Status Updates From The War Before the War: Fug...

“Americans, let us remember the dealings of God to other nations, for which national sins have always been followed by national calamities.” The Civil War was a calamity — not only as measured by the scale of suffering it inflicted on black and white alike, but by the freedom it brought was belated, partial and sudden. So sudden that it consigned Black Americans to limbo.

The fugitive slave law was indeed an education. For those who thought slavery was not their problem were forced to think again…the better argument now belonged to those who retorted that so long as slavery exists and the Union continues, we are in fact abettors of that crime.”

“We went to bed one night old fashioned conservative compromised union whigs, and waked up stark mad abolitionists.”

“Impudence unparalleled even in this age of audacity”

How much truth and introspection, really, can we expect of a country that couldn’t bring itself to say the word slavery or slave in its founding document, despite multiple portions regulating and permitting it?

“To face this fact is to encounter one of the most demanding challenges in thinking about history: explaining how people in the past can fail to see what seems so clear to us in retrospect.”

“The questions they faced were not so different from the ones we face: What to do when law comes into conflict with justice? How to choose when the pursuit of one duty involves the violation of others? What are our obligations to human beings in flight from horrors that are, in part, of our own making?”