The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Editorial Board
• Alphabetical List of Authors
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Organization of the Work
• Note On the Texts
• Part One: the Civil War
• The Crittenden Compromise
• South Carolina Ordinance of Secession
• South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession
• Mississippi Ordinance of Secession
• Mississippi Declaration of Causes of Secession
• Virginia Ordinance to Repeal the Ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America
• Missouri Act Declaring the Political Ties Heretofore Existing Between the State of Missouri and the United States of America Dissolved
• Ordinance of the Kentucky Convention
• Constitution of the Confederate States of America
• Farewell Speech to the United States Congress
• Inaugural Address
• First Inaugural Address
• Proclamation Calling the Militia and Convening Congress
• Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports
• Message to Congress In Special Session
• Proclamation Suspending Writ of Habeas Corpus
• Message to Congress On Gradual Abolishment of Slavery
• Proclamation Revoking General Hunter’s Emancipation Order
• Emancipation Proclamation
• Emancipation Proclamation
• The Gettysburg Address
• Message to the Congress of Confederate States
• Act to Increase the Military Force of the Confederate States
• Last Order
• Part Two: Reconstruction
• Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction
• Veto Message With Wade-davis Proclamation and Bill
• Wade-davis Manifesto
• Special Field Order No. 15
• Second Inaugural Address
• Last Public Address
• Constitution of Indiana, Article Xiii
• Black Code of Mississippi
• U.s. Constitution, Thirteenth Amendment
• Freedmen’s Bureau Bill
• Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill
• Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill
• Civil Rights Act
• First Reconstruction Act of 1867
• Veto of the First Reconstruction Act
• First Supplement to the First Reconstruction Act of 1867
• Second Supplement to the First Reconstruction Act of 1867
• Articles of Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
• Debate On Proposed Fourteenth Amendment
• U.s. Constitution, Fifteenth Amendment
• Enforcement Act of 1870
• Enforcement Act of 1871
• Enforcement Act of 1875
• The Constitution of the State of Mississippi, As Adopted In Convention
• Inaugural Address
• Civil Rights Cases
• Constitution of the State of Mississippi
• Part Three: Consolidating Markets
• The Homestead Act
• The Pacific Railway Act
• The Morrill Act
• The Gospel of Wealth
• Cross of Gold Speech
• First Inaugural Address
• First Annual Message
• Lochner V. New York
• Part Four: Consolidating Culture?
• Twelfth Annual Report of the Massachusetts State School Board
• Address On Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes
• Address of Booker T. Washington, Principal Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Ala., At the Opening of the Exposition
• Plessy V. Ferguson
• The Talented Tenth
• Treaty Between the United States of America and the Navajo Tribe of Indians; Concluded June 1, 1868; Ratification Advised July 25, 1868; Proclaimed August 12, 1868.
• Dawes Act
• Proposed Constitutional Amendment
• Massachusetts Constitutional Provision
• Reynolds V. United States
• The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Et Al. V. United States
• Immigration Policy
• The Principles of Scientific Management
• Carrie Buck, By R. G. Shelton, Her Guardian and Next Friend, Plff. In Err., V. J. H. Bell, Superintendent of the State Colony For Epileptics and Feeble Minded
• Introduction to I’ll Take My Stand
• Part Five: Reform Movements
• National People’s Party Platform, Adopted At Omaha, Neb., July 4, 1892
• Coin’s Financial School
• Lecture II: What Pragmatism Means
• The Socialist Party and the Working Class
• Preamble
• The Subjective Necessity For Social Settlements
• Why the Ward Boss Rules
• Declaration of Principles of the Progressive Party
• The Income Tax
• Speech On Constitutionality of an Income Tax
• U.s. Constitution, Sixteenth Amendment
• Direct Election of U.s. Senators
• Resolution Opposing Direct Election of Senators
• U.s. Constitution, Seventeenth Amendment
• First Annual Meeting of the Woman’s State Temperance Society
• Prohibition Debate
• U.s. Constitution, Eighteenth Amendment
• U.s. Constitution, Twenty-first Amendment
• Women’s Suffrage
• The Fundamental Principle of a Republic
• Debate On Women’s Suffrage
• U.s. Constitution, Nineteenth Amendment
• Part Six: Consolidating Government
• The Pendleton Act
• Interstate Commerce Act
• Veto Message—distribution of Seeds
• Sherman Antitrust Act
• President’s Message to the Senate and House of Representatives
• Federal Trade Commission Act
• The Place of the Independent Commission
• Radio Address On Unemployment Relief
• Commonwealth Club Address
• Inaugural Address
• Federal Emergency Relief Act
• National Industrial Recovery Act
• Redistribution of Wealth
• A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. Et Al. V. United States
• Fireside Chat On the Reorganization of the Judiciary
• National Labor Relations Board V. Jones & Laughlin Steel
• Part Seven: America In the World
• Monroe Doctrine—seventh Annual Message
• Roosevelt Corollary to Monroe Doctrine
• The Fallacy of Territorial Extension
• The Star of Empire
• Open Door Note
• Woodrow Wilson On Neutrality and War
• Statement On American Neutrality
• Address to the Senate
• Dissent In Wartime
• Espionage Act
• Free Speech In Wartime
• Sedition Act
• Schenck V. United States
• Fourteen Points Speech
• Covenant of the League of Nations
• Speech Against the League of Nations
• Kellogg-briand Pact
• Note On Chinchow
• Neutrality and War
• The Atlantic Charter
• The Four Freedoms
• Pearl Harbor Speech
• Sources

Introduction

This volume continues the work begun with The American Republic: Primary Sources. Like that work, this one seeks to make available within the covers of one volume the most crucial documents necessary for understanding the variety of policies and viewpoints driving American public life during an important, substantive part of its history. Picking up with the onset of the Civil War, documents in this volume will take students and other readers through the onset of World War II and America’s entrance into yet another major new phase in its existence.

For decades now, a host of debates have continued concerning the purpose, nature, and impact of the major popular, legal, and ideological movements shaping the United States during the period from approximately the onset of the Civil War through World War II. Was Reconstruction a noble, failed attempt to protect and empower African Americans in the South by reforming Southern institutions, a self-interested attempt to gain power and wealth for one political party and region through cynical appeals to abstract ideals, or a Utopian experiment in radical politics? Were national markets in goods and services the natural outgrowth of individual initiative and the American spirit of enterprise, or the creation of powerful interests? Is American culture intrinsically racist, ideologically intolerant of racial and cultural connections that might dilute a common emphasis on individual choice, or racially and culturally ambivalent? Were American reform movements homegrown or spawned by immigrants who brought with them European political habits and notions of class? Did the Great Depression necessitate establishment of the national welfare and administrative state, or was this a matter of ideological choice? Was America’s entry onto the world stage an inevitable consequence of its growing power, or a conscious choice, spawned by commitment to, and dreams of, universal peace and justice?

Such questions abound in discussions of these critical periods, but too rarely are informed by close reading of the public documents and pronouncements through which American thought has been expressed and policy made. In particular, the recent turn to social history has uncovered a great deal of information regarding the daily lives of Americans during the Civil War and through World War II. Unfortunately, this information often has come at the expense of in-depth study of crucial, relevant documents. The massive evidence marshaled by Raoul Berger in his landmark volume Government by Judiciary concerning the intentions of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, has been all but ignored in the legal literature.1 Indeed, the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which promised all Americans due process of law, equal protection of the laws, and the privileges and immunities of American citizenship, has become part of the ideological debate it was intended to illuminate.

The debate continues over whether public figures and policy makers after the Civil War sought to treat race as a set of intractable differences government should treat as guides to public policy, conventional differences public institutions should eliminate, or cultural differences government and society should respect. Almost unnoticed has been the specifically constitutional debate over which branch of government—Congress, the president, or the courts—should have primary responsibility for defining and enforcing the rights set forth in the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus re-presentation of key speeches and statutes relevant to that amendment’s passage remains imperative.

If students are to understand how and why the Supreme Court has gained increased power in the American system, they must be able to consult, directly, the relevant documents. The same may be said for the late-nineteenth-century growth of national markets, aided by Supreme Court decisions as it was opposed by an organized set of political actors (the Populists in particular) whose political program too often is reduced by commentators to issues of class struggle. Again, there has not been sufficient attention paid to actual party platforms and reforms.

In addition, while the work of the so-called Progressive historians has changed opinions greatly among academics concerning the nature and intent of the American founding, most students gain little exposure to the actual political program put forward by the Progressives themselves during the height of their influence.2 Direct documentary knowledge of Progressive legislative and constitutional enactments such as the direct election of senators would increase students’ understanding of the entire history of American public life. Likewise, the relationship between various political ideologies and the debate between so-called isolationists and internationalists—a relationship which changed radically at least once during the era represented in this volume—would be shown to be more complex, and more worthy of serious thought and investigation, by examination of relevant pronouncements and enactments.

A few words are required regarding editorial interpretation. As with the first work, this volume eschews editorial commentary on the contents of the documents presented. It presents only brief, historically oriented headnotes, intended to provide readers with the most basic information needed to understand the documents themselves. Given the breadth of material covered, it was necessary to organize the volume around themes. But those themes were chosen with the intention of providing a framework for the documents that does not necessitate or even push the reader toward any particular ideological conclusions. Whether one sees consolidation as a good or a bad thing, it can be agreed among students of all stripes that the era covered in this volume was one in which the power of the federal government increased and gained greater clarity, in which industrialization and the construction of national markets took place, in which regional movements opposed to consolidation, as well as truly national reform movements, were formed, in which a conflict of visions produced genuine conflict regarding race, ethnicity, and culture in America, and in which the United States came to play a far greater role in international affairs. The goal is simply to show the variety of positions and policies that shaped American public life during the era between the Civil War and World War II.

[1. ] Berger, Raoul, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997).

[2. ] See especially James Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government (New York: Macmillan, 1907).