“The United States was not the only nation to experience emancipation in the nineteenth century. Neither plantation slavery nor abolition were unique to the United States. But Reconstruction was.”

1980s, The New View of Reconstruction (1983)

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Eric Foner24

American historian 1943

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Eric Foner (1943) American historian

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“While the opinion of the court, by Chief-Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case and the separate opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a Territorial legislature to exclude slavery from any United States Territory, they all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a State, or the people of a State, to exclude it.”

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“The Union is a confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States constitute only one nation.”

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Context: The Union is a confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States constitute only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation. Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and collision results.
Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.

“[N]either the Civil War nor Reconstruction fit neatly into traditional Marxist frameworks. Both the Civil War and Reconstruction belong to a chapter in American history in which the United States was still an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, and the contest that was waged between 1861 and 1865 was largely an argument (in economic terms) between the free-labor family farm and the slave-labor cotton plantation.”

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“Linking the national identity with race is not unique to the United States. National identity always requires an "other" to define it. But this country has linked its identity with race to an extraordinary degree, matched only by two other settler states: South Africa and Israel.”

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“The United States of America fought a horrific civil war that ended slavery. Yes, slavery was the reason for the Civil War. Every southern state that seceded from the United States announced that northern opposition to slavery and to its spread to new states was the primary reason for secession. In the meantime, America gradually became the least-xenophobic, least-racist nation in the world. In no country do people become accepted as full members of the society as do immigrants to America.”

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“They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.”

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1830s, Illinois House Journal (1837)

“The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.”

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Conclusion
1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)
Context: The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that 'A state half slave and half free cannot exist.' All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.

“Beneath the surface of states and nations, ideas and language, lies the fate of individual human beings in need. Answering their needs will be the mission of the United Nations in the century to come.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Nobel lecture (2001)

“The United States was not the only nation to experience emancipation in the nineteenth century. Neither plantation slavery nor abolition were unique to the United States. But Reconstruction was.”

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Eric Foner24

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