After reading the book about loathing Lincoln here I go again with another book on slavery and the war.
P. 13 Abolitionists knew about military emancipation, but they were not counting on it to get the job done. Events changed everything.
P. 18 Freeing slaves was a normal and accepted practice in war. Eric Foner pointed this out in his presentation at UAB last November.
P. 19 But universal military emancipation was something new in American history.
P. 20 The destruction was not inevitable just as the war was not inevitable. Who knew that Joshua Chamberlain could lead his mean to hold on to Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg. Nobody knew before it happened that the Constitution would have to be modified to officially end slavery or until late in the game that Lincoln would win reelection so that the Republicans could finish the job.
P. 21 Compromise failed. The war came. How did it all come down?
P. 25 The scorpion's sting was the metaphor by which opponents of slavery saw it's eventual demise. Surround slavery with freedom and eventually the states would end the institution on their own in their states, the federal government doing what it could to help. Seeing no means of escape Eventually the scorpion will sting itself to death.
P. 26 According to the Constitution, the federal government could not go into any state and abolish slavery, but it could create conditions so that the states would want to do it themselves.
P. 27 Would the scorpion technique---surrounding the slave states with freedom--- have eventually extinguished slavery short of war? We will never know.
P. 28 The Republican policy of slow strangulation by encirclement is why the Southern states seceded.
P. 28 The Republican belief was that slavery was strictly a state institution. It did not reach beyond the state that recognized it. Outside the slave states the Constitution recognized freedom. Slavery sectional; freedom national.
P. 34 Most antislavery advocates thought that abolition would proceed on a state-by-state basis.
P. 36 A cordon of freedom around the slave states along with compensated gradual emancipation was the peaceful way to national emancipation, preferable to wartime military emancipation.
P. 50 Despite Republican policy to not interfere with slavery in the states where it existed, slaveholders understood the Republican intention to surround the slave state with free states so as to force the slave states to eventually end the institution. Slavery had to expand or die. This is why they seceded.
P. 52 The point of the scorpion's sting was to surround slavery until it killed itself, and crucial to this purpose was to ban slavery in the territories. So from this view the war was only superficially over the expansion of slavery; in reality it was a conflict over slavery itself.
P. 53 The word slavery has been understood in different ways. The kind of slavery in the American South has to be carefully understood and distinguished. It is unfortunate that historically and in the present the words slave and slavery are thrown around indiscriminately and inaccurate inequality comparisons are made to Southern slavery. Slavery is not just another form of inequality.
P. 56 The issue is chattel slavery. The word chattel is the point. Chattel slaves were commodity property. This distinguishes chattel slavery from other forms of inequality.
P. 56 The nation went to war because of a difference of opinion over two different labor systems. The difference was over the chattel principle: property in man.
P. 57 Did the natural right of property take precedence over the natural right of freedom? For slave defenders, the right of property took precedence.
P. 58 The right of property preceded the Constitution. This is implied in the Constitution.
P. 58 Thus slavery was sanctioned by principles of natural right that transcended mere statutes.
P. 81 In theory, the argument against slavery was easier because it required only a single step. Once you rejected the legitimacy of property rights in human beings, you were done.
P. 85 The debate about "race" in American history eventually comes down to political power.
P. 98 In the Dred Scott decision, the Taney court in effect said blacks could not be US citizens.
P. 100 The Dred Scott decision set the tone for the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.
P. 102 The irreconcilable conflict over slavery was an irreconcilable conflict over racial equality.
P. 104 The wars over Revolutionary wartime emancipation is an intriguing story.
P. 117 British emancipation of American slaves was a subject for the peace negotiations. The British wouldn't budge over their emancipation activities. American demands for the return of slaves was "odious."
P. 118 Alexander Hamilton defended British emancipation and resisted re-enslaving freed slaves. Return of property is one thing; the return of human beings to slavery is something else entirely.
P. 119 Hamilton said the British did not have to compensate for slaves liberated during the way.
P. 121 Hamilton says that to reenslave a person who has been freed by war is odious and immoral.
P.130 Arguments over Jay's Treaty and the Treaty of Paris partially involved slaves freed by by the British but in the US when the Revolutionary and Wars of 1812 ended.
P. 132 Arguments ensued over the wording regarding slaves in the treaties.
P. 151 JQA seemed to change his views over the years to favor emancipation.
P. 153 JQA is a hero to the emancipation movement during his time.
P. 165 The novelty of this country is that the seceding state made it clear they were forming a country based on slavery and the inherent inequality of human beings.
P. 166 The British had trouble seeing that the Civil War was always over slavery.
If there's one thing that stands out in the book, it's the part that military emancipation played in eliminating slavery in this country.
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