jacob graham’s Reviews > These Truths: A History of the United States > Status Update

1/2: "Political equality had been possible, in the South, only at the barrel of a gun. As soon as federal troops withdrew . . . the era of black men's enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end . . . All-white legislatures began passing . . . Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place . . ."

2/2: "In mourning [Lincoln] . . . Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment . . . millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped . . . and buried in unmarked graves . . . With Lincoln's death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb . . ."

1/2: "With the nation still draped in black, the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln's last legacy, went to the states . . . A great debate had been ended. A terrible war had been won. Slavery was over. But the unfinished work of a great nation remained undone: the struggle for equality had only just begun."

"By May of 1861, the Confederacy comprised . . . 12 million people, including 4 million slaves, and 4 million white women who were disenfranchised. It rested on the foundational belief that a minority governs a majority. 'The condition of slavery is with us nothing but a form of civil government for a class of people not fit to govern themselves,' said Jefferson Davis."

"History teems with mishaps and might-have-beens: . . . storms not far from port, narrowly contested elections, court cases lost and won, political visionaries drowned. But over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart."

"The religious revival that had brought women into moral reform also carried them into politics . . . [L]ong before women could vote, they brought into the parties a political style they'd perfected first as abolitionists and then as prohibitionists: the moral crusade, pious and uncompromising. No election has been the same since."

2/2: "The triumph of the sciences over the arts meant the defeat of the ancients by the moderns. The genius of Eli Whitney, hero of modernity, was said to rival that of Shakespeare; the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamboat 'a mightier epic' than 'The Iliad.'"

1/2: ". . . Another kind of faith was taking deeper root in the 1820s, an evangelical faith in technological progress, an unquestioning conviction that each new machine was making the world better . . . Writers celebrated inventors as 'Men of Progress' and 'Conquerors of Nature' and lauded their machines as far worthier than poetry."

2/2: ". . . Hemings, fifty-three years old, was appraised at fifty dollars, but she was not sold at auction; she had quietly left Monticello for Charlottesville . . . From Monticello, she brought with her a pair of Jefferson's eyeglasses to remember him by—a man of sight, and of blindness."

1/2: "In a will that Jefferson had made months before, he'd freed the last of his children with Sally Hemings . . . he did not mention Sally . . . He died on the Fourth [of July], while the bells in nearby Charlottesville tolled the anniversary of American independence . . . Six months later, to pay his debts, Jefferson's entire estate, including 130 slaves, was sold at an auction . . ."