civil War but even earlier, at the moment Lincoln, an antislavery Republican, was elected to the presidency”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“The “southern strategy” deployed by suffragists later on entailed an appeal to southern women at the cost of black people’s rights, who were largely excluded from suffrage conventions.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“majority of the men who held political office and led the movement for a separate southern nation were planters or substantial slaveholders,”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

“Another interpretative thread concerns capitalism and democracy, which were not born as conjoined twins in the United States or the rest of the world. To see them as such is to root one’s claims in ideology, not history.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

“Calhoun used and deviated from American political traditions. That is what made him an original thinker on the problem of slavery and democracy.”
― Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina