Tag Archives: lincoln

While today’s conversation centers on slavery’s influence during the forty years from the 1830s to the 1870s, we’re going to begin a bit prior to that with a journal entry by Benjamin Banneker who lived from 1731 to 1806 near Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland (now known as Ellicott City). In that entry Banneker recalled a “great locust year” in 1749, a …

Born in poverty in rural Vermont, the Pennsylvania politician, Thaddeus Stevens, was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a true democracy which meant equal suffrage for all and more importantly the necessity of being a landowner. One of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in …

In the August 1897 Atlantic Monthly W. E. B. Du Bois published “Strivings of the Negro People” in which he introduced the term double-consciousness: …this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — …

Today we discuss the ideology of market egalitarianism and versions of libertarianism from the Levellers in 17th century England through Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and on to Lincoln’s political argument to poor whites that wage labor was slave labor and a man should instead stand on his own two feet on his own plot …