美国内战与重建美国内战与重建transcript23.doc

Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 23 Transcript
April 15, 2008
<< back
Professor David Blight: So what is the engine of history? I beg your attention. There's a simple question for you, what is the engine of history? Don't you like unanswerable questions? Is the engine of history politics, the inherent, natural, eternal quest of people to bend other people's wills and take power? Or is the engine of history economics, the grinding, on-the-ground process by which people carve out livelihoods over against other people'petition for the same livelihoods? It doesn't seem to matter what history you study, or where you look, history always es around to this nexus, this collision, between forces of political power and forces of economics, and our job is always somehow to discern between them and how they mix. Now often, of course, the answer is that it's all one and the same thing.
Listen to this passage by a freedman in the South named Bailey Wyatt. He got up and made a speech at a freedmen's political meeting. This was actually an early Union League meeting, in 1866. It was about anizing in the South. But know what Bailey gets up and says, as it was recorded. It was a meeting in Yorktown, Virginia. Bailey Wyatt, former slave, he's sort of announcing the freed people's grievances at a political gathering. He says: "We now as a people desires to be elevated, and we desires to do all we can to be educated, and we hope our friends will aid us all they can. I may state to all our friends and to all our enemies that we has a right to the land where we are located. Why? I'll tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon. For that reason we have a divine right to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn and of cotton and of o and of rice and of sugar and of everything? And then didn't them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the ri