How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
But he felt it again: a flutter of unmistakable revulsion. Fat lips, brute jaw, red-veined eyeballs. Chamberlain stood up. He had not expected this feeling. He had not even known this feeling was there. He remembered suddenly a conversation with a Southerner a long time ago, before the war, a Baptist minister. White complacent face, sense of bland enormous superiority: my dear man, you have to live among them, you simply don't understand. (3.2.33)
Chamberlain has a moment of crazy racist panic. Unexpectedly, he feels repulsed when he sees a runaway slave and momentarily wonders if the Southerners are right. This won't last long, but it does raise another issue—slavery is one thing, but racism is another. It's easier to abolish slavery than to abolish racism, and even good men like Chamberlain have to check themselves sometimes and realize that they have biases and fears, too.
Quote #5
He backed off. He stared at the palm of his own hand. A matter of thin skin. A matter of color. The reaction is instinctive. Any alien thing. And yet Chamberlain was ashamed; he had not known it was there. He thought: If I feel this way, even I, an educated man… what was in God's mind? (3.2.43)
Chamberlain feels ashamed. He recognizes that, despite his supposedly enlightened views, even he can fall prey to knee-jerk racial judgments and reactions.
Quote #6
He felt a slow deep flow of sympathy. To be alien and alone, among white lords and glittering machines, uprooted by brute force and threat of death from the familiar earth of what he did not even know was Africa, to be shipped in black stinking darkness across an ocean he had not dreamed existed, forced then to work on alien soil, strange beyond belief, by men with guns whose words he could not even comprehend. What could the black man know of what was happening? Chamberlain tried to imagine it. He had seen ignorance, but this was more than that. What could this man know of borders and states' rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? What did he know of the war? And yet he was truly what it was all about. It simplified to that. Seen in the flesh, the cause of the war was brutally clear. (3.2.48)
As Chamberlain thinks more about the issue, his initial lack of sympathy for the runaway slave morphs into real sympathy. He also muses on the irony that, since the slaves weren't allowed to learn or keep up with current events or anything like that, the people he's fighting to free aren't aware of all the issues surrounding the struggle. Also, even though Chamberlain knows he has some racist tendencies, he decides to work through them in order to try overcome them.