Abigail Modaff responds to Chapter 4—Contests of Intellectual Authority (1850-1890) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
The Impatient Pacifist
Sitting in a guest room in Lake Placid, New York, after a lovely sunset drive through the countryside, the activist Jane Addams admitted something in a letter to her partner: she admired John Brown. “My blood flows warm,” she confided, “when we see John Brown’s farm and the flag floating over his grave.” It was 1904, nearly a half-century after Brown’s infamous raid at Harper’s Ferry, and Addams had plenty of contemporary concerns on her mind. The nation had transformed since the Civil War, with telephones connecting millions of homes, cities boasting skyscrapers, and new languages filling the ports and the streets. Freed from the vexed question of legalized slavery, the nation expanded across the continent and beyond, and the advanced industrial revolution kept Addams and fellow anti-poverty activists busy. Nonetheless, the world of the 1850s still hung over Addams’s thoughts. “I always had a secret sympathy,” she wrote, thinking of Brown, “with his impatience and his determination that something should happen about it.” Soon, Addams predicted, there would be similar “martyrs for economic slavery,” shattering the yokes of factories and sweatshops. She herself, she admitted, “might be the one.”[1]
A person ruminating on the legacy of a past leader would not be all that remarkable—except that Addams was a famous pacifist. In 1904, she was even writing a book attacking militarism in all its forms. Newspapers, acquaintances, and, later, historians presented her as saintly, a compassionate woman always seeking to create common ground. Addams’s surprising appreciation for Brown’s style of politics demands a reassessment not only of her reputation, but of the intellectual world in which she lived. Brown’s “impatience,” and its ability to inspire fifty years later, reveals a key intellectual legacy of the Civil War: the politics of moral urgency.
This is not the story we are used to hearing about the Civil War. Historians often reflect on how the war and its deadliness blanketed the nation in grief and frayed the moral fibers of the most privileged, provoking the racist abandonment of the freedpeople and even leading to the loss of faith in belief itself.[2] But Addams’s comments, casual as they are, reveal that the calamity of war—and its controversial buildup—also had a different impact. Especially for those with less power to cling to in the last half of the nineteenth century, the war represented a thrilling and necessary break in the norm, an infusion of justice and right into the ugly business of politics as usual. War itself presented not only tragedy, but also opportunity. It raised the possibility that an unyielding commitment to justice could slice the Gordian knots of conflict.
The belief that moral righteousness could and should transcend politics emerged before the war, largely through abolitionist activism, then spread to disparate realms of politics after the war’s conclusion. Abolitionism was immensely controversial, to put it mildly. Those who insisted on its moral immediacy were often viewed with suspicion even within antislavery circles. Yet despite their minority status, the moral urgency that abolitionists cultivated forged a new language of American politics, especially as the cataclysm of war rose to underscore the emergency of the moment. From John Brown to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass, Americans before and during the Civil War presented the antislavery cause as a divine certainty, a raw and irrefutable evil that overshadowed petty human concerns. And well after the war ended, people both feared and hoped that the anti-political politics of moral righteousness would emerge once again.
Chapter Four of The Ideas that Made America focuses on conflict as well, but it foregrounds the great epistemological and social conflicts that surrounded the production of knowledge from 1850 to 1890. Where does truth come from, and who has access to it? The chapter’s argument is convincing and important, and it does take the war seriously as a pivotal event in intellectual history. Yet the chapter’s title itself, “Contests of Intellectual Authority,” demonstrates that the war is not its central focus. The phrase is too anodyne to characterize the Civil War and everything it stood for: the bodily fact of enslavement and resistance, and the bloody years of war and grief. In tackling this time period, Ratner-Rosenhagen has to craft a theme that captures at once the challenge of Darwinism, the creation of the modern research university, Victorian culture and its critics, and the emancipation of enslaved people in a single short chapter. Indeed, the last item was the event that W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as “the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history.”[3] If the resulting chapter inevitably smooths over some of the war’s edges, it does so in order to illuminate a crucial truth: a late nineteenth century wracked by “contests of moral authority and the range of human responses to human problems.”
The Drumbeat
Inspired by the true story Ratner-Rosenhagen tells, this essay illuminates a parallel truth about the era. This parallel truth emerges when we begin directly from the war’s messiness and its stakes. The Civil War was a total rupture not just in knowledge, but in the range of political possibility; and it was fought over an evil so great that it made martyrdom necessary and politics as usual ridiculous. The years surrounding the Civil War were a battle over the role of transcendent truth in everyday politics. Especially after the war ended, Americans were left not only with the practical question of what Reconstruction would look like but the meta-political questions that emerged from a nation torn in pieces. Given that slavery had been outlawed by a devastating yet necessary war—as most Unionists agreed, enthusiastically or reluctantly, by 1865—was further political division a threat to be feared, or a hope to be followed? Did “bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds” demand finding fragile common ground between powerful white leaders?[4] Or was divisiveness, instead, the mark of courageous thinking, inspired by the necessary courage of emancipation? From socialism to the Comstock Act to the Ghost Dance, the period after the Civil War was rocked by the idea—hoped for by some, feared by others—that politics could rupture again.
The drumbeat of moral urgency began well before the formal hostilities did. In the years preceding the Civil War, no one communicated the emergency of the moment more clearly than enslaved Americans who risked everything to seek freedom. The constant fact of escapes and attempts, plus the powerful testimony from those who lived them, created some of the greatest pressure for emancipation.[5] Narratives written by people who successfully escaped revealed the deadening confinement of slavery and the burning necessity of abolition, rounding out the powerful yet broad idea of “freedom” with concrete content. Formerly enslaved author Harriet Jacobs captured this binary when she wrote about resolving to run away with a man she loved, recalling that at that time “nothing seemed more dreadful than my present life.”[6] For some, the need to escape from bondage could be more urgent than survival itself.
Escapes, and narratives of escape, were not the only modes of capturing the moment’s urgency. The intellectual output by those who remained enslaved, trying to navigate the logistical and spiritual boundaries of their world, also presented a politics in which righteousness shattered the complicit everyday. Songs, poems, and tales depicted a delivering god, with hope and sadness layered against one another. Songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” promised eventual divine rescue in language that could double as harmless religious meditation under the scrutiny of slaveholders. Folk songs reconciled God’s power with an evil world by depicting Providence cracking open the shell of everyday existence.[7] The intervention of divine righteousness in the form of emancipation would render obsolete all these everyday concerns, bringing about a necessary and total transformation.
Enslaved people were not the only ones who saw slavery as an indictment of the human political order and appealed to a higher plane for change. Famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison presented the moral imperative of abolition as a higher ground upon which all could meet, a space free from party and faction, and a mission that had the direct blessing of Providence.[8] Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, writing in 1849, separated the political priority of expediency from the human priority of right.[9] And even the iconoclastic Ralph Waldo Emerson envisioned an irrefutable, divine truth that reigned on the level of humanity as a whole, a kind of anti-political politics that sneered at the masses while still professing to love humankind.[10] Like Garrison’s much more activist vision, Emerson privileged a realm of politics that did not cater to the haggling realities of everyday community—and in so standing above compromise, held the door open for divine redemption. In a strictly political theory sense, these ideas carried a whiff of John Locke’s “appeal to heaven,” in which the foremost theorist of the social contract recognized that war may be the only way to resolve a situation in which the sides cannot agree on a revolution’s righteousness. Antebellum assertions about divine justice and human law were also, however, intensely practical. To be released from “the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force, from the bondage of sin,” as Garrison put it, required real risk and concrete action to end enslavement.[11]
The contrast between politics as usual and the pursuit of untarnished righteousness was a commonality in antebellum American thought, but it was too varied to be considered any sort of movement. Instead, it was a trope of the period’s political thinking. This trope unified a wave of disparate activists and intellectuals, including even at times the defenders of slavery, whom Ratner-Rosenhagen captures well in earlier chapters of More Ideas. The most powerful versions of the anti-political politics of righteousness and rupture, however, coalesced around emancipation. In “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, delivered in 1852, formerly enslaved orator Frederick Douglass not only dissected the farce of American patriotism but also contrasted the powerful truth of emancipation with other forms of communication. “Scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed,” said Douglass; “it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”[12] The ordinary human realm of speech could not capture the irrefutable truth of justice. The beast of slavery was too wild for ordinary politics to hold. Like a storm, heaven-sent, the righteousness of abolition would tear down the crooked trees of the old order and plant the seeds of the new.
Abraham Lincoln did not always participate in this pattern of thinking. In a speech at Peoria in 1854, during one of the many bloody conflicts over slavery’s expansion, Lincoln acceded that slavery was temporarily necessary, though he protested that it was not right. But by the time of his famous Second Inaugural Address, in 1865, he too echoed the idea of Providential rupture—of the necessary ruin of the ordinary in the face of righteousness. “So still it must be said,” even in the midst of an awful war, that “‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether,’” Lincoln reminded his audience. “This terrible war” was sent by God as “the woe due those by whom the offense came.”[13] Though he mourned the devastation that war brought, he emphasized, at least by 1865, that war’s necessity: its role as the manifestation of divine force against the failures of human will. Crisis—even mass death—was the price to be paid to right the profound wrong of enslavement.
This view of the war, however, always faced powerful detractors. The allure of reconciliation was strong, and especially after 1890, as David Blight has documented, it would dominate the Civil War’s legacy.[14] But the worldview in which reconciliation was the goal and division the fear was not unanimously adopted right away, even among white Americans. In the decades that followed the war, many people continued to hold out hope for a politics that transcended politics. They accepted the necessity of conflict, division, and even war in order to achieve what was right. And for good or ill, the idea spread well beyond the politics of enslavement and into diverse realms of American life. As Jane Addams’s admiration for the “impatient” John Brown shows, the appeal of martyrdom did not end with Appomattox.
Martyrdom After Appomattox
For some, the war opened the door to a new kind of government: one that tackled, with more energy and fortitude than American federalism had previously allowed, the pressing moral issues that the war brought in its wake. In other words, Americans expected that the federal government could and should solve big material problems. As the war itself ended and the Union Army negotiated the conditions of freedom with recalcitrant former planters, freedpeople made the case that their legal freedom was meaningless without an economic basis. As a committee of formerly enslaved people living on Edisto Island wrote, “if the government Haveing concluded to befriend Its late enemies . . . now takes away from [freedpeople] all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and thier [sic] all time [enemies] . . . we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former.” Without land, the freedpeople wrote, their only option was to work “as In former time and subject to thier will as then. . . You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.”[15] It was the government’s job to insist on what was right, regardless of the conflict it may cause. The petitioners expected the federal government to finish what the war had started: to ignore the protestations of Confederates and planters and to ensure the conditions of real freedom with active, unbending force.
Indeed, despite the many limitations of national Reconstruction, the federal government did act upon some of these convictions, though nowhere near enough of them. Haphazardly, and often post hoc, new ideas emerged to fit new governmental forms. The Freedmen’s Bureau expanded government capability and involvement in citizens’ everyday lives, and the army stationed itself throughout the South to ensure that the fragile new laws were actually followed—a major development in a nation less than a century removed from declaring a standing army a revolution-worthy threat to liberty. As one Major General wrote in 1868, “To restore measurable peace and quiet to Texas will require, for a long time, that troops be stationed at many county seats, until, by their presence, and aid if necessary, the civil law can be placed in the hands of reliable officers, and executed. This will be the work of years….”[16]
The intellectual impact of the war, however, was not only felt in obvious ways. The goal of breaking everyday politics to accomplish something transformative suffused movements with little or no connection to the politics of Reconstruction. To take one crucial—and newly relevant—example, anti-vice reformer Anthony Comstock channeled his brushes with death during the war and his fears about bodily and spiritual degradation into a crusade to make the government responsible for public morals. The Comstock Act (1873) forbade any and all obscene materials from being sent through the mail. “We have been assigned by the Great Commander,” Comstock told the fellow members of his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, “to constantly face some of the most insidious and deadly forces for evil that Satan is persistently aligning against the integrity of the children of the present age.”[17] Alongside state-level anti-abortion laws, many of which were passed shortly after the Civil War, Comstock’s early skirmish in the battle against vice painted the federal government as a force for moral order—well before the groundswell of reform energies during the Progressive Era. Instead, Comstock’s drive for change came in part from the rupture of war: the horrors it produced, and the determination it demanded.
In another realm of the politics of moral urgency, all sides laid claim to providential righteousness. In the postwar decades, “civilization” offered itself to white Americans as a transcendent value to fight for, as seemingly unassailable as “freedom” had been—with deadly consequences. During and after the Civil War, the Union Army took advantage of its mobilization to “pacify” the other rebellious segments that it claimed to be part of the union: Native American nations, which controlled land, trade, language, and culture throughout large swaths of the continent. The wars that resulted from this attempt at pacification became the justification for further wars. Buoyed by military success and a newly visible federal government, American leaders began to believe that the “Indian problem” could be solved. As President Arthur said to Congress in 1881, policy toward Native Americans “has been a cause of trouble and embarrassment from the infancy of the Government, [yet] it is but recently that any effort has been made for its solution at once serious, determined, consistent, and promising success.” In other words, it was time to take drastic action: to “grapple with the great permanent problem,” Arthur chided, rather than wasting time with patchy solutions. It was time to finally “bring them under the influences of civilization.”[18]
American ideas of civilization hardened into an easy, active binary in the postbellum period, honed by the economic pressure to expand and by the global discourse and practice of empire. Helen Hunt Jackson, also writing in 1881, complained that it was futile to push back against this message. Siding with Native people was foreclosed by “the wide-spread sentiment among the people of dislike to the Indian, of impatience with his presence as a ‘barrier to civilization,’ and distrust of it as a possible danger.” Fed on old tales of frontier wars, the “average mind” held “something like an hereditary instinct of unquestioning and unreasoning aversion.”[19] Such a deep antipathy and easy presumption of righteousness among white Americans is one of the building-blocks of American intellectual life, and the federal government’s search for a final resolution to the so-called “Indian problem” in this period testifies to both the strength of that anti-“savage” bigotry and a new comfort with energetic government action. Comfortable in their sense of righteousness, leaders pursued forced assimilation with a newfound confidence that seemingly intractable “problems”—the conflicts of political life in an expanding empire—could and should be solved.
The Native response, however, was also wreathed in the rhetoric of necessary crisis. Starting in the 1880s, the prophet Wovoka led a spiritual revival and political alliance. Rejecting half-measures and temporary solutions of their own, Wovoka’s visions promised that if people reinvigorated the old ritual of the Ghost Dance and served the Supreme Being, a new age of abundance and freedom would begin and the white colonizers would leave the continent. Syncretic across various Great Basin Native traditions as well as threads of Christianity, the modern Ghost Dance became a religio-political mass movement that built ties between Wovoka’s Paiute nation and neighboring tribes. As technological innovations like railroads and sprawling industries cinched the United States together, intellectual and political innovations unified disparate Native nations. Lakota thinkers, in particular, who were caught in a crushing famine accelerated by government policy, often emphasized the utopian resolution to colonization that Wovoka’s vision promised. But these vibrant, optimistic political visions threatened the project of white control, and the Ghost Dance revival ended tragically with the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, in the cold December of 1890.[20]
The Crackling Atmosphere
Undaunted, other social movements swelled in the postbellum fervor. American socialism became a mass movement. After the idealistic days of Brook Farm, and before Eugene Debs emerged as the next generation’s standard-bearer, Americans honed their theories of economic development in mass meetings, public debates, and thousands of newspapers. Some groups were strictly trade unionist, while others believed in an international proletarian revolution; some wanted to participate in the political machinery of the nation, while others wanted to destroy it. Immigrants with memories of the 1848 Revolutions embraced the American postbellum sense of possibility. The nation’s first socialist party, the Socialist Labor Party, was founded in Chicago in 1876. By the following decade, socialist parties were making headway not just in the industrial hotbeds of the Midwest, but as far away as California and Manhattan. Marxist, Christian, utopian, and Lassallean ideas clashed in public forums and private debates, shaping and being reshaped by a generation of American workers.[21] Yet despite mass socialism’s growth, some early leaders looked to yet more radical ideas, like anarchism, to overcome what they saw as the maddeningly slow pace of change. The German evangelist of dynamite, Johann Most, found willing converts; American thinkers elaborated the Italian anarchist idea of “propaganda of the deed,” in which violent actions alone can spark the proletarian revolution.[22] Whatever form their impatience took, American socialists and anarchists remembered that just a generation earlier, the Civil War had secured one revolution. Why shouldn’t theirs be next?
This faith in productive crisis spread from radical anarchists to everyday socialists to the nervous middle classes. But as the revolutionaries’ eagerness for change trickled outward, it curdled into fear. The broad-based Knights of Labor, a network of labor unions, helped to lead a mass movement for the eight-hour day in the spring of 1886. In Chicago, representatives of the tiny anarchist party used that mass movement’s momentum to thrust themselves into the spotlight, leading 80,000 protestors along Michigan Avenue. Notwithstanding the popularity of the movement’s demands, the city’s newspapers singled out the anarchists as disturbers of the peace. “Hold them responsible for any trouble that occurs,” the Chicago Mail insisted, in an editorial titled “Brand the Curs.”[23] When a mysterious bomb exploded at a small rally a few days later, killing several and wounding dozens, Chicago police arrested as many anarchist leaders as they could find. An internationally publicized trial raised the issue of whether the anarchists’ violent rhetoric counted as a conspiracy, even though there was no evidence linking them to the bomb itself. The anarchists and their allies passionately defended free expression and insisted that the industrial economy itself was a powderkeg. The unconscionable grind of poverty and filth in the city screamed for a solution, they argued, and insisting on peace and order under such circumstances was predatory.[24] But the prosecution depicted the anarchists as villainous foreign rabble-rousers. The jury sided with the government, and four of the anarchists were hanged on November 11, 1887.
The crackling atmosphere in Chicago had exploded. What crisis would be next? Even before the Haymarket bombing, the national mood surrounding the politics of moral urgency and division had begun to feel more anxious and less optimistic. In 1885, a liberal clergyman named Lyman Abbott had mourned what he saw as the terrifying dividedness of the American nation, just two decades after the war’s reunification. “The early American colonists were a homogeneous people,” Abbott insisted, inaccurately. “They spoke one language; they held substantially the same religious faith . . . they were . . . all capitalists and all laborers.” But now, with the rapid growth of industry and with waves of immigration that Abbott viewed with barely concealed distrust, “a country which two centuries ago had hardly a social rift, is now as full of social crevasses, broad and deep, as the snowy side of the Alps.”[25] Abbott’s article in Century Magazine, titled “Danger Ahead,” is remarkable for two reasons: first, its utter forgetfulness regarding the Civil War and race-based slavery as sources of conflict; and second, its palpable yearning for division to be overcome. Rather than evidence of the possible, if frightening, triumph of righteousness over a blinkered political system, Abbott saw social and intellectual conflict as the greatest possible threat—the danger that lay ahead, threatening to pull the country apart.
Abbott’s surprisingly mild solution was to provide some guardrails for the industrial economy. By the following decade, such third-way proposals would swell into the chorus of reform that became the Progressive Era. Seen from this viewpoint, Progressivism appears as a cautious attempt to quell the revolutionary fervor of the prior decades, or perhaps a pragmatic attempt to bring that fervor down to the everyday plane. But in context, Progressivism was one of the most optimistic solutions that the turn of the century fostered. Faced with a politics that felt apocalyptic, many sought control. As Ratner-Rosenhagen’s chapter points out, the 1880s were also when Social Darwinists honed their arguments that the industrial economy’s violent maw was the necessary means to progress, justifying a hands-off approach to industrial poverty and death. The Comstock Act was just the beginning of the relentless pursuit of vice and crime, which revised and renewed racial prejudices for the modern era. Eugenics and other forms of scientific racism emerged as ways to give order to the so-called babel of the modern city, and the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act kicked off nearly a century of immigration restriction based on national origin. By the 1890s, the restoration of order would become a top political priority, whether through the “gentler” means of reformist Progressive social control or through the reactionary combination of racialized policing and unregulated market competition.
Lost Causes
The clamping down on the politics of moral urgency, the insistence that the war must finally end, was at its worst in the case of anti-Black racism. The 1870s through the 1890s oversaw the purposeful construction and propagandization of the “Lost Cause” myth, the nostalgic image of a harmonious antebellum South draped with Spanish moss and magnolias, where people had fought valiantly and lost nobly. (The details of what they had fought for, of course, were left hazy.) Monuments to Confederate dead as well as novels, pamphlets, plays, and paintings spread the myth nationwide, justifying the end of national Reconstruction and laying the groundwork for the poisonous groundswell of Jim Crow laws. The Lost Cause, too, is one of the ideas that made America. But of course, as one formerly enslaved person had insisted in the desperate antebellum years, “what man can make, man can unmake.”[26]
In the face of the Lost Cause myth’s self-serving distortion, many tried to keep the war’s spirit of righteousness alive, none so eloquently—as usual—as Frederick Douglass. “No candid man, looking at the political situation of the hour, can fail to see that we are still afflicted by the painful sequences both of slavery and of the late rebellion,” Douglass admonished an audience on Decoration Day in 1878. For Douglass, the war was “a war of ideas . . . between the old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.” And yet “Good, wise, and generous men at the North . . . would have us forget and forgive, strew flowers alike and lovingly, on rebel and on loyal graves.” This equanimity, said Douglass, was a lie. “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war,” even though “freedom of speech and of the ballot have for the present fallen before the shot-guns of the South.” The time to forget was a long way off; the “great emergency” of war was not yet over.[27]
Moral urgency, however, had fallen upon hard times. Even in this “nadir” of race relations, Black Americans continued to organize. Yet while their participants were indisputably courageous, the movements that rose to the surface and shaped a generation of American ideas were no longer apocalyptic. Instead, they were pragmatic, and each in their own way sought to overcome division rather than accept it. From Booker T. Washington’s exhortation to “cast down your bucket where you are” to the self-improvement message of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, from Ida B. Wells’s meticulously researched anti-lynching investigations and W. E. B. Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of sympathetic understanding, Black leaders sought to change minds rather than to welcome the divine lightning-strike of revolution.[28]
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: Age Print, 1892).
The antebellum South mythologized in the reconciliation narrative was buoyed by its contrast to the modern city. The imagined South was free from factory smoke, from strikes and violence in the street, from the grasping for every dollar that marked labor and capital alike, from the vibrant clash of languages and cultures that so unnerved Lyman Abbott. This mythical version of the South, alongside the romantic images of the American west that also spread in the Gilded Age, captured the self-serving regret over the pace of change that powerful Americans felt so deeply during the postbellum decades.[29] Victorianism, with its ordered and sacred domestic space, provided reinforcement against the city wilderness by claiming the mantle of whiteness and civilization. The city’s image, by contrast, coalesced as the site of hope and fear, progress and chaos. And as it did, the war receded into the past. For most people, the once-impending battle between “wage-slaves” and their “masters” became a crisis to avert, not a necessary escape from the evil politics of compromise. Breaking the political mold became a cautionary tale. The divine rupture of the Civil War became distant, impossible to emulate. The ordinary might be a site of struggle, but it was good enough.
The memory of the Civil War and its urgency, however, did not disappear completely. Never unanimous, nor even necessarily dominant, the politics of moral righteousness forged by the Civil War transformed politics well after the battles ended. It is one of the ideas that made America. Even as enthusiasm for this trope waned, desperation and impatience lingered into the 1890s and beyond. As the twentieth century began, anarchists stalked presidents and tycoons, seeing themselves as warriors for emancipation. In the Plains and Southwest, Native Americans refused to give up their land, well after the “end” of the “Indian Wars.” And in the hills of western New York, Jane Addams, the generation’s most famous pacifist, felt her blood run warmer, her heart quicken, at the memory of John Brown.
About the Author
Abigail Modaff is a historian of the American Progressive Era. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University, on leave from her position as Instructional Assistant Professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston. Her first book, The Ladies’ Pioneer Society: A History of Women and Ideas in America, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
Notes
[1] Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, August 1904, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, quoted in Anne Firor Scott, “Introduction,” in Democracy and Social Ethics, by Jane Addams, ed. Anne Firor Scott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), xxxix.
[2] See especially Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy, Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 727.
[4] “Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865,” HathiTrust, 8, accessed 1 September 2024, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiuo.ark:/13960/t8hd91210?urlappend=%3Bseq=3.
[5] See especially R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery, Slaveries since Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[6] Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; reprint, G&D Media, 2020), Ch. 7.
[7] See especially Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), especially 22-3, 31-55. See also: Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 232–55; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1996), Ch. 14.
[8] See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison, “Prospectus of The Liberator (1837),” in The American Intellectual Tradition, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, Sixth Edition, vol. I, 1630–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 279–83.
[9] Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” in The American Intellectual Tradition, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, Sixth Edition, vol. I, 1630-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 416–28.
[10] See especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
[11] Garrison, “Prospectus of The Liberator (1837),” 279.
[12] Frederick Douglass, John R. McKivigan, and Julie Husband, The Speeches of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 71–72.
[13] “Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865,” 7–8.
[14] David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001).
[15] “7. A Committee of Freedmen on Edisto Island Reveal Their Expectations · After Slavery: Educator Resources · Lowcountry Digital History Initiative,” accessed 1 September 2024, https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_one_documents/document_seven.
[16] Report of Brevet Major General J. J. Reynolds, Commanding Fifth Military District,” Annual Report of the Secretary of War (Washington: 1868), 704-705, https://congressional-proquest-com.libproxy.wustl.edu/congressional/docview/t47.d48.1408_s.misdoc.46?accountid=15159
[17] Comstock quoted in Mary Alden Hopkins, “Birth Control and Public Morals: An Interview with Anthony Comstock,” Harper’s Weekly, 22 May 1915, 490, http://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-weekly_1915-05-22_60_3048.
[18] “Chester A. Arthur on American Indian Policy (1881),” The American Yawp Reader, accessed 1 September 2024, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/17-conquering-the-west/chester-a-arthur-on-american-indian-policy-1881/.
[19] H. H. Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881), 338.
[20] See especially Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 363–64; Rani-Henrik Andersson, A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018); Gregory Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
[21] See, for example, Gary Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); Richard Schneirov, “New Perspectives on Socialism I: The Socialist Party Revisited,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, 3 (July 2003): 245–52; Richard Schneirov, “New Perspectives on Socialism II: Socialism and Capitalism Reconsidered,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, 4 (October 2003): 351–60; Abigail Modaff, “‘The Hidden Life’: Ellen Gates Starr, Vida Dutton Scudder, and Catholic Socialist Progressivism,” Modern Intellectual History 20, 4 (2023): 1065–90.
[22] See especially Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, Hachette Book Group, 2023); as well as Abigail Modaff, “To ‘Meet Life Face to Face’: Communication and American Social Reform from Haymarket to the Harlem Renaissance” (PhD Dissertation, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2021).
[23] Quoted in Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 186.
[24] See especially The Accused the Accusers: The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court (Chicago: The Socialistic Publishing Society, n.d.). On this theme generally, see also Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (1995; second ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
[25] Lyman Abbott, “Danger Ahead,” The Century Magazine, November 1885, 51. For much more on this transformation, see Modaff, “Meet Life Face to Face.
[26] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; reprint, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 74. The best discussion of the Lost Cause myth is still Blight, Race and Reunion.
[27] “Frederick Douglass on Remembering the Civil War, 1877,” The American Yawp Reader, accessed 1 September 2024, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/reconstruction/frederick-douglass-on-remembering-the-civil-war-1877/.
[28] Booker T. Washington, “Address By Booker T. Washington, Principal Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama, At Opening Of Atlanta Exposition,” 18 September 1895, https://history.iowa.gov/history/education/educator-resources/primary-source-sets/reconstruction-and-its-impact/booker-t; Mary Eliza Church Terrell, “In Union There Is Strength: First Presidential Address to the National Association of Colored Women,” in Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863–1954, ed. Beverly Washington Jones (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: Age Print, 1892), http://www.aspresolver.com/aspresolver.asp?BLTC;S10849; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, especially “Of Alexander Crummell”; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Editorial: The Races in Conference,” Crisis, December 1910.
[29] See especially T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981; second ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).