Early America Quotes

“Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror.”
― William Edward Buckley

“The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new American theocracy in Boston and Salem, hung Quakers, and passed a law to hang any Catholic priests who might dare show up.”
― Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

“The Cambridge flowers had a moral meaning...but they had a poetical meaning that was even more apparent. So did the sounds one heard on summer evenings, the bells of the cows ambling home at twilight, the lullaby of the crickets in early autumn, the hymns of the frogs, in spring, in some neighbouring swamp, not to speak of the creaking of the winter wood-sleds, dragging their loads of walnut over the complaining snow. Every sound and odour had its value.”
― Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865

“Though [women] move in a different sphere of life, from the other sex; yet the duties they have to fulfill are not less important. In no instance are [their] duties more important than that of a Mother. In that character, they have perhaps the charge of a numerous family. And they ought to be capable, to teach the lisping infant to speak with propriety, and as the tender mind expands to fill it with virtuous principles---Early impressions are hard to be obliterated. And the man who is, from the very morning of existence, taught to think justly, to reverence virtue, and cultivate benevolence, will, in all human probability, be an ornament to human-nature. In this view, the fate of our Country, is in some degree dependant, on the education of its females.”
― Eliza Palmer Peabody