it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.

Institutions like ours, in which all power is derived directly from the people, must depend mainly upon their intelligence, patriotism, and industry.

. To the race more favored heretofore by our laws I would say, Withhold no legal privilege of advancement to the new citizen. The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people

"I notice that … [one Lost Cause apologist] says the charge that the South went to war for slavery is 'a slanderous accusation.' I always understood that we went to War on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery."

For centuries, the Dutch State and its representatives facilitated, stimulated, preserved and profited from slavery.<br> For centuries, in the name of the Dutch State, human beings were made into commodities, exploited and abused.<br> For centuries, under Dutch state authority, human dignity was violated in the most horrific way possible.<br> And successive Dutch governments after 1863 failed to adequately see and acknowledge that our slavery past continued to have negative effects and still does.

Today, on behalf of the Dutch government, I apologise for the past actions of the Dutch State: to enslaved people in the past, everywhere in the world, who suffered as a consequence of those actions, as well as to their daughters and sons, and to all their descendants, up to the present day.

How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.

Lost Cause ideology, an alternative explanation for the Civil War developed by white Southerners after the war’s end, seeks to rationalize the Confederacy.

This website can help you to better understand Confederate monuments and the context in which they were created. Start with the historical introduction, which includes information about who erected the monuments, along with when, where, and why.

Eric Foner

“I am not a believer in originalism and do not want to operate on terrain constructed by the conservative justices. Originalism is intellectually indefensible.

That’s part of the historical effort to understand the time period. But to think that there’s one original meaning is just foolish, in my opinion.

I’m a believer in what they call the living Constitution; you apply these principles at the present, not by going back to figuring out what in 1866 Senator Jacob Howard or Charles Sumner, or for that matter, Jefferson Davis thought about what the Fourteenth Amendment meant.

actually, for public policies far more far-reaching than this court would ever agree to. And of course, every one of those three amendments ends with a section saying Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment. Not the Supreme Court, not the secretary of state or somebody — Congress. But over time, the Supreme Court has asserted its right to overrule what Congress decides, even though the Constitution textually, specifically gives it to Congress.

They didn’t trust the Supreme Court. How could you trust a body which had produced the <em>Dred Scott</em> decision not that long before?

How these originalists can accept <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> has always been very mysterious for me. You know, it’s not an originalist decision. In fact, the Supreme Court explicitly said—[Chief Justice Earl] Warren explicitly said, “We don’t know what the people intended in 1866. We’re interested in what we should do now.” That’s how I would interpret it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, where she says that Reconstruction was a time when <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Eighty_Years_and_More_1815_1897/xooEAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;pg=PA241&amp;printsec=frontcover" onclick="javascript:window.open('https://www.google.com/books/edition/Eighty_Years_and_More_1815_1897/xooEAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;pg=PA241&amp;printsec=frontcover'); return false;">the fundamentals of government were debated</a> all up and down the society, in churches, at every fireside—people were debating these things in their homes. And yet you never get a sense of that—that they were trying to work out what these principles meant. And there’s no single original meaning that one can devise out of this.

abstraction of colorblindness.

Colorblindness is not the only original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the original meaning in the eyes of some people, but not a lot of others.

But yes, to say that all citizens must enjoy the same rights as white persons was a complete repudiation of the history of the United States up to that point. Up to that point, white people enjoyed far more rights than any other group of people had. For the law now to say, “No, no, you can’t do that”—whiteness now becomes not a form of exclusion, but a standard that must apply to everybody. You want to know what basic rights in terms going to court, or testifying, or whatever, that non-whites should enjoy—look at what white people have. And then that’s the same thing that non-whites ought to have.

Title: Report on the Condition of the South

First published 1865

reason does, under existing circumstances, not appear odious in the south. The people are not impressed with any sense of its criminality. And, secondly, there is, as yet, among the southern people an <i>utter absence of national feeling</i>

<span class="dropcap-pf"></span>he American Historical Association welcomes the emerging national debate about Confederate monuments

History comprises both facts and interpretations of those facts. To remove a monument, or to change the name of a school or street, is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history. A monument is not history itself; a monument commemorates an aspect of history, representing a moment in the past when a public or private decision defined who would be honored in a community’s public spaces.

To remove such monuments is neither to “change” history nor “erase” it. What changes with such removals is what American communities decide is worthy of civic honor.

We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina today as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them, the worse off he got. As to his “rights” – I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern the white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.<a href="#footnotes" name="_ftnref6" target="_top"><sup id="footnote6">6</sup></a> I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. . . .