slavery.”
56 Thomas David Schoonover, Dollars Over Dominion (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 41, 78.
57 Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1987),
92- 93.
58 The debates were also the first events in American public life to be
transcribed verbatim, allowing much fuller and more accurate news coverage.
59 Amazingly, the two inquiry texts gloss over the debates. The American
Adventure includes only a paragraph of questions, Discovering American
History only a paragraph of descriptive prose (though it does quote from
Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech). When treating actions, inquiry texts can
have a difficult time incorporating primary sources, which by nature are
usually words rather than deeds. Here the action consists of words—yet the
textbooks ignore them!
60 Paul M. Angle, Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates
of 1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). See also Gustave
Koerner, Memoirs, 2:58-60, quoted in Angle, The American Reader (New
York: Rand McNally, 1958), 297.
61 Angle, Created Equal? 22-23.
62 Quoted in Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1979), 153.
63 The exceptions are The American Pageant, The American Way, and
Discovering American History. American Pageant is a patch job by David
Kennedy on Thomas Bailey’s original, which dates to 1956! Where Bailey
embraced Margaret Mitchell—“The moonlight-and-magnolia Old South of
ante-bellum days had gone with the wind”—after “days” Kennedy adds
“largely imaginary in any case.” Despite such new material, the result is still a
dated and racist interpretation of “Reconstruction by the Sword,” emphasizing
its “drastic legislation” and completely downplaying the considerable
acceptance Republican policies won among many Southern whites. The
American Way paints “Radical” Republicans as opportunists who “sent
northerners to the South to make sure the Blacks remembered to vote for the
party that freed them.” (Blacks needed no such aid, of course; many voted
Republican through the 1950s!) The American Way also claims that “The