Review for Examination 2
History 419: American Social and
Intellectual History
Examination Date: November 5, 2007
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
Quotes from Emerson’s Self-Reliance:
•…To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in
your private hears, is true for all men,--that is genius. p. 70
•A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which
flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our
own rejected thought: they come back to us with a certain alienated
majesty. p. 70
•Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. p. 71.
•Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every
one of its members. p. 71.
•Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. p. 71.
•I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls
me. p. 71.
•What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. p.
71.
•Do your thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall
reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man-bluff is
this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your
argument. p. 71.
•For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure. p. 71.
•A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do.
•To be great is to be misunderstood. p. 72.
•The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks….
See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the
average tendency. p. 72.
•The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is
profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God
spaketh, he should communicate not one thing, but all things; should
fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time,
souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new
create the whole. p. 73
• …in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles
disappear. p. 73
•Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He
dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.
p. 73.
•…man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the
present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless
of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee
the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives
with nature in the present, above time…. p. 73.
•Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the
instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a
past to a new state…. p. 73.
•He who has more soul than I, masters me, though he should
not raise his finger. p. 73.
•I like the silent church before the service begins, better than
any preaching. p. 74.
•…you isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is,
must be elevation. p. 74.
•It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all
the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in
their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in
their speculative views. p. 74.
•Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of
view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of
God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a
private end, is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in
nature and consciousness. p. 74.
•The soul is no traveler: the wise man stays at home…. p. 75.
•Insist on yourself; never imitate. p. 75.
•Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the
other. p. 75.
•The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. p.
75.
•Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not.
•And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. p. 75.
•Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace
but the triumph of principles. p. 75.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Young American (1844)
Main points:
· Commerce is the most significant political issue for Americans because its revolutionary
new developments combine us together as Americans.
1. “There is no American citizen who has not been stimulated to reflection by the facilities
now in progress of construction for travel and the transportation of goods in the United
States.”
2. The railroad creates American sentiment and connects people with resources. It also
unifies people together as a country.
· “America is the country of the future.”
1. … “It is a country of beginnings, or projects, or designs, and expectations. It has no past:
all has an onward and prospective look.”
2. … “For remote generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we
change in our own persons to receive was the utmost they would yield.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Young American (1844)
Main points:
· History of commerce provides a record of the development of
America and the tremendous benefits trade has brought.
1.
“It is a new agent in the world and one of great functions;
it is a very intellectual force.”
2. “Trade is an instrument in the hands of the friendly Power
which works for us in our own despite.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
Thoreau was a transcendentalist.
Transcendentalism: A literary and
philosophical movement, associated
with Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Margaret Fuller, asserting the
existence of an ideal spiritual reality
that transcends the empirical and
scientific and is knowable through
intuition.
Source: Excerpted from The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition
Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie
Speech Products N.V.
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
• Essayist, poet, and Transcendentalist
• Born to a pencil maker in Concord, Mass. July 12,
1817
• Went to Concord Academy and then to Harvard
• Loved the outdoors
• Best known for his book Walden
• Other jobs teacher and pencil maker
• Once went to chapel in a green coat “because the
rules required black”
• Refused to pay his poll tax
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
“He
[Thoreau] is a singular character — a young man
(1848)
with much wild original nature still remaining in him;
and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and
method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed,
queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat
rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding
very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of
an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him
much better than beauty.” ---Nathaniel Hawthorne,
distinguished American novelist
"He [Thoreau] had a great contempt for those
who made no effort to gauge accurately their
own powers and weaknesses, and by no
means spared himself, of whom he said that a
man gathers materials to erect a palace, and
finally concludes to build a shantee with
them." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher
and Thoreau’s friend and mentor
“Under a government which
imprisons any unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a
prison…. Cast your whole vote, not a
strip of paper merely, but your whole
influence.” --Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau dedicated his life to the exploration
of nature — not as a backdrop to human
activity but as a living, integrated system of
which you and I are simply a part. --Randall
Conrad, Director of the Thoreau Project
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 1: Thoreau prefers a
laissez-faire government, but he does
not call for abolishing government.
Rather he wants a better government.
• “That government is best which governs
least”
• “…I ask for, not at once no government,
but at once a better government.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 2: Most men serve the state
mechanically and do not freely exercise
moral judgment about their service.
“The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men
mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They
are the standing army, and the militia, jailers,
constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases
there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment
or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a
level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden
men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve
the purpose.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 3: It is man’s duty to
wash his hands of wrong.
“It is not man’s duty, as a matter of course, to
devote himself to the eradication of any…wrong;
he may still properly have other concerns to
engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer,
not to give it practically his support. If I devote
myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I
must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them
sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get
off him first, that he may pursue his
contemplations too.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 4: Order, Civil Government, and
the rule of the majority (i.e. democracy)
sometimes prevents people from doing the
right thing.
“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or
shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until
we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at
once? Men generally, under such a government as this,
think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded
the majority to alter them. They think that, if they
should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil.
But it is the fault of the government itself that the
remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why
is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform?
Why does it not cherish its wise minority?”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 5: Any man more right than his
neighbors constitutes a majority because he
has God on his side, and he should act
immediately to wash his hand of wrong.
If a government is maintaining unjust laws, people
should at once effectually withdraw their support,
both in person and property, from the government.
They should “not wait till they constitute a majority
of one, before they suffer the right to prevail
through them. I think that it is enough if they have
God on their side, without waiting for that other
one. Moreover, any man more right than his
neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 6: One honest man can change
the state by standing up to it.
“…if one thousand, if on hundred, if ten men whom
I could name,—if ten honest men only, —ay, if one
HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts,
ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw
from this copartnership, and be locked up in the
county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of
slavery in America. For it matters not how small
the beginning may seem to be: what is once well
done is done forever. But we love better to talk
about it: that we say is our mission.
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 7: A man can change an unjust
system by refusing to be unjust, and by
being entirely willing to make a sacrifice.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also a prison…. Cast
your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but
your whole influence.”
“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the
majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is
irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 8: Blood spilt is lamentable,
but wounding one’s conscience is worse.
Suppose blood should flow when standing
up to the government or the majority in
refusal to consent to unjust laws. “Is there
not a sort of blood shed when the
conscience is wounded? Through this
wound a man’s real manhood and
immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an
everlasting death.”
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1848)
MAIN POINT 9: The state should
respect the individual.
“The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy,
from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress
toward a true respect for the individual…. There will
never be a really free and enlightened State until the
State comes to recognize the individual as a higher
and independent power, from which all its own power
and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
I please myself with imaging a State at least which
can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the
individual with respect as a neighbor; which even
would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if
a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it,
nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of
neighbors and fellow-men.”
George Bancroft (1800-1891)
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Transcendentalism: A literary
and philosophical movement,
associated with Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Margaret Fuller,
asserting the existence of an
ideal spiritual reality that
transcends the empirical and
scientific and is knowable
through intuition.
George Bancroft
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Point 1: Americans and their political system have discovered how to bring to
bear the Divine mind, and thus we are destined for greatness.
…the condition of our race is one of growth or of decay. It is the glory
of man that he is conscious of this law of his existence. (We great
Americans choose growth.)
The progress of man consists in this, that he himself arrives at the
perception of truth. The Divine mind, which is its source, left it to be
discovered, appropriated and developed by finite creatures.
In this great work our country holds the noblest rank…. Our land
extends far into the wilderness, and beyond the wilderness; and while
on this side of the great mountains it gives the Western nations of
Europe a theatre for the renewal of their youth, on the transmontane
side, the hoary civilisation of the farthest antiquity leans forward
from Asia to receive the glad tidings of the messenger of freedom.
The islands of the Pacific entreat our protection, and at our suit the
Empire of Japan breaks down its wall of exclusion….
George Bancroft
The Progress of Mankind (1854)
Point 2: In order to progress, each individual must
contribute to the whole, and the whole of society is more
intelligent than the wisest individual.
In order to advance human progress, it is every
individual’s responsibility “to contribute some share to
the general intelligence. The many are wiser than the
few; the multitude than the philosopher; the race than
the individual; and each successive generation than its
predecessor….”
Point 3: “The human mind tends not only toward unity,
but UNIVERSALITY.”
The world is just beginning to take to heart this principle
of the unity of the race, and to discover how fully and
how beneficently it is fraught with international,
political, and social revolutions.
Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is
The Fourth Of July? (1852)
The motto of Frederick
Douglass’ newspaper, The
North Star: "Right is of no
Sex — Truth is of no Color
— God is the Father of us
all, and we are all
brethren."
Frederick Douglass, What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July? (1852)
• Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was probably born in 1818 on Holme Hill
Farm in Talbot County, Maryland, to Harriet Bailey, a slave. Frederick never
knew his father but suspected him to be his owner, Captain Aaron Anthony.
• At the age of 16, he was hired out to Mr. Covey, a "slave breaker", to destroy
his spirit and force him to accept slavery.
• Leader of the abolitionist movement
• Douglas escaped in 1838 at the age of 20.
• He married Anna Murray, a free black woman.
• Settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
• In 1841, gave his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
• He soon became known as a brilliant speaker
• Douglass wrote three autobiographical narratives:
–
–
–
First: “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” (1845) Published seven years after his escape.
Second: “My Bondage and My Freedom” (1855) Written after he had established himself as a newspaper
editor.
Third: “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (1881).
• Married his second wife Helen Pitts, a white woman because during this time
there were not many black women.
• Founder of the antislavery newspaper “North Star.”
• Served as advisor to President Lincoln during the Civil War.
• He died 1895
• His intended audience was American People
Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (1852)
Main Points:
1) The Fourth of July is important to the white American people, but a mockery
to the black people.
“I am not included within the pale of the glorious anniversary! Your high
independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The
blessings in which you this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich
inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by
your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that hath brought life
and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July
is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters
into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in
joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean,
citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel
to your conduct.”
A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, and unholy license; your national
greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless:
you denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty
and equality, hollow mockery; are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety, and hypocrisy
Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (1852)
Main Points
2) American Slavery is what comes to the minds of slaves on the
Fourth of July. It is not the freedom in America. Slaves had no
freedom.
“My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see
this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of
view. Standing there, identified with the American bondman, making
his soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked
blacker to me than on this Fourth of July. Whether we turn to the
declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the
conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America
is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself
the be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and
bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity
which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the
name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and
trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the
emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate
slavery--the great sin and shame of America!”
Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the
Fourth of July? (1852)
3) The slave is a man, which is acknowledged by the government in the
punishments given for their crimes.
“Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it.
The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government.
They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventytwo crimes in the state of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant
he be), subject him to the punishment of death...”
“What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being.
The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that southern statute books are
covered with enactments forbidding, under sever fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to
read or write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I
may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.
4) The wrongfulness of slavery is so strong that if any man be asked if it is
wrong, he would say yes.
“Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by
the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful
application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look today in the
presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural
right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so,
would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a
man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
5) The Fourth of July is hypocritical because it is a
celebration of freedom, yet there is still the evil of
slavery.
“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that
reveals to him, more than other days in the year, the gross injustice and
cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a
sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness,
swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your
denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your prayers and
hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade
and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and
hypocrisy- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation
of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more
shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this
very hour.
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Frederick Douglass
MAIN POINTS:
1. Slavery dehumanizes by destroying the family unit by undermining family values of both slaves and slave
owners.
The practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to
admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave
system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man
to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all
just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.
…My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!
Slavery has no use for fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or
families, and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation.
He [the master] can be father without being a husband, and may sell his child without incurring reproach,
if the child be by a woman in whose veins courses one thirty-second part of African blood.
…[T]he fact remains, in all its odiousness, that, by the laws of slavery, children, in all cases, are reduced to
the condition of their mothers. This arrangement admits of the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and
their profligate sons, brothers, relations and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional
attraction of profit.
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Frederick Douglass
2. Education of slaves was dangerous to slave owners because it empowered slaves
and could possibly lead to their freedom.
Mr. Auld promptly forbade continuance of her instruction; telling her, in the first
place, that the thing itself was unlawful; that it was also unsafe, and could only lead to
mischief. (Douglass’ masters’ response to his wife teaching Douglass to read the Bible)
…If you learn him now to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this
accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.
It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my
youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white man’s
power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. “Very well,” thought I;
“knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition; and
from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom…
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
1813- Harriet Ann Jacobs is born
1819- Harriet’s mother dies and she realizes she is a slave
1825- Harriet Jacobs mistress dies and she becomes the slave to Dr. Flint’s 3 year old daughter
1828- Dr. flint begins to harass Harriet and tries to sexually take advantage of her
1829- Harriet and Mr. Sands son is born and the baby and Harriet move in with her grandmother
1831- Harriet and Mr. Sands daughter is born
1835- Harriet escapes and goes into hiding in the attic of her grandmothers house
1842- Harriet Jacobs escapes to the North
1844- Harriet moves to Boston with her 2 children
1849- Harriet moves to Rochester, New York, while Dr. Flint’s daughter continues searching for her
1852- Harriet finds out her owner is in New York, so she flees to California to join her brother. She
becomes free when Cornelia Willis, her employer and friend, buys her freedom for $300
1853- Harriet’s grandmother dies; she begins to write about her experiences in anonymous letters
to a New York paper. Later she starts her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
1858- She finishes her book, and travels to England to try to sell her story
1861- Harriet’s book is published
1897- Harriet Jacobs dies on March 7, in Washington D.C.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Main Points:
1) A slave was property and no legal rights, and therefore a slave could not go against
their master’s will, even sexual affairs.
But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him---where
I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of
my nature. He told me I was his property; that I must subject to his will in all things.
My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection?
No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In
either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, for violence, or even
from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.
2) The people in the North would not ever believe what was taking place in the South,
and they would not put up with it.
Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are told you concerning the helpless
millions suffering in this cruel bondage, you at the north would not help to tighten
the yoke. You surely would refuse to do for the master, on your own soil, the mean
and cruel work which trained bloodhounds and the lowest class of whites do for him
at the south.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Main Points:
3) The mistress will end up hating the slave girl the most. If a slave is beautiful, jealousy
and hatred could make her a victim of her slave owner.
She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what
is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to
tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it
will prove her greatest curse. That whish commands admiration in the white woman
only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
4) Sex between master and slave represent unequal power relationship, which is often
exploited to the benefit of the master and the detriment of the slave.
My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing
by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a
breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by
my mothers grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature
had given me became heavy with sad forebodings........
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Main Points:
5) A slave had no recourse against violations, and was often in a situation of isolation and
loneliness.
I longed for some one to confide in…..But Mr. Flint swore he would kill me, if I was not
as silent as the grave. Then although my grandmother was all in all to me, I feared her
as well as loved her…..I was very young and felt shamefaced about telling her such
impure things, especially as I knew her to be very strict on such subjects.
6) The wives of the slave owners often also suffered from the unequal relations between
their slave-master husbands and his female slaves. Moreover, she often blamed the slave
for her husband’s infidelity.
I had entered my sixteenth year, and every day it became more apparent that my
presence was intolerable to Mrs. Flint. Angry words frequently passed between her and
her husband. He had never punished me himself, and he would not allow any body else
to punish me. In that respect, she was never satisfied; but, in her angry moods, no
terms were to vile for her to bestow upon me. Yet I, whom she detested so bitterly, had
far more pity for her than he had, whose duty it was to make her life happy. I never
wronged her; and one word of kindness from her would have brought me to her feet…
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Main Points:
7) Southern woman often looked at her husbands-slave children
as unwanted objects, who didn’t deserve any special treatment,
and might preferably be sold.
…..Southern woman often marry a man knowing that he is the
father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves
about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable
as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not
make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader’s
hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their
sight.
Alexander Stephens
Vice-president of the Confederacy
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
Main Point 1: The new Constitution is
similar to the old only better
•
“All the great principles of Magna Charta are
retained in it. No citizen is deprived of life, liberty or
property, but by the judgment of his peers, under the
laws of the land. The great principle of religious
liberty, which was the honor and pride of the old
Constitution, is still maintained and secured.”
•
“So, taking the whole new Constitution, I have not
hesitancy in giving it as my judgment, that it is
decidedly better than the old.”
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
• Main Point 2: With the Independence of the Confederate
States of America, the South will no longer suffer from the
oppressive tariffs of the United States’ federal government.
• “The old thorn of the tariff, which occasioned the cause
of so much irritation in the old body politic, is removed
forever from the new…”
• “The cost of the grading, the superstructure and
equipments of our roads was borne by those who entered
upon the enterprise…”
• “The true principle is to subject commerce of every
locality to whatever burdens may be necessary to
facilitate it.”
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
Main Point 3: Slavery is the cause of the split
of the Union
• “…African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro
in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late
rupture and present revolution. JEFFERSON anticipated this, as the
“rock upon which the old Union would split”…What was conjecture
with him, is now realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the
great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted.
The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading
statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that
the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature;
that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.”
• “Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the
assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. It was a sandy
foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the
“storm came and the wind blew, it fell.” (Matthew 7:27)
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
Main Point 4: Slavery is the “cornerstone” of the
Confederacy
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the
opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone
rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to
the white man; that slavery, subordination to the
superior race, is his natural and moral condition.
[Applause] This, our new Government, is the first, in
the history of the world, based upon this great physical,
philosophical, and moral truth.”
“It is upon this, as I have stated, our social fabric is
firmly planted.”
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
Anti-Lincoln Political Ad, 1964
Main Point #5: Northerners are fanatics.
“Those at the North who still cling to these errors with a zeal above
knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an
aberration of the mind; from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”
Main Point #6: Northerners are trying to make equal what the Creator has
made unequal.
• “They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to
equal privileges and rights, with the white man. If their premises were correct,
their conclusions would be logical and just; but their premises being wrong,
their whole argument fails. They were attempting to make things equal which
the Creator had made unequal.”
• “The truth of the Negro’s inferiority “has been slow in the process of its
development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
Main Point 7: The Confederate government is in conformity with God and Nature
• “It is the first Government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to
nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human
society. Many Governments have been founded upon the principles of certain
classes; but the classes thus enslaved, were of the same race, and in violation of the
laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. The negro
by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he
occupies in our system.”
• “It is, indeed, in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the
wisdom of His ordinances or to question them. For His own purposes He has made
one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another in
glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained, when conformed to his
laws and degrees, in the formation of Governments as well as in all things else.
Our Confederacy is founded, upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.
This stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the chief stone of
the corner” in our new edifice.” [Applause] (Matthew 21:42)
• “The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition
which he occupies in our system [(i.e. slavery)].”
Alexander Hamilton Stephens
Slavery and the Confederacy
Main Point 8: The people of the confederacy are
peaceful people, but do not try to coerce them.
• “Our object is Peace, not only with the North, but
with the world… The ideal of coercing us, or
subjugating us, is utterly preposterous.”
Main Point 9: If we stay true, we will succeed.
• “If…we are true to ourselves, true to our cause, true
to our destiny, true to our high mission, in
presenting to the world the highest type of
civilization ever exhibited by man—there will be
found in our Lexicon no such word as FAIL.”
Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer
Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer
Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate it
1. The South’s providential trust “is to conserve and to
perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing….”
2. White slave owners act as guardians of their black slaves.
Blacks are like helpless children who the slave owner
protects.
3. “Freedom would be their doom.”
4. Slaves “form parts of our households, even as our children….”
5. The world should FEAR abolition. The world is more
dependent on slavery for its wealth than ever, and if slavery
ends, the world economy will totter.
6. The South needs slavery to support its material interests.
Slavery is a matter of self-preservation for the South.
7. The South defends the cause of God and religion, since the
“Abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic….”
Rabbi Morris J. Raphall
Bible View of Slavery
POINT 1:
The Bible does not condemn slavery.
However, it does condemn coveting
another’s property, including
another’s slaves.
POINT 2:
Abolitionists, such as
Reverend Henry Ward
Beecher, are inventing new
sins when they claim that
slavery is evil. By doing this
they are insulting and
exasperating “thousands of
God-fearing, law-abiding
citizens” and have pushed
the country toward civil war.
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Peace, Be Still
POINT 1: “…The whole
nation is guilty
[regarding slavery]….”
POINT 2: “Our
civilization has not
begotten humanity and
respect for others’
rights, nor a spirit of
protection to the
weak….”
The Gettysburg Address
By:
Abraham Lincoln
Bibliography
•
•
•
•
•
•
1809 - Abraham Lincoln was born in a
log Cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky
1817- Abraham Lincoln and his family
moved by wagon across the Ohio River
into Indiana
1818- Nancy Lincoln, Abraham’s
mother, died from “milk sickness”
1828- At age 19, in New Orleans
Lincoln saw for the first time slaves
being sold in the marketplace.
1836- Lincoln became a lawyer. He
practiced law in Springfield, Il.
1842- He marries Mary Todd when
Lincoln was 33 years old
•
•
•
•
•
1858- Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas
in seven cities on the issue of slavery
1860- Lincoln decides to run for
president
1861- Lincoln took oath of office to
become president. The Civil War began
in April, 1861
1863- a ceremony was held to dedicate
a cemetery on the Gettysburg
battlefield. Lincoln made a famous
speech know as the “Gettysburg
Address”
1865- Lincoln was assassinated by John
Wilkes Booth while attending a play at
Ford’s theater
Main Points
Our founding fathers brought forth a new nation “conceived in
liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal”
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.
Main Points cont’d
• We cannot consecrate this field. The soldiers have already
done so.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot
consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men,
living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it,
far above our poor power to add or detract.”
Main Points
• The Union is worth fighting for
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say
here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us
the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced.
Questions
• Why couldn’t Lincoln
consecrate the
ground?
• What responsibility
does Lincoln give us
as the readers?
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner
Main Point #1:
America’s Western frontier, at all points during its colonization, placed many
hardships on the people who would settle in it. These obstacles and the settlers’
spirit to overcome them built the American identity.
• The westward expansion was founded largely by individuals who sought fortune
and freedom. Their search for personal satisfaction and the distances in which
this was done drove them to distrust an intrusive and stratified government,
thus reinforcing the concept of self-governance.
• It is the Western Frontier which shaped the American Dream- the idea of
unlimited opportunity and financial security.
“The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.
“…to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That
coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical,
inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material
things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous
energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that
buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom, these are traits of the frontier,
or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner
Main Point #2:
The Frontier transformed America from a land of British colonists to a country
encompassing dozens of nationalities- the proverbial “Melting Pot.”
Hordes of newly arrived immigrants, many escaping the financial and social
obscurity of Europe, ventured westwards where, if they overcame the environment,
financial success and equality were virtually guaranteed.
Every step westwards was a step away from an old and stagnated Europe. America
presented any brave and willing soul with the opportunities of an untouched land.
• “The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans furnished the dominant element in
the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed
indentured servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of
service passed to the frontier… In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants
were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither
nationality nor characteristic.”
• “[The Atlantic Coast] was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving
Westward, the frontier became more and more American. Thus the advance of
the frontier has meant a steady growth of independence on American lines.
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner
Main Point #3:
The uneven expansion of the West forced the transition from frontier
to settled area to repeat itself many times over. Each time this
process was repeated, democratic ideals and economic opportunities
found new strongholds.
“This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of opportunities, its
continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society,
furnishes the forces dominating American character.”
“The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American
political institutions were dependent on the advance of the
frontier…”
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner
Main Point #4:
The frontier and the individualism it fostered placed considerable gaps between
the American people and the federal government.
The mass exodus westwards placed long distances between the new territories
and the political hegemony of the Eastern United States. Settlers were less likely
to accept legislation from the federal government, and because the distances
involved were so great, Congress and the President lost control of the westward
expansion.
As each new community strove for self-sufficiency and governance, less attention
was paid to the political situation in Washington. This lack of critical oversight
encouraged incompetent leadership.
“Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental
affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest
evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civil spirit.”
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner
Main Point #5:
The continental frontier drove early American history. Now that
it’s gone, a new chapter in American history opens.
“The legislation which most developed the powers of the
national government, and played the largest part in its activity,
was conditioned on the frontier.”
“…four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a
hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has
gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American
history.”
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 1: DO NOT LIVE A LIFE OF IDELNESS; A STRENUOUS
LIFE IS MUCH MORE REWARDING AND NOBLE.
• I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous
life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of
success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who
does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these
wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
• We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies
victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a
friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual
life.
• A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life
which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
• The man must be glad to do a man's work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep
himself, and those dependent on him. The woman must be the housewife, the
helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.
POINT 2: ONLY THROUGH STRIFE AND STRENUOUS AND
DARING EFFORT WILL WE ACHIEVE NATIONAL GREATNESS.
• …it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall
ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 3: WEAKNESS IS THE GREATEST OF CRIMES. OUR
NATION HAS A RESPONSIBILTY TO BRING THE HALF-CAST
NATIONS OF THE WORLD GOOD GOVERNMENT. IF WE DO
THIS WE WILL BE GREAT, AND IF WE DO NOT WE WILL CEDE
THE OPPORTUNITY TO “BOLDER AND STRONGER PEOPLES.”
• We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within
our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in scrambling commercialism;
heedless of higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of
our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has
already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself into a career of unwarlike and
isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and
adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great
part in the world.
• The guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but they also left us a legacy
of duty. If we drove out a mediaeval tyranny only to make room for savage anarchy, we had better not
begun the task at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty to perform, and can leave to
their fates the islands we have conquered. Such a course would be a course of infamy. It would be
followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power
would have to step in and do the work, and we would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry
to successful completion the labors that great and high-spirited nations are eager to undertake.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
POINT 3 (CONTINUED): WEAKNESS IS THE GREATEST OF CRIMES.
OUR NATION HAS A RESPONSIBILTY TO BRING THE HALF-CAST
NATIONS OF THE WORLD GOOD GOVERNMENT. IF WE DO THIS WE
WILL BE GREAT, AND IF WE DO NOT WE WILL CEDE THE
OPPORTUNITY TO “BOLDER AND STRONGER PEOPLES.”
• The Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their population includes half-caste and
native Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit
for self-government and show no signs of becoming fit.
• Resistance [in the Philippines] must be stamped out. The first and all-important work to
be done is to establish the supremacy of our flag. We must put down armed resistance
before we can accomplish anything else, and there should be no parleying, no faltering, in
dealing with our foe. As for those in our own country who encourage the foe, we can afford
contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be remembered that their utterances are not
saved from being treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable.
• [We must send out there only good and able men.... [They] must show the utmost tact and
firmness, remembering that, we such people as those with whom we are to deal, weakness is
the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes lace of consideration for their
principles and prejudices.
The English philosopher
Herbert Spencer relied on
the theories of evolution to
explain differences
between the strong and the
weak: successful
individuals and races had
competed better in the
natural world and
consequently evolved to
higher states than did other
less fit peoples. On the
basis of this reasoning,
Spencer and others
justified the domination of
European imperialists over
subject peoples as the
inevitable result of natural
scientific principles. (B &
Z, p. 960.)
Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903)
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Points
• The State has one obligation and that is to
ensure the safety of the people
“also whether there is anything but a
fallacy and a superstition in the notion that
“the State” owes anything to anybody except
peace, order, and the guarantee of rights”
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Point #2
• It is God’s and Nature’s intent that everyone will have
hardships, and who are we to change this.
“But God and Nature have ordained the chances and
conditions of life on earth once and for all. The case cannot be
reopened. We cannot get a revision of the laws of human life.
We are absolutely shut up to the need and duty, if we would
learn how to live happily, of investigation the laws of Nature,
and deducing the rules of right living in the world as it is”
“Certain ills belong to the hardships of human life. They
are natural. They are part of the struggle with Nature for
existence”
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Point #3
• The gains of some imply the loss of others
“ We shall find that all the schemes for producing
equality and obliterating the organization of society
produce a new differentiation based on the worst
possible distinction…the right to claim and the duty
to give one man’s effort for another man’s
satisfaction! We shall find that every effort to realize
equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.”
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Point #4
• Our first duty is to take care of himself and mind your
own business
“ Every man and woman in society has one big
duty. That is, to take care of his or her own self.”
“..there is a danger that a man may leave his own
business unattended to; and second, there is a danger
if an impertinent interference with another’s affairs”
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Point #5
• Our society does well under a contract,
because contracts are rational.
“ Contract, however, is rational- even
rationalistic. It is also realistic, cold, and matter-offact. A contract relation is based on a sufficient
reason, not on custom or prescription. It is not
permanent. It endures only so long as the reason for
it endures.”
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Point # 6
The Forgotten Man is the person who suffers quietly, works
hard, and takes care of himself.
“He passes by and is never noticed, because he has behaved
himself, fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing……”
“He will be found to be worth, industrious, independent, and selfsupporting. He is not technically, “poor” or “weak” he minds his own
business, and makes no complaints. Consequently the philanthropists
never think of him, and trample on him….”
William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other
(1883)
Main Point #7
• “The pursuit of happiness” should not be confused
with the possession of happiness
“Rights do not pertain to results, but only to
chances. They pertain to the conditions of the
struggle for existence….It cannot be said that each
one has a right to have some property, because if one
man had such a right some other man or men would
be under a corresponding obligation to provide him
with some property.”
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Veblen was the son of Norwegian immigrants, and he grew up in rural
Minnesota.
He did not learn to speak English until he was a teenager.
He received a B.A. from Carleton College in 1880 and a Ph.D. in
philosophy from Yale in 1884. At Yale, he developed a friendship with his
sociology professor, William Graham Sumner, and wrote his doctoral
thesis on Immanuel Kant in the area of Moral Philosophy.
In 1882, he started to teach political economy at the University of
Chicago. He became known as a brilliant and eccentric thinker and an
unconventional teacher. At the University of Chicago he gained a
reputation as an insightful social critic, and it was during his years in
Chicago that he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class.
He taught political economy and later became editor of the Journal of
Political Thought.
He taught at Stanford from 1906-1909 and at the
University of Missouri from 1911-1918.
In 1919 he became a founding member of the New
School for Social Research in New York.
He died in 1929 of heart disease.
Main Point 1: The leisure class is
conservative, finding no reason to support
changes, because they enjoy the status quo
and are little affected by economic pressures.
The exigencies of the struggle for means of life are less
exacting for [the leisure] class than for any other; and as a
consequence of this privilege position we should expect to
find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society
to the demands which the situation makes for a further
growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered
industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative
class.
…exigencies do not readily produce in the members of this
class, that degree of uneasiness with the existing order
which alone can lead any body of men to give up views and
methods of life that have become habitual to them. The
office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard
the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent….
Main Point 2: Conservatism
is decorous and respectable.
Innovation is vulgar.
•This conservatism of the wealthy class is so obvious a feature that it has even
come to be recognized as a mark of respectability. Since conservatism is a
characteristic of the wealthier and therefore more reputable portion of the
community, it has acquired a certain honorific or decorative value. It has
become prescriptive to such an extent that an adherence to conservative views
is comprised as a matter of course in our notions of respectability; and it is
imperatively incumbent on all who would lead a blameless life in point of social
repute. Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and
conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar.
•…progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no
less effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by
cutting off the occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose
energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are
conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day
after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they
have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.
•From this proposition it follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to
make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it
may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and
consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable
of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought.
Main Points 3: The example of the leisure class fosters conspicuous
consumption, which diverts resources away from sustenance of the lower
classes.
•The prevalence of conspicuous consumption as one of the main elements in the
standard of decency among all classes is of course not traceable wholly to the example
of the wealthy leisure class, but the practice and the insistence on it are no doubt
strengthened by the example of the leisure class. The requirements of decency in this
matter are very considerable and very imperative; so that even among classes whose
pecuniary position is sufficiently strong to admit a consumption of goods considerably in
excess of the subsistence minimum, the disposable surplus left over after the more
imperative physical needs are satisfied is not infrequently diverted to the purpose of a
conspicuous decency, rather than to added physical comfort and fullness of life.
Moreover, such surplus energy as is available is also likely to be expended in the
acquisition of goods for conspicuous consumption or conspicuous boarding. The result is
that the requirements of pecuniary reputability tend (1) to leave but a scanty
subsistence minimum available for other than conspicuous consumption, and (2) to
absorb any surplus energy which may be available after the bare physical necessities of
life have been provided for.
What is a living wage?
Why is there starvation?
Main Point 4: Since the leisure class discourages
change, it hinders evolutionary progress.
…the leisure class, in the nature of things, consistently acts to
retard that adjustment to the environment which is called social
advance or development. The characteristic attitude of the class
may be summed up in the maxim: "Whatever is, is right" whereas
the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions,
gives the axiom: "Whatever is, is wrong." Not that the institutions
of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the life of today, but
they are, always and in the nature of things, wrong to some
extent. They are the result of a more or less inadequate
adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which prevailed
at some point in the past development.
The institution of a leisure class, by force or class interest and
instinct, and by precept and prescriptive example, makes for the
perpetuation of the existing maladjustment of institutions, and
even favors a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of
life; a scheme which would be still farther out of adjustment with
the exigencies of life under the existing situation even than the
accredited, obsolescent scheme that has come down from the
immediate past.
Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
1. All women are created equal.
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal…”
2. Women, too, are given certain unalienable rights by God.
“…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
3. When under oppression, women have the right to refuse allegiance to their government and lobby for a
better one that grants equality.
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who
suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its
foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their safety and happiness.”
4. Men have repeatedly harmed and dominated women.
“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward
woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let
facts be submitted to a candid world.”
5. Because women are equal, but because they have been oppressed, they should be immediately admitted
as full American citizens.
“…because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most
sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which
belong to them as citizens of these United States.”
Horatio Storer, The Origins of the Insanity in Women (1865)
1. Mental disease in women results from a disturbance in their
reproductive system.
“That in women mental disease is often, perhaps generally,
dependent upon the functional or organic disturbance of the
reproductive system.”
2. These mental disorders coincide with women’s menstrual cycles.
“That in women…mental disease is usually coincident with the
catamenial [menstrual] establishment.”
3. Therefore, focusing only on the disorder is like only treating the
symptoms. The disease – the dysfunctional reproductive system –
must be cured to ensure a healthy patient.
4. “…it is just as unscientific here, and generally as futile, to treat primarily
the mental disturbance, which is usually a symptom only or a
consequence…”
Fourteenth Amendment
to The U.S. Constitution:
“No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of
citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person
of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law; nor deny to
any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.”
Myra Colby Bradwell
•
Born in 1831 in Manchester, Vermont.
James
Bradwell
• In 1852 Myra married James B. Bradwell, an Englishman who had immigrated to
the United States and studied law in Memphis Tennessee.
• In 1854, the Bradwells moved to Chicago, where James opened a law office and
eventually became a judge of the Cook County Court.
• Myra began to study law to help her husband as his assistant. She later decided
to open a practice of her own.
• In 1868 Myra founded a weekly legal newspaper called the Chicago Legal News.
With Bradwell servicing as both editor and business manager, the Chicago Legal
News quickly became a success.
• In 1869, after passing the state bar examination, Bradwell applied to the Illinois
Supreme Court for admission to the bar. The court rejected her application on the
grounds that as a married woman she “would be bound neither by her express
contracts nor by those implied contracts which it is the policy of the law to create
between attorney and client.” She reapplied, but the court rejected her again, this
time because she was a woman, regardless of her marital status. The Court ruled,
"God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged
to men to make, apply and execute laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic
truth."
• She appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1873 upheld the Illinois
decision, saying that it could not interfere with each state’s right to regulate the
granting of licenses within its borders.
Myra Colby
Bradwell
Bradwell v. The State of Illinois
(1873), U.S. Supreme Court
Main Point 1
(Majority Decision written by
Justice Miller):
Citizenship does not give one
the right, under the
fourteenth amendment, to
practice law in the courts of
a state.
“We agree with [counsel] that there
are privileges and immunities
belonging to citizens of the United
States, in that relation and
character, and that it is these and
these alone which a State is
forbidden to abridge. But the right to
admission to practice in the courts
of a State is not one of them. This
right in no sense depends on
citizenship of the United States.” p.
84.
Justice Samuel Freeman Miller
Myra Bradwell
Main Point 2 (Concurring Opinion by Justice Bradley): Men and women are
very different. Women are naturally timid and delicate and there are many
occupations for which they are unfit. Man is woman’s protector and
defender.
…[T]he civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide
difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man
is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper
timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for
many of the occupations of civil life. p. 85.
Main Point 3 (Concurring Opinion by Justice
Bradley): Women belong to the domestic sphere,
and should not adopt a career distinct and
independent from that of her husband.
The constitution of the family organization, which
is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in
the nature of things, indicates the domestic
sphere as that which properly belongs to the
domain and functions of womanhood. The
harmony, not to say identity, of interests and
views which belong, or should belong, to the
family institution is repugnant to the idea of a
woman adopting a distinct and independent
career from that of her husband. p. 85.
Justice
Bradley
Main Point 4 (Concurring Opinion by Justice
Bradley): God has given women the role of
wives and mothers. This is a natural law to
which we must adapt, and not be persuaded
by exceptional cases.
The paramount destiny and mission of
woman are to fulfill the noble and benign
offices of wife and mother. This is the law of
the Creator. And the rules of civil
society must be adapted to the general
constitution of things, and cannot be based
upon exceptional cases. p. 85.
Historical Significance
•
In the 1875 case Minor V. Happersett, the Court ruled against women
suffrage in Missouri on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment does not
add to the privileges and immunities of a citizen, and that historically
“citizen” and “eligible voter” have not been synonymous.
•
About a hundred years later, the Court began employing the Fourteenth
Amendment as a way of overturning gender-discriminatory state laws. In
doing so, however, it would typically use the "equal protection" clause,
rather than the clause cited in Bradwell, "privileges and immunities."
•
In 1882, the Illinois legislature passed a law guaranteeing all persons,
regardless of sex, the right to select a profession as they wished. Although
Bradwell never reapplied for admission to the bar, the Illinois Supreme
Court informed her that her original application had been accepted. As a
result, she became the first woman member of the Illinois State Bar
Association; she was also the first woman member of the Illinois Press
Association. On March 28, 1892, she was admitted to practice before the
U.S. Supreme Court.
•
In addition to her efforts to win admission to the bar, Bradwell played a role
in the broader women's rights movement. She was active in the Illinois
Woman Suffrage Association and helped form the American Woman
Suffrage Association. She was also influential in the passage of laws by the
Illinois legislature that gave married women the right to keep wages they
earned and protected the rights of widows.
•
Bradwell died February 14, 1894, in Chicago, Illinois.
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920)
Main points:
1. Birth control will lay the foundation for improving civilization and
decreasing the ills of society.
“While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and
providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was
also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and
institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks
of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and
inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this
tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have
done it more effectively.”
“Within her is wrapped up the future of the race- it is hers to make
or mar.”
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920)
Main points:
2. The use of contraceptives will lessen the economic and social hardships that many people
encounter due to overcrowding, and will revolutionize the world.
“It is she who has the long burden of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted
children. It is she who must watch beside the beds of pain where lie the babies who
suffer because they have come into overcrowded homes. It is her heart that the sight of
the deformed, the subnormal, the undernourished, the overworked child smites first and
oftenest and hardest.”
“War, famine, poverty, and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes
life cheap.”
“Diplomats may formulate leagues of nations and nations may pledge their utmost
strength to maintain them, statesmen may dream of reconstructing the world out of
alliances, hegemonies and spheres of influence, but woman, continuing to produce
explosive populations, will convert these pledges into the proverbial scrapes of paper; or
she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent
function, and remake the world. When the world is this remade, it will exceed the dream
of statesman, reformer and revolutionist.”
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920)
Main points:
3. Birth control is a woman’s problem and she must be able to educate herself about
the various methods that are best suited for her needs. Education will allow her to
have the freedom to determine her future.
“In an ideal society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the
man as well as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which we encounter today is that man has not only refused any such responsibility, but has individually
and collectively sought to prevent woman from obtaining knowledge by which
she could assume this responsibility for herself.”
“Woman must have her freedom- the fundamental freedom of choosing whether
or not she shall be a mother- and how many children she will have.”
Question:
According to Sanger, why is birth control a woman’s problem?
IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
Thousands gathered in Paris, Texas, for the 1893 lynching of Henry
Smith.
IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
MAIN POINTS
• For more than thirty years Negroes were killed without
due process.
–
“During these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in
cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.”
• Race Riots
• Unjust Suffrage
• Violators of white women
• The government did nothing to stop brutal lynchings of
Negroes.
–
“The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable
to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection
which should have maintained that right.”
IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
Main Points Continued
• After Negroes were given emancipation,
White women from the north began teaching
the negroes despite allegations by southern
white women that these negroes were violent.
–
“ Before the world adjudges the Negro a moral monster, a vicious assailant of
womanhood and a menace to the sacred precincts of home, the colored people ask
the consideration of the silent record of gratitude, respect, protection, and devotion
of the millions of the race in the South, to the thousands of northern white women
who have served as teachers and missionaries since the war…”
IDA B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
Main Points Continued
• The Negroes were helpless in the fight
against the white men.
–
“The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud,
violence, intimidation, and murder. The franchise vouchsafed to
the Negro grew to be a “barren ideality,” and regardless of
numbers, the colored people found themselves voiceless in the
councils of those whose duty it was to rule.”
Booker T. Washington
Main Point: We should concentrate on
work and progress. Blacks and whites
need stop fighting, agitating and
relocating. The South will progress if
we work together. We only hurt
ourselves by fighting.
THE MESSAGE FOR BLACKS: Work hard, and do not agitate for equality. Start
at the bottom and work your way up.
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic
service, and in the professions. …when it comes to business…, it is
in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the
commercial world…. Our greatest danger is that in the great leap
from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of
us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in
mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and
glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common
occupations of life…. No race can prosper till it learns that there is
as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the
bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.
The wisest among my race understand
that the agitation of questions of social
equality is the extremist folly, and that
progress in the enjoyment of all the
privileges that will come to us must be
the result of severe and constant
struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
However, working together does not
necessary include socializing together.
THE MESSAGE FOR WHITES: We are a loyal and humble people who serve you
well if you treat us well. It is in your interest to encourage and help black
people.
Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you
know, whose fidelity and love you have tested….. Cast down your
bucket among these people who have without strikes and labor wars
tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and
cities, brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, just to
make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the
South. Casting down bucket among my people, helping and
encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to
education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy
your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and
run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as
in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most
patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world
has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing
your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers,
and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in
the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion
that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives,….
[We will interlace ] our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life
with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.
THE MESSAGE FOR WHITES: If white people insist on keeping the Negro down,
they will only be hurting themselves.
Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward,
or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute
one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or onethird its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the
business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a
veritable body, of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort
to advance the body politic.
Stamp commemorating Booker T. Washington
Issue Date: April 7, 1940
SIGNIFICANT FINE POINT FOR BOTH RACES: We do not have to
socialize together, but we should work together for the common cause
of development.
In all things that are purely social we call be as separate as the
fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
William Edward Burghardt
DuBois
(1868 - 1963)
•
Born: 23 February 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
• Died: 27 August 1963
•
While in high school Du Bois showed a keen concern for the development of his
race.
•
At age fifteen he became the local correspondent for the New York Globe.
•
Attended Fisk College in Tennessee & received his bachelor's degree & later
completed a doctorate from Harvard.
•
Du Bois chose to study at the University of Berlin in Germany will there, he began
to see the racial problems.
•
After the completion of the study, Du Bois accepted a position at Atlanta University
to further his teachings in sociology.
Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. Between 1890 and 1906
•
Controversy grew between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, which later grew
into a bitter personal battle.
•
Du Bois was not opposed to Washington's power, but rather, he was against his
ideology/methodology of handling the power.
•
Washington argued the Black people should temporarily forego "political power,
insistence on civil rights, and higher education of Negro youth. They should
concentrate all their energies on industrial education." Du Bois believed in the
higher education of a "Talented Tenth" who through their knowledge of modern
culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization.
Among the greatest scholars in American history stands Dr.
W.E.B. Du Bois. A towering figure, a brilliant scholar and a
prolific writer.
•
In 1909 merged with some white liberals and thus the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was born.
•
World War I had dramatic affects on the lives of Black folks. Firstly, the Armed
Forces refused Black inductees, but finally relinquished and put the "colored folks"
in subservient roles. Secondly, while the war was raging, Blacks in the southern
states were moving North where industry was desperately looking for workers.
Ignorant, frightened whites, led by capitalist instigators, were fearful that Blacks
would totally consume the job market. Thus, lynching ran rampant. Finally, after the
war, Black veterans returned home to the same racist country they had fought so
heroically to defend.
Striving of the Negro People
The August 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly introduced Du Bois to a
national audience when it published his article "The Striving of the Negro
People. In his article, Du Bois argued that, given the opportunity to
cultivate and educate themselves, American blacks would demonstrate that
they have their own distinctive and worthy contributions to make to
American life and culture.
Main Points
•
For Dubois, this double-consciousness both gives blacks a "second
sight" and hinders their progress toward a simple access to identity.
Blacks can never see themselves directly, but only through the eyes of
contemptuous white men who are watching for them to fail or to behave
foolishly.
•
Americans, including white Americans, should appreciate the Negro
race for its contribution.
• A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world,
but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social
problems.
• The training of the schools we need to-day
more than ever,-the training of deft (skillful) hands, quick eyes, and ears,
and the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds. Negros should have
access to all levels of education including the highest.
• Negros shouldn’t be left at the bottom to climb their way up.
•
Freedom of life and limb, freedom to work and think. All of these we need, not
singly, but together…
•
The idea of fostering the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in
conformity with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order that some
day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics
which both so sadly lack.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Niagara Movement, (1905)
1. We should meet, despite the existence of other
organizations for Negroes.
2. We must complain about common wrongs toward
blacks.
We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint,
ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of
dishonesty and wrong—this is the ancient,
unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it.
(p. 100)
3. In not a single instance has the justice of our
demands been denied, but then come the
excuses.