Adam Goodheart > Quotes

“By the age of twenty-five, [Louis T. Wigfall] had managed to squander his considerable inheritance, settle three affairs of honor on the dueling ground, fight in a ruthless military campaign against the Seminoles, consume a small lakeful of bourbon, win an enviable reputation in whorehouses throughout the South, and get hauled before a judge on charges of murder. Three years after that, he took the next logical step and went into Texas politics.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The Confederacy was never truly much of a cause - lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect; a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The North’s three greatest generals would all be Ohioans: Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.3 And of the next six men to be elected president of the United States—through 1900, that is—all but one would be Ohio-born Republicans who had fought for the Union.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“For my own part,” the president began, “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Boston would see many young men march through over the next five years: parades both ebullient and somber, strutting off toward glory or trudging homeward, shattered, from the fields of death. The Wide Awake rally of October 16, 1860—the last great parade of the peace—was an unwitting dress rehearsal for all that would follow.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery—and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had refused to concede any meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with black skin.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Democratic newspaper editors and stump speakers, far more than any Northern Republicans, began turning the election into a national referendum on slavery, race, and equality in the very broadest sense—often in the ugliest possible terms. A St. Louis newspaper charged flatly that the principle of “negro equality” lay behind the entire Republican ideology. A Texas paper referred to Lincoln as “the candidate of the niggers.”32 And almost every anti-Lincoln paper in the country consistently referred to the “Black Republicans,” just in case any inattentive voter might somehow miss the point.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Though California may officially have been free territory, its political leadership was still dominated by Southern sympathizers—voters called them the Chivalry faction, or the Chivs. No Northern state had more draconian laws restricting the lives and rights of its black inhabitants”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Numerous reports attest that by mid-1861 it had fallen to half or even a third of what it had been the year before. The “property” that slaveholders were fighting for was now not only less reliable (you never knew when it might run off in the night) but less valuable—perhaps, in a sense, less worth fighting for.121”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The intensity of racial invective in 1860 was shocking even by the standards of that time. Northern Democrats could be as offensive as their Southern counterparts. A Chicago Democratic paper warned its readers that if Lincoln’s party won in November, the entire country would soon be overrun by “naked, greasy, bandy-shanked, blubber-lipped, monkey-headed, muskrat-scented cannibals from Congo and Guinea,” who would live on terms of perfect equality with the proud descendants of “Washingtons [and] Lafayettes.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“(In St. Louis, a shop assistant and former army lieutenant named Ulysses Grant often coached the local Wide Awakes.) The sinister symbol of the new organization, painted on its banners and printed on its membership certificates, was a single all-seeing, unblinking eye.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The more new territory was opened to slave agriculture, the greater the fresh demand for slave labor, and the higher the value of those human investments would soar.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Behind his boss’s back, Hay had recently given Lincoln a nickname: “the Tycoon.” This word had entered American slang within just the past year or so, as part of the fad for all things Japanese. Taikun was the title of the chief shogun, and suggested—at least to the Western mind—not just a wise and powerful ruler but a figure of deep oriental inscrutability.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“In 1858, Lincoln himself noted in a speech that the region’s four million slaves were valued at no less than two billion dollars. (Most recent historians have put the figure even higher.)”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“New members signed enlistment papers as if in an army. The groups were organized into companies and battalions, with their own sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, each wearing appropriately fancier versions of the Wide Awake uniform. These officers, many of them veterans of the Mexican War, taught enlistees formal military drill using official army handbooks.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Yet within all the enveloping layers of myth and meme, a small stubborn truth remains: the inarguable fact of their persistence. Their presence in our world enlarges the boundaries of what it means to be human. Holding fast to a few square miles of their planet, they declare their independence. With eyes as shrewd as any explorer’s, the Sentinelese look at all that we have to offer them⁠—our planes, our plastics, our inflatable boats, and our waterproof Bibles⁠—and say: Thanks anyway. We’d rather not.”
― Adam Goodheart, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth

“The “black Confederates”—a misleading term, since the Confederacy never accepted Negro enlistments—have received a great deal of attention from present-day apologists for the Lost Cause. Far more widespread throughout the South in early 1861, though, were signs of white fear and black rebellion.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Lincoln returned again and again to the idea of “the people.” He was determined to prove that the Union was not fighting against the cause of freedom, as the Confederates maintained, but actively for it—and according to a very different understanding of the word. To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only alternative was authoritarianism. “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States,” he wrote.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only alternative was authoritarianism.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“By October, many estimates put the organization’s national membership at half a million men.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The party’s moderate leaders fanned out across New York and Pennsylvania, talking busily about tariffs, about railroads—about anything except slavery.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“In a long missive to the secretary of war, Simon Cameron, Butler also took the opportunity to argue that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were—in a legal sense—no longer things, but people.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fortress Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in northern Virginia, along the James, on the Mississippi, in Florida.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“In most Americans’ minds as of 1860, the ideal of union and the ideal of universal freedom stood in direct antithesis, irreconcilable at present or anytime in the foreseeable future.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“General Ruggles told headquarters that he had immediately dispatched mounted troops “to intercept and recover the slaves supposed to have escaped, but thus far without satisfactory results.”71 In other words, the Confederates were fighting Negroes on Virginia soil weeks before they fought even a single Yankee.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“By the end of the month, its ranks had swelled to more than two thousand. Somewhere along the way, they came up with a name for their group: the Wide Awakes.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The president left no record of his own thoughts on the news from Fortress Monroe. But he might have agreed with Frederick Douglass’s recent words, had he known of them: The control of events has been taken out of our hands … we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces—which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Keeping blacks out of white Northerners’ midst was a good reason for opposing slavery’s expansion.77 What did gain wide currency among Northerners—even many who detested blacks and abolitionists in equal measure—was the self-congratulatory conceit that the North was the land of liberty and the South the land of slavery.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Were these blacks people, or property? Free, or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable, for answering them would have raised a whole host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook, by allowing the escaped Negroes to be all of those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening