Questions About John Brown

[Wild Bill]

You got it Kate. It is surprising how many abolitionists and anti-slavery people saw the problem as ended with the 13th Amendment. One only has to look at Alexander Stephens meeting with Lincoln aboard the River Queen in Hampton Roads in 1865. "What are you going to do with the freed slaves," asked Stephens. Lincoln replied, "It is root hog or die." One may not like the source of this quote but it captures the essence of Reconstruction in the end, and presages the notion of separate but equal in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1898.