Eric Foner Quotes
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If you are going to abolish slavery, that opens up all these other questions: what system of labor is going to replace slave labor? What system of race relations is going to replace the race relations of slavery? Who is going to have power in the post-war South? The Emancipation Proclamation doesn't answer that question, but it throws it open.
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Lincoln has accepted America as a biracial society. He's talking about giving at least some black men the right to vote. In the Emancipation Proclamation he advises some blacks to labor faithfully for reasonable wages, here in the United States. He doesn't say anything about them leaving the country. He puts black men in the army. That is a whole different vision than simply saying "let's have them go out of the country." I think what's interesting is the change in Lincoln's view, but one must realize that he did adhere to this idea of colonization for many years.
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Even as the United States has risen to become the predominant international power, however, conflict has persisted over the nature of American society itself and what its role in the world should be.
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America's historic sense of mission has been redefined to mean the creation of a single global free market.
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America at the turn of this century is a far freer, more egalitarian society than in 1900.
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Freedom has been privatized - it is how you dress, what your sexual orientation is, choosing your own life. That's fine. But that is not what Thomas Jefferson was talking about.
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The collapse of communism as an ideology and of the Soviet Union as a world power has made possible an unprecedented internationalization of current American values, among them free choice in the consumer marketplace, reduced government economic regulation and an emphasis on individual self-fulfillment rather than the social good, all promoted by an internationalized mass media and consumer culture.
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Lincoln sees slavery in some ways as a theft of labor. A slave is a laborer who is being denied the fruits of his labor.