The American Reader is a stirring and memorable anthology that captures the many facets of American culture and history in prose and verse. The 200 poems, speeches, songs, essays, letters, and documents were chosen both for their readability and for their significance. These are the words that have inspired, enraged, delighted, chastened, and comforted Americans in days gone by. Gathered here are the writings that illuminate -- with wit, eloquence, and sometimes sharp words -- significant aspects of national conciousness. They reflect the part that all Americans -- black and white, native born and immigrant, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, poor and wealthy -- have played in creating the nation's character.
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Francis Miles Finch (1827â1907) was a judge of the New York Court of Appeals and later taught law at Cornell University. His poem âThe Blue and the Gray,â which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, was printed in the hugely successful 1879 edition of McGuffeyâs Reader. Consequently, it was known by millions of schoolchildren. The poem was frequently recited at Memorial Day ceremonies and was said to have been inspired by the women of Columbus, Mississippi, who spread flowers over the graves of both the Union and the Confederate dead.
By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead;â
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
Under the one, the Blue;
Under the other, the Gray.
These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;â
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
Under the laurel, the Blue;
Under the willow, the Gray.
From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe,â
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
Under the roses, the Blue;
Under the lilies, the Gray.
So with an equal splendor
The morning sun rays fall,
With a touch, impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all;â
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
âBroidered with gold, the Blue;
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.
So, when the summer calleth,
On forest and field of grain
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain;â
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
Wet with the rain, the Blue;
Wet with the rain, the Gray.
Sadly, but not with upbraiding,
The generous deed was done;
In the storm of the years that are fading,
No braver battle was won;â
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
Under the blossoms, the Blue;
Under the garlands, the Gray.
No more shall the war cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;â
Love and tears for the Blue,
Tears and love for the Gray.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
WOMENâS RIGHT TO VOTE
It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor we, the male citizens, but we, the whole people, who formed this Union.
Susan B. Anthony (1820â1906) grew up in a liberal Quaker family in Massachusetts. She taught school, and as an unmarried woman she became acutely aware of womenâs need for economic and personal independence. She worked actively in the temperance and abolition movements in New York. In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was then raising her large brood of children. Anthony was free to travel, speak, and organize during a long period when Stanton had to remain at home with her children. They formed a working partnership on behalf of womenâs rights that lasted for the rest of their lives and shaped the course of American feminism.
In the 1872 presidential election, Anthony led a group of women in Rochester, New York, to the polls to vote. Since womenâs suffrage was illegal, she was arrested and indicted. Before her trial in June 1873, Anthony traveled widely in upstate New York, giving the following speech about the injustice of denying women the suffrage. She was ultimately convicted and fined, but she refused to pay the fine. No attempt was made to collect. In this speech, she argued that no Constitutional amendment was needed to âgiveâ women the vote, because the Fourteenth Amendmentâpassed in 1868âsaid that âall persons born or naturalized in the United Statesâ were citizens and entitled to the rights of citizenship. Since women were persons and citizens, she insisted that they were fully entitled to vote.
I stand before you under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus doing, I not only committed no crime, but instead simply exercised my citizenâs rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution beyond the power of any State to deny.
Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that government can give rights. No one denies that before governments were organized each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property. When 100 to 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences and adopt those of civilizationâŚ. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several States and the organic laws of the Territories, all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.
All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, or exclusion of any class from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the right of all men, and âconsequently,â as the Quaker preacher said, âof all women,â to a voice in the government. And here, in this first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can âthe consent of the governedâ be given, if the right to vote be denied?⌠The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representationâthat compels them to obey laws to which they never have given their consentâthat imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peersâthat robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages, and childrenâare this half of the people who are left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By these declarations, kings, popes, priests, aristocrats, all were alike dethroned and placed on a common level, politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, men, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of these declarations all class and caste distinctions would be abolished, and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike rise from their subject position to the broader platform of equality.
The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. We formed it not to give the blessings of liberty but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole peopleâwomen as well as men. It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican governmentâthe ballotâŚ.
When, in 1871, I asked [Senator Charles Sumner] to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to voteâas he had done for black menâhe handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said:
Put âsexâ where I have âraceâ or âcolor,â and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a Sixteenth Amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth under protest; would never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-made freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor time to await that slow process. Women do possess all these in an eminent degree, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every citizen of the republic.
But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumnerâs counsel I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizenâs right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to themâthey appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegallyâŚ.
For any State to make sex a qualification, which must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever with-held from women and their female posterity. For them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. For them this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjectsâcarries discord and rebellion into every home of the...
