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****[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spam/LinkReports/rebootmymodem.net Hypocritepedia was here] [[Special:Contributions/69.178.193.66|69.178.193.66]] 03:57, 25 June 2016 (UTC) |
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[[File:Flag of the Confederate States of America (1861-1863).svg|thumb|We prefer, however, our system of industry... where the white man cannot labor... brought into usefulness by the labor of the African... Join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States. ~ ''Address of South Carolina to the Slaveholding States'']] |
[[File:Flag of the Confederate States of America (1861-1863).svg|thumb|We prefer, however, our system of industry... where the white man cannot labor... brought into usefulness by the labor of the African... Join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States. ~ ''Address of South Carolina to the Slaveholding States'']] |
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The '''[[w:Confederate States of America|Confederate States]]''' ('''C.S.'''), also known as "'''the Confederacy'''", was a declared but unrecognized country that existed in the continent of [[Americas|North America]] from 1861 to 1865, during the [[American Civil War]]. In 1861, following the election of [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] candidate [[Abraham Lincoln]] to the presidency of the [[United States]] the previous year, several [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]]-controlled [[Slavery|slave]] states feared that the future of [[slavery]] was in jeopardy, due to [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]]s' and Lincoln's anti-[[slavery]] views. In response, they declared that they were no longer a part of the [[United States|United States of America]] and that they had formed their own new country, which they called "the Confederacy". The [[United States]] refused to recognize the newly-declared Confederacy as being legitimate, for its existence was illegal under American law. Civil [[war]] subsequently erupted between the Confederacy and the [[United States]] after the former attacked an [[United States Armed Forces|American army]] [[w:Fort Sumter|base]] in [[South Carolina]], causing several more [[Slavery|slave]] states to declare that they had left the United States and had joined the Confederacy as well. Led by slave-owning [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrats]] [[Jefferson Davis]] and [[Alexander H. Stephens]], the Confederacy fought against the [[United States]] in four years of open warfare, before surrendering in 1865. After surrendering, the Confederacy was disbanded and its territory made a part of the [[United States]] again, with [[slavery]] in the country being outlawed and abolished by an amendment to the [[United States Constitution]]. |
The '''[[w:Confederate States of America|Confederate States]]''' ('''C.S.'''), also known as "'''the Confederacy'''", was a declared but unrecognized country that existed in the continent of [[Americas|North America]] from 1861 to 1865, during the [[American Civil War]]. In 1861, following the election of [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] candidate [[Abraham Lincoln]] to the presidency of the [[United States]] the previous year, several [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]]-controlled [[Slavery|slave]] states feared that the future of [[slavery]] was in jeopardy, due to [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]]s' and Lincoln's anti-[[slavery]] views. In response, they declared that they were no longer a part of the [[United States|United States of America]] and that they had formed their own new country, which they called "the Confederacy". The [[United States]] refused to recognize the newly-declared Confederacy as being legitimate, for its existence was illegal under American law. Civil [[war]] subsequently erupted between the Confederacy and the [[United States]] after the former attacked an [[United States Armed Forces|American army]] [[w:Fort Sumter|base]] in [[South Carolina]], causing several more [[Slavery|slave]] states to declare that they had left the United States and had joined the Confederacy as well. Led by slave-owning [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrats]] [[Jefferson Davis]] and [[Alexander H. Stephens]], the Confederacy fought against the [[United States]] in four years of open warfare, before surrendering in 1865. After surrendering, the Confederacy was disbanded and its territory made a part of the [[United States]] again, with [[slavery]] in the country being outlawed and abolished by an amendment to the [[United States Constitution]]. |
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![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Flag_of_the_Confederate_States_%281861%E2%80%931863%29.svg/220px-Flag_of_the_Confederate_States_%281861%E2%80%931863%29.svg.png)
The Confederate States (C.S.), also known as "the Confederacy", was a declared but unrecognized country that existed in the continent of North America from 1861 to 1865, during the American Civil War. In 1861, following the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States the previous year, several Democrat-controlled slave states feared that the future of slavery was in jeopardy, due to Republicans' and Lincoln's anti-slavery views. In response, they declared that they were no longer a part of the United States of America and that they had formed their own new country, which they called "the Confederacy". The United States refused to recognize the newly-declared Confederacy as being legitimate, for its existence was illegal under American law. Civil war subsequently erupted between the Confederacy and the United States after the former attacked an American army base in South Carolina, causing several more slave states to declare that they had left the United States and had joined the Confederacy as well. Led by slave-owning Democrats Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy fought against the United States in four years of open warfare, before surrendering in 1865. After surrendering, the Confederacy was disbanded and its territory made a part of the United States again, with slavery in the country being outlawed and abolished by an amendment to the United States Constitution.
A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z – See also – External links
Quotes
- Alphabetized by author or source.
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A
- We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor–by which our population doubles every twenty years–by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land–by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our own productions. All we demand of other peoples is, to be let alone, to work out our own high destinies. United together, and we must be the most independent, as we are the most important among the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace, than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States.
- We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
- Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union... We do not overstate the dangers to our Institution...
- If the Republican Party with its platform of principles, the main feature of which is the abolition of slavery and, therefore, the destruction of the South, carries the country at the next Presidential election, shall we remain in the Union, or form a separate Confederacy? This is the great, grave issue. It is not who shall be President, it is not which party shall rule – it is a question of political and social existence.
- Alfred Aldrich, as quoted in Crisis of Fear, by Steven Channing, pp. 141–142
- I saw a sight yesterday that beats all I ever saw. A Negro boy that the Rebels left in a barn, entirely naked. His breast cut and bowels were scratched or cut and the doctor said that turpentine had been put on him and also his privates had been cut off. I went in the barn to see him but it was rather dark. He lay on his back, his legs bent, knees up, and grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth and seemed to take no notice of anything and breast and bowels looked as if they had been cut and then burned all over. I understand the reason of the act to be because he would not go over the river with them.
- Chester Leach, letter to his wife (15 July 1863), Company H, 2nd Vermont Infantry, as quoted in "A Regular Slave Hunt: The Army of Northern Virginia and Black Civilians in the Gettysburg Campaign" (September 2001), by Ted Alexander, North & South.
B
- The truth is, we shall see the Southern Cross ere the destiny of the Southern master and his African slave is accomplished. That destiny does not stop short of the banks of the Amazon. The world of wonders in the animal and vegetable kingdom, of riches incalculable in the vast domain, watered by that gigantic stream, is the natural heritage of the Southron and his domestic slave. They alone can achieve its conquest and lay its untold wealth a tribute at the feet of commerce, the Queen consort of King Cotton.
- George Bagby, "Editor's Table" (January 1862), Southern Literary Messenger (1862), p. 68.
- The Confederacy is part of our history, but it is not two-thirds of our history.
- Roy Barnes, speech to the Georgian House of Representatives (24 January 2001).
- Down with the traitor! Up with the stars! The Union forever! Never forget those brave Union men who braved shot and steel to dispense justice to slavers, traitors, and bloodthirsty criminals. Remember the massacre at fort Pillow! Remember the murder of the surrendered and wounded men of the USCT at the Battle of the Crater! And remember that accursed death camp at Andersonville, where Union men were kept penned like animals and left to die because the south refused to trade colored prisoners! Southern honor? What honor? A bunch of feckless knaves more like! You want to impugn the honor of Sherman? Find me one instance of direct sanctioned violence against civilians or POWs in his march to the sea. You'll find not a one. The rebel flag should be burned, it will forever be a symbol of shame, lawlessness, and oppression, A symbol reviled by the loyal, true, and free, wherever they dwell.
- T.D. Baron, "The Battle Cry of Freedom" (2015), YouTube
- In a word, the south determined to fight for her property right in slaves, and in order to do so, it was necessary for her resist the change which the abolitionists proposed.
- Ed Baxter, at a reunion (1889), as quoted in The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (2005), by John M. Coski, p. 26.
- What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the north, was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery... Is it true, then, that unless there had been a separation from the north, slavery would be abolished in Georgia? I address myself to the proofs of that case. In the first place, I say that the North hates slavery, and, in using that expression I speak wittingly.
- Henry Benning, speech to the Virginian secession convention (18 February 1861), as quoted in "Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought", by Gordon Rhea, Civil War Trust. Also quoted in Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, vol. 1, pp. 62–75.
- If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case. Although not half so numerous, we may readily assume that war will break out everywhere like hidden fire from the earth, and it is probable that the white race, being superior in every respect, may push the other back. They will then call upon the authorities at Washington, to aid them in putting down servile insurrection, and they will send a standing army down upon us, and the volunteers and Wide-Awakes will come in thousands, and we will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. That is the fate which Abolition will bring upon the white race. But that is not all of the Abolition war. We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or Saint Domingo.
- Henry Benning, speech to the Virginian secession convention (18 February 1861), as quoted in “Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought” (25 January 2011), by Gordon Rhea, Civil War Trust. Also quoted in Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, vol. 1, pp. 62–75.
- Join the north and what will become of you? They will hate you and your institutions as much as they do now, and treat you accordingly. Suppose they elevated Charles Sumner to the presidency? Suppose they elevated Fred Douglass, your escaped slave, to the presidency? What would be your position in such an event? I say give me pestilence and famine sooner than that.
- Henry Benning, speech to the Virginian secession convention (18 February 1861), as quoted in “Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought” (25 January 2011), by Gordon Rhea, Civil War Trust. Also quoted in Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, vol. 1, pp. 62-75.
- Slavery was not merely a feature of the Confederacy; it was its defining characteristic... It would be nothing short of delusion to say the South did not fight to preserve both slavery and the white supremacy upon which it relied... Those who defend the Confederacy in the name of liberty today must assume, against all historical evidence, that rationality and economic benefit would have otherwise trumped the exploitation and irrational hate that drove the institution of slavery, the rebellion to defend slavery, and the Jim Crow South to avenge slavery's defeat... A war for slavery is, by definition, a fight against the individual right of exit. It takes an extraordinary leap for a libertarian to assign rights to a state which are denied to the people or an individual. Properly understood, states have powers, not rights. The fundamental tenet of rights theory is that a man or woman has property in him- or herself and that he or she voluntarily gives up only a small portion of his or her rights when joining a state. The right of exit is indeed a solemn one, but its root lies with the individual, not a body of elites and their self-interested whims.
- Jonathan Blanks, "Why 'Libertarian' Defenses of the Confederacy and 'States' Rights' are Incoherent" (22 February 2012), Libertarianism.
- The decision to make more than half of the new national flag entirely white returned some Confederates to the question of race. The Savannah Morning News argued that the preponderance of white would make clear to the world that “we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.” It even predicted that the new banner would be “hailed by the civilized world as THE WHITE MAN’S FLAG.” Such expectations proved premature. “Purity” did become the primary association of this banner’s whiteness, and at a time when the Union turned to a war of emancipation, this resonant color could not help but conjure up something of the fears about “amalgamation” that were a part of American culture in both North and South. Yet the sort of overt reference to slavery and race that the Savannah editor expected did not become a major theme in the published record of commentary and verse. The opposition that most Confederates took to African American freedom hardly needed overt expression. Yet the tendency to skirt this theme in patriotic poetry recalled the earlier caution of risking international isolation and the alienation of southern nonslaveholders.
- Robert Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (2002), Princeton University Press, pp. 115–16.
- I have ever held the South was right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln, four years ago, spoke plainly... Looking upon African slavery... I for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings, both for themselves and us...
- John Wilkes Booth, as quoted in "The murderer of Mr. Lincoln" (21 April 1865), The New York Times (1865).
- Why is it so hard for people to just say Robert E. Lee fought for a despicable cause and doesn't deserve our admiration?
- Jamelle Bouie, Twitter post (22 June 2014).
- A third of the south's population were black slaves, which might be used for manual labor but which could not be used as soldiers. After all, if the Confederates were to give their slaves weapons, how could they be sure the slaves wouldn't immediately turn them against those who enslaved them? Even worse, many of these blacks would join the Union army if they took control of the territory in which they lived... The Confederacy started its struggle for independence vastly outnumbered in terms of the number of soldiers, vastly inferior to the Union in terms of the industrial and financial power necessary to wage war, and lacking any fleet with which to combat the naval strength of the North. Given these facts, combined with the fact that the South did, indeed, lose the war in the end, I don't blame those who claim that the south never had a chance of winning.
- Jeffrey Evan Brooks, "The South Could Have Won the Civil War" (27 December 2015), The Blog of Jeffrey Evan Brooks.
- No serious person can deny that slavery was the cause of the war, for the Southern politicians who pushed for secession made absolutely no bones about the fact that they were doing it to protect slavery.
- Jeffrey Evan Brooks, Civil War Talk (6 September 2015)
- The country and the army are mainly dependent upon slave labor for support.
- Joseph E. Brown, Journal of the Senate at an Extra Session of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, Convened under the Proclamation of the Governor (25 March 1863), p. 6
- I have forborne, sir, in this discussion, to argue the question upon any other or different grounds of right than those adopted by your authorities, in claiming the negroes as property, because I understand that your fabric of opposition to the Government of the United States has the right of property in man as its corner-stone.
- Will you suffer your soldier, captured in fighting your battles, to be in confinement for months rather than release him by giving for him that which you call a piece of property, and which we are willing to accept as a man? You certainly appear to place less value upon your soldier than you do upon your negro. I assure you, much as we of the North are accused of loving property, our citizens would have no difficulty in yielding up any piece of property they have in exchange for one of their brothers or sons languishing in your prisons.
C
- The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery... No man of common sense, who has observed the progress of events, and is not prepared to surrender the institution... The time for action has come – now or never... The existence of slavery is at stake.
- Charleston Mercury (3 November 1860)
- The new paradigm in social attitudes and the fuller use of available evidence has favored a massacre interpretation. Debate over the memory of this incident formed a part of sectional and racial conflicts for many years after the war, but the reinterpretation of the event during the last thirty years offers some hope that society can move beyond past intolerance.
- John Cimprich, as quoted in Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory (2005), Louisiana State University Press, pp. 123–124
- The proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. It is to me a source of deep mortification and regret to see the name of that good and great man and soldier, General R. E. Lee, given as authority for such a policy. My first hour of despondency will be the one in which that policy shall be adopted. You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers. The moment you resort to negro soldiers your white soldiers will be lost to you; and one secret of the favor with which the proposition is received in portions of the army is the hope that when negroes go into the Army they will be permitted to retire. It is simply a proposition to fight the balance of the war with negro troops. You can't keep white and black troops together, and you can't trust negroes by themselves. It is difficult to get negroes enough for the purpose indicated in the President's message, much less enough for an Army... Use all the negroes you can get, for all the purposes for which you need them, but don't arm them. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong. But they won't make soldiers. As a class they are wanting in every qualification of a soldier. Better by far to yield to the demands of England and France and abolish slavery and thereby purchase their aid, than resort to this policy, which leads as certainly to ruin and subjugation as it is adopted; you want more soldiers, and hence the proposition to take negroes into the Army. Before resorting to it, at least try every reasonable mode of getting white soldiers. I do not entertain a doubt that you can, by the volunteering policy, get more men into the service than you can arm. I have more fears about arms than about men, For Heaven’s sake, try it before you fill with gloom and despondency the hearts of many of our truest and most devoted men, by resort to the suicidal policy of arming our slaves.
- Howell Cobb, regarding suggestions that the Confederates turn their slaves into soldiers (1865). As quoted in Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), Hugh Chisholm, editor, 11th ed., Cambridge University Press. Also quoted as 'You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong'.
- This we must leave to history. The bloody conflict between brothers, is closed, and we 'come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.' The South had $2,000,000,000 invested in Slaves. It was very natural, that they should desire to protect, and not lose this amount of property. Their action in this effort, resulted in War. There was no desire to dissolve the Union, but to protect this property. The issue was made and it is decided.
- Sterling Cockrill, as quoted in letter to Andrew Johnson (18 September 1865), Courtland, Alabama.
- No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country.
- Article IV, Section 1, Constitution of the State of Alabama (1861)
- The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden...
- Article I, Section 9, Constitution of the Confederate States of America (11 March 1861)
- No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
- Section 9, Constitution of the Confederate States of America (11 March 1861), p. 10
- Citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states, and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any state of this Confederacy, with their slaves...
- Article IV, Section 9, Constitution of the Confederate States of America (11 March 1861)
- The right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
- Article IV, Section 9, Constitution of the Confederate States of America (11 March 1861)
- The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.
- Section 1, Article XV, Constitution of the State of Florida (10 January 1861)
- Down with the eagle!
- "Confederate Battle Cry of Freedom"
- To secure the proper police of the country, one person, either as agent, owner or overseer on each plantation on which one white person is required to be kept by the laws or ordinances of any State, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to do military service, and in States having no such law, one person as agent, owner or overseer, on each plantation of twenty negroes, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to military service; And furthermore, For additional police for every twenty negroes on two or more plantations, within five miles of each other, and each having less than twenty negroes, and of which there is no white male adult not liable to military duty, one person, being the oldest of the owners or overseers on such plantations;… are hereby exempted from military service in the armies of the Confederate States;… Provided, further, That the exemptions herein above enumerated and granted hereby, shall only continue whilst the persons exempted are actually engaged in their respective pursuits or occupations.
- Negroes and mulattoes who shall be engaged in war, or be taken in arms against the Confederate States, or shall give aid or comfort to the enemies of the Confederate States, shall, when captured in the Confederate States, be delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured, and dealt with...
- Resolved by the Congress of the Confederate States of America, in response to a message of the President, transmitted to Congress at the commencement of the present session, that, in the opinion of Congress, the commissioned officers of the enemy ought not to be delivered to the authorities of the respective States as suggested in the said message, but all captives taken by Confederate forces ought to be dealt with and disposed of by the Confederate Government.
- Sec. 2. That, in the judgment of Congress, the proclamations of the President of the United States dated respectively September twenty-second, eighteen hundred and sixty-two, and January first, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, and other measures of the Government of the United States and of its authorities, commanders and forces, designed or intending to emancipate slaves in the Confederate States, or to abduct such slaves, or to incite them to insurrection, or to employ negroes in war against the Confederate States, or to overthrow the institution of African slavery, and bring on a servile war in these States, would, if successful, produced atrocious consequences, and they are inconsistent with the spirit of those usage which in modern warfare prevail among civilized nations; they may, therefore, be properly and lawfully repressed by retaliation.
- Sec. 3. That in every case, wherein, during the present war, any violation of the laws or usages of war among civilized nations shall be, or has been, done and perpetrated by those acting under the authority of the Government of the United States, on the persons or property of citizens of the Confederate States, or of those under the protection or in the land or naval service of the Confederate States, or of any State of the Confederacy, the President of the Confederate States is hereby authorized to cause full and ample retaliation to be made for every such violation, in such manner and to such extent as he may think proper.
- Sec. 4. That every white person, being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command nergroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprize, attack or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, by 'put to death, or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court.
- Sec. 5. Every person, being a commissioned officer, or acting as such in the service of the enemy, who shall, during the present war, excite, attempt to excite, or cause to be excited, a servile insurrection, or who shall incite, or cause to be incited, a slave to rebel, shall, if captured, be put to death, or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court.
- Sec. 6. Every person charged with an office punishable under the preceding resolutions shall, during the present war, br tried before the military court attached to the army or corps by the troops of which he shall have been captured, or by such other military court as the President may direct, and in such manner and under such regulations as the President shall prescribe, and, after conviction, the President may commutate the punishment in such manner and on such terms as he may deem proper.
- Sec. 7. All negroes and mulattoes who shall be engaged in war, or be taken in arms against the Confederate States, or shall give aid or comfort to the enemies of the Confederate States, shall, when captured in the Confederate States, be delivered to the authorities of the State or States in which they shall be captured, and dealt with according to the present or future laws of such State or States. Approved May 1, 1863.
- The papers don't say much about it but the truth is these slaveholders, these three hundred and fifty thousand chivalrous southern gentlemen, who own some four million of poor ignorant fellows who pushed to the front and mowed down by Union bullets don't know what they are fighting for.
- Chauncey Herbert Cooke, letter to mother
- Some of the boys asked them what they were fighting for, and they answered, 'You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to the niggers.'
- Chauncey Herbert Cooke, letter to family (10 May 1864)
- This increasing unification has well-nigh obliterated State lines so far as concerns many relations of life. Yet, in a country of such enormous expanse, there must always be certain regional differences in social outlook and economic thought. The most familiar illustration of this is found in the history of slavery. The Constitution did not interfere with slavery, except to fix a time when the foreign slave trade should be abolished. Yet within a generation the country was confronting a sharp sectional division on this issue. Changing economic conditions made slavery profitable in the south, but left it unprofitable in the north. The resulting war might have been avoided if the south had adopted a policy of ultimate abolition. But as this method was not pursued the differences grew sharper until they brought on the great conflict.
- Calvin Coolidge, "The Reign of Law" (30 May 1925), speech at the Memorial Exercises, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington County, Virginia.
- I do not share the reverence for the Confederate heritage that blinds so many people to truths that seem painfully clear to others.
- John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (2005), p. x
- The South's theoretical distrust of a powerful central government was related directly to its real fear of what that would mean for the institution of slavery... The statesmen who led the secession movement were unashamed to explicitly cite the defense of slavery as their prime motive... Acknowledging the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy is essential.
- John Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (2005), pp. 23–27
- Mosby, Rhett, Davis, Stephens, and other Confederates had no difficulty conceding what their descendants go to enormous lengths to deny, that the raison d'être of the Confederacy was the defense of slavery. It follows that, as the paramount symbol of the Confederate nation and as the flag of the armies that kept the nation alive, the St. Andrew's cross is inherently associated with slavery. This conclusion is valid whether or not secession was constitutional. It is valid whether or not most southern soldiers consciously fought to preserve slavery. It is valid even though racism and segregation prevailed among nineteenth-century white northerners... Descendants of Confederates are not wrong to believe that the flag symbolized defense of constitutional liberties and resistance to invasion by military forces determined to crush an experiment in nationhood. But they are wrong to believe that this interpretation of the flag's meaning can be separated from the defense of slavery. They need only read the words of their Confederate ancestors to find abundant and irrefutable evidence.
- The Confederate flag's meaning in the 1960s was logical and historically consistent with its meaning in the 1860s, as a symbol of opposition to the employment of federal authority to change the south's racial status quo. There could be no more fitting opposition than the Confederate battle flag. Although segregationists lost their battle and their cause was discredited, attitudes of white supremacy live on.
- The end of slavery in 1865 did not eliminate the problems of racist gun control laws; the various Black Codes adopted after the Civil War required blacks to obtain a license before carrying or possessing firearms or Bowie knives; these are sufficiently well-known that any reasonably complete history of the Reconstruction period mentions them. These restrictive gun laws played a part in the efforts of the Republicans to get the Fourteenth Amendment ratified, because it was difficult for night riders to generate the correct level of terror in a victim who was returning fire. It does appear, however, that the requirement to treat blacks and whites equally before the law led to the adoption of restrictive firearms laws in the South that were equal in the letter of the law, but unequally enforced. It is clear that the vagrancy statutes adopted at roughly the same time, in 1866, were intended to be used against blacks, even though the language was race-neutral. The former states of the Confederacy, many of which had recognized the right to carry arms openly before the civil war, developed a very sudden willingness to qualify that right. One especially absurd example, and one that includes strong evidence of the racist intentions behind gun control laws, is Texas.
- Clayton Cramer, "The Racist Roots of Gun Control" (1995), Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy (1995).
- To talk of maintaining our independence while we abolish slavery is simply to talk folly.
- Courier (24 January 1865), Charleston.
- On Palm Sunday, at Appomattox Court House, the spirit of feudalism, of aristocracy, of injustice in this country, surrendered, in the person of Robert E. Lee, the Virginian slave-holder, to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and of equal rights, in the person of Ulysses S. Grant, the Illinois tanner. So closed this great campaign in the 'Good Fight of Liberty'. So the Army of the Potomac, often baffled, struck an immortal blow, and gave the right hand of heroic fellowship to their brethren of the west. So the silent captain, when all his lieutenants had secured their separate fame, put on the crown of victory and ended civil war. As fought the Lieutenant-General of the United States, so fight the United States themselves, in the 'Good Fight of Man'. With Grant's tenacity, his patience, his promptness, his tranquil faith, let us assault the new front of the old enemy. We, too, must push through the enemy's Wilderness, holding every point we gain. We, too, must charge at daybreak upon his Spottsylvania Heights. We, too, must flank his angry lines and push them steadily back. We, too, must fling ourselves against the baffling flames of Cold Harbor. We, too, outwitting him by night, must throw our whole force across swamp and river, and stand entrenched before his capital. And we, too, at last, on some soft, auspicious day of spring, loosening all our shining lines, and bursting with wild battle music and universal shout of victory over the last desperate defense, must occupy the very citadel of caste, force the old enemy to final and unconditional surrender, and bring Boston and Charleston to sing Te Deum together for the triumphant equal rights of man... Inferior race? Was it they who carved the skulls of our boys into drinking-cups and their bones into trinkets? Was it they who starved and froze our brothers into idiocy and madness at Andersonville and Belle-Isle? Was it they who hunted our darlings with bloodhounds, or hung faithful Union men before the very eyes of their wives and children? Come! Come! Brothers of my race, whether at the north or south, these things which we all execrate and abhor were the work of men of our own color.
- George William Curtis, "The Good Fight" (1865).
- Independence without slavery, would be valueless... The South without slavery would not be worth a mess of pottage.
- Caleb Cutwell, letter to the Galvaston Tri-Weekly (22 February 1865).
D
- We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.
- Jefferson Davis, reply in the Senate to William H. Seward (29 February 1860), Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol. As quoted in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 6, pp. 277–84. Transcribed from the Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 916–18
- We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.
- Jefferson Davis, speech (March 1861), as quoted in Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), by William C. Davis, New York: The Free Press, p. 137
- The zeal of the people is failing.
- Jefferson Davis, as quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007), by James Loewen, New York: New Press, pp. 225–226
- All peoples part with their myths reluctantly, and historians are at some risk when they try to dismantle those of the Confederacy... Myths simply throw roadblocks in the path to enlightenment, and it is from truth that we have the most to learn. One man's truth, however, can be another's myth, and only through dispassionate and disinterested dissection of such stories can we tell the difference. The Confederate experience is dotted with episodes that are not particularly admirable.
- William Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996), Kansas: University Press of Kansas, pp. 177–178
- In fact, the state rights defense of secession in 1860–1861 did not really appear in force until after 1865 as builders of the Lost Cause myth sought to distance themselves from slavery.
- William Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996), Kansas: University Press of Kansas, p. 180
- Legalistic Southerners tried to view the Constitution as a contract. Unfortunately, that viewpoint breaks down when viewed as a lawyer views a contract. There are very few ways to legally break a contract unilaterally.
- William Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996), Kansas: University Press of Kansas, p. 186
- [I]t is impossible to point to any other local issue but slavery and say that Southerners would have seceded and fought over it.
- [A]lways there had been the complicated factor of the one institution that peculiarly set the South apart from the North, slavery... Southern states had embraced the Union only insofar as it served to protect their rights to hold property in slaves, and to spread slavery as the nation expanded and the institution itself became intertwined as a defining element in the struggle for national power itself. In slavery could not spread as new states were formed, then the existing slave states would be doomed to perpetual minority in representation in Congress, guaranteeing that if the day came when Northern antipathy to slavery itself became hot enough, the majority could use the government to subvert the Constitution and abolish the institution where it already existed. In short, the South could not affort to lose any battle over slavery, nor even over issues on its periphery.
- William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, p. 3
- Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both. For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic... [S]o long as the number of slave states was the same as or greater than the number of free states, then in the Senate the South had a check on the government... Even in 1832 there were those in the South who confessed that the tariff was only a battlefield, not the war. If they did not fight their ground and win on the tariff, soon enough they would be fighting for something even closer to their hearths, slavery itself.
- William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, pp. 9–10
- [R]ace had never been a defining element in successful nation states. The true definition always depended far more on distinctions in language, culture, and political institutions. Southerners spoke precisely the same language as Northerners, so there was no distinction there... The only substantial difference between them, and the one that divided them politically almost since birth, was their system of labor... [T]he South had a far better chance of preserving its institutions and quirks of culture by remaining a part of a larger nation... Thanks to slavery, in the South capital and labor were combined in nearly four million sweating field hands picking cotton and planting rice.
- William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, pp. 20–21
- To the old Union they had said that the federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.
- William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, pp. 97–98
- The secession and the Confederacy's existence were predicated on slavery, on preserving and defending it against containment, as virtually all of its founders from Robert Barnwell Rhett to Jefferson Davis unashamedly declared in 1861.
- William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, p. 130
- Confederates were terrified of what was happening to slavery.
- William Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), New York: The Free Press, p. 159
- The true purpose of all government is to promote the welfare and provide for the protection and security of the governed, and when any form or organization of government proves inadequate for, or subversive of this purpose, it is the right, it is the duty of the latter to alter or abolish it. The Bill of Rights of Virginia, framed in 1776, reaffirmed in 1860, and again in 1851, expressly reserves this right to the majority of her people, and the existing constitution does not confer upon the General Assembly the power to call a Convention to alter its provisions, or to change the relations of the Commonwealth, without the previously expressed consent of such majority. The act of the General Assembly, calling the Convention which assembled at Richmond in February last, was therefore a usurpation; and the Convention thus called has not only abused the powers nominally entrusted to it, but, with the connivance and active aid of the executive, has usurped and exercised other powers, to the manifest injury of the people, which, if permitted, will inevitably subject them to a military despotism.
- We, therefore the delegates here assembled in Convention to devise such measures and take such action as the safety and welfare of the loyal citizens of Virginia may demand, having mutually considered the premises, and viewing with great concern, the deplorable condition to which this once happy Commonwealth must be reduced, unless some regular adequate remedy is speedily adopted, and appealing to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do hereby, in the name and on the behalf of the good people of Virginia, solemnly declare, that the preservation of their dearest rights and liberties and their security in person and property, imperatively demand the reorganization of the government of the Commonwealth, and that all acts of said Convention and Executive, tending to separate this Commonwealth from the United States, or to levy and carry on war against them, are without authority and void; and the offices of all who adhere to the said Convention and Executive, whether legislative, executive or judicial, are vacated.
- The Revolution was about creating a new system of government built on new principles while the secessionists were trying to maintain the same government that they said was oppressing them and building it on the principle of slavery. The Revolutionaries spoke of not wanting to be slaves while the secessionists spoke of wanting to maintain slaves. That paradox just keeps coming up all the time. How do you have a country built on liberty, equality, and freedom while at the same time you enslave your fellow man, deny equality based on gender and race, and say you are a nation of free people? This is why I personally say the Revolution has not ended. It certainly had not ended in 1861 because the Civil War and more specifically the struggle to end slavery in America was part of the egalitarian process set forth by the Revolution itself. It is still ongoing today because of the need to firmly establish equality today. The Civil War did not have to be a war. Slavery was going to end in some manner via legislation at some point, but the slave owners chose war instead. The results were different directly due to those slave owners making that choice. Everything they opposed came to pass with far, far worse consequences for them and the country as a whole had they not chosen to fight a war in order to perpetuate the expansion of slavery in America.
- Jimmy Dick, as quoted in Chat-Room (18 February 2014), Crossroads.
- My argument against the dissolution of the American Union is this. It would place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slave-holding states, and withdraw it from the power in the northern states which is opposed to slavery. Slavery is essentially barbarous in its character. It, above all things else, dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices. While in the Union it will meet with both. Its hope of life, in the last resort, is to get out of the Union. I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of the Union more completely under the power of the free states. What they most dread, that I most desire... The dissolution of the Union would not give the north a single advantage over slavery, but would take from it many. Within the Union we have a firm basis of opposition to slavery. It is opposed to all the great objects of the Constitution. The dissolution of the Union is not only an unwise but a cowardly measure; fifteen millions running away from three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders. Mister Garrison and his friends tell us that while in the Union we are responsible for slavery. He and they sing out 'No Union with slaveholders', and refuse to vote. I admit our responsibility for slavery while in the Union but I deny that going out of the Union would free us from that responsibility. There now clearly is no freedom from responsibility for slavery to any American citizen short to the abolition of slavery. The American people have gone quite too far in this slave-holding business now to sum up their whole business of slavery by singing out the cant phrase, 'No union with slaveholders'. To desert the family hearth may place the recreant husband out of the presence of his starving children, but this does not free him from responsibility. If a man were on board of a pirate ship, and in company with others had robbed and plundered, his whole duty would not be preformed simply by taking the longboat and singing out, 'No union with pirates'. His duty would be to restore the stolen property.
- Frederick Douglass, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (26 March 1860), Glasgow, United Kingdom.
- Shoot down the Confederacy and uphold the flag; the American flag.
- Frederick Douglass, "What the Black Man Wants", speech in Boston, Massachusetts (1865).
- We saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds...
- Frederick Douglass, Oratory in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (14 April 1876), Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.
- Southern gentlemen who led in the late rebellion have not parted with their convictions at this point, any more than at any other. They want to be independent of the negro. They believed in slavery and they believe in it still. They believed in an aristocratic class, and they believe in it still. Though they have lost slavery, one element essential to such a class, they still have two important conditions to the reconstruction of that class. They have intelligence, and they have land. Of these, the land is the more important. They cling to it with all the tenacity of a cherished superstition. They will neither sell to the negro, nor let the carpet-bagger have it in peace, but are determined to hold it for themselves and their children forever. They have not yet learned that when a principle is gone, the incident must go also; that what was wise and proper under slavery is foolish and mischievous in a state of general liberty; that the old bottles are worthless when the new wine has come; but they have found that land is a doubtful benefit, where there're no hands to till it.
- Frederick Douglass, Our Composite Nationality (7 December 1869), Boston, Massachusetts.
- Thus, God, as he is infinitely wise, just and holy, never could authorize the practice of a moral evil. But God has authorized the practice of slavery, not only by the bare permission of his Providence, but the express provision of his word. Therefore, slavery is not a moral evil.
- Pastor Dunwody, of South Carolina, as quoted in "Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought" (25 January 2011), by Gordon Rhea, Civil War Trust
E
- The Creator of the Universe had stamped them, indelibly, with a different color and an inferior physical and mental organization. He had not done this from mere caprice or whim, but for wise purposes. An amalgamation of the races was in contravention of His designs or He would not have made them so different. This immense number of people could not have been transported back to the wilds from which their ancestors were taken, or, if they could have been, it would have resulted in their relapse into barbarism. Reason, common sense, true humanity to the black, as well as the safety of the white race, required that the inferior race should be kept in a state of subordination. The conditions of domestic slavery, as it existed in the South, had not only resulted in a great improvement in the moral and physical condition of the negro race, but had furnished a class of laborers as happy and contented as any in the world.
- Jubal Early, as quoted in A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence in the Confederate States of America (2001), edited by Gary W. Gallagher. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, pp. xxv–xxvi.
- If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country.
- Clement Evans, as quoted in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000), by Alan T. Nolan and Gary W. Gallagher, pp. 13-14.
- But for a great many of the most powerful southerners the idea of arming and freeing the slaves was repugnant because the protection of slavery had been and still remained the central core of Confederate purpose... Slavery was the basis of the planter class's wealth, power, and position in society. The South's leading men had built their world upon slavery and the idea of voluntarily destroying that world, even in the ultimate crisis, was almost unthinkable to them.
F
- Control every single moment of a slaves life, every minute of their day; it would tell them where to go, what to wear, where to sleep, when to work, when to eat, what to eat, when to speak, when to be silent. This is probably the biggest form of government that human beings have ever invented in the whole of history. I vigorously support Abraham Lincoln’s federal takeover of the southern states, and his highly commendable commitment to human rights. Lincoln viewed secession as an attempt to expand slavery. The Confederacy was based on the glorification of inequality and tyranny. The southern leaders clearly spelled out their views. Their motivation was not to be left alone, it was to enshrine slavery. CSA President Jefferson Davis said all black people are 'not fit to govern themselves', and they should be treated in a manner similar to 'lunatics, criminals and children'.
- Joshua Felipe, as quoted in "The Libertarian Attack on Abraham Lincoln" (5 June 2010), by Gregory Hilton, The DC World Affairs Blog, WordPress
- Rally round the flag, boys—
Give it to the breeze!
That's the banner that we bore
On the land and seas.
Brave hearts are under it,
Let the traitors brag,
Gallant lads, fire away!
And fight for the flag.
Their flag is but a rag—
Ours is the true one;
Up with the Stars and Stripes!
with the new one!
Let our colors fly, boys—
Guard them day and night;
For victory is liberty,
And God will bless the right.- James Thomas Fields, "The Stars and Stripes"; reported in Florence Adams and Elizabeth McCarrick, Highdays & Holidays (1927), pp. 182–83
- The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became.
- Eric Foner, "The South's Inner Civil War" (March 1989), American Heritage, Volume 40, Issue 2
- Slavery, Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens proudly affirmed, was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Accordingly, slavery's disintegration compelled the Confederate government to take steps to save the institution, and these policies, in turn, sundered white society... The impression that planters were not bearing their fair share of the war’s burdens spread quickly in the upcountry. Committed to Southern independence, most planters were also devoted to the survival of plantation slavery, and when these goals clashed, the latter often took precedence.
- Eric Foner, "The South's Inner Civil War: The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became. To fully understand the vast changes the war unleashed on the country, you must first understand the plight of the Southerners who didn't want secession" (March 1989), American Heritage, Volume 40, Issue 2, pp. 1–6
- The Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class.
- The main driver of the decision to secede was the desire to protect slavery from the threat of the antislavery Republican Party. There were certainly secondary and tertiary conflicts between the free and slave states, but economic, political, and cultural divisions over slavery were THE problem. This is not what I say, this is what Confederates said. I have no reason to disbelieve what they said in their own words.
- Forever Free, "Fighting For Slavery?" (21 February 2013), Civil War Talk.
- This fight is against slavery; if we lose it, you will be made free.
- Nathan Bedford Forrest, as quoted in Report of the Joint Select Committee.
- Facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.
- Nathan Bedford Forrest, regarding the Fort Pillow massacre, as quoted in Personal Memoirs, by U.S. Grant, (Library of America, 1990), p. 483.
- The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct – intentional murder – for the vilest of reasons – racism and personal enmity.
- Richard Fuchs, as quoted in An Unerring Fire: The Massacre At Fort Pillow (2002), Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, p. 14.
G
- The social and economic system based on chattel slavery that the seceding states had sought to protect lay in ruins. The inviolability of the Union, most of the loyal citizenry’s pre-eminent concern throughout the conflict, was confirmed on the battlefield. In the longer term, preservation of the Union made possible the American economic and political colossus of the next century.
- Gary Gallagher, The American Civil War, Gilder Lehrman Institute.
- Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty. I admit that it is perilous to confer the franchise upon the ignorant and degraded; but if an educational test cannot be established, let suffrage be extended to all men of proper age, regardless of color. It may well be questioned whether the negro does not understand the nature of our institutions better than the equally ignorant foreigner. He was intelligent enough to understand from the beginning of the war that the destiny of his race was involved in it. He was intelligent enough to be true to that Union which his educated and traitorous master was endeavoring to destroy. He came to us in the hour of our sorest need, and by his aid, under God, the Republic was saved.
- James Garfield, oration delivered at Ravenna, Ohio (4 July 1865).
- The newspapers and the men that opposed the cause of the great Republic are those like the ass of the fable that dared kick the lion believing him fallen; but today as they see it rise in all its majesty, they change their language.
- Giuseppe Garibaldi, letter to the American minister in Italy
- The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party, while it attracts to itself by its creed, the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government; anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose.
- Georgia Declaration of Causes of Secession (January 1861).
- As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.
- Ulysses S. Grant, to Otto von Bismarck in June 1878, as quoted in Around the World with General Grant (1879), by John Russell Young, The American News Company, New York, vol. 7, p. 416.
- As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.
- Ulysses S. Grant, to Otto von Bismarck (June 1878), as quoted in Around the World with General Grant (1879), by John Russell Young, The American News Company, New York, vol. 7, p. 416
- There had to be an end of slavery. Then we were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty was possible – only destruction.
- Ulysses S. Grant, Around the World with General Grant (1879), p. 417.
- The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
- Ulysses S. Grant, regarding the Mexican–American War, as quoted in Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Chapter 3.
- For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be holy. As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.
- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 12.
- It was very much discussed whether the South would carry out its threat to secede and set up a separate government, the corner-stone of which should be, protection to the 'Divine' institution of slavery.
- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 16.
- I had known General Lee in the old army, and had served with him in the Mexican War; but did not suppose, owing to the difference in our age and rank, that he would remember me, while I would more naturally remember him distinctly, because he was the chief of staff of General Scott in the Mexican War.
When I had left camp that morning I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb. I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback on the field, and wore a soldier's blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. When I went into the house I found General Lee. We greeted each other, and after shaking hands took our seats. I had my staff with me, a good portion of whom were in the room during the whole of the interview.
What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.
- Ulysses S. Grant, as quoted in Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 67.
- The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that 'A state half slave and half free cannot exist.' All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.
- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Conclusion.
- The Union cause has suffered, and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to rebel slavery. Had you, sir, in your inaugural address, unmistakably given notice that, in case the rebellion already commenced were persisted in, and your efforts to preserve the Union and enforce the laws should be resisted by armed force, you would recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in Slavery by a traitor, we believe the rebellion would therein have received a staggering if not fatal blow.
- Horace Greeley, letter to Abraham Lincoln (19 August 1862).
- The end of the war should be the end of slavery, and, as a consequence, of rebellion.
- P. Densmore Gurley, White House Funeral Sermon for President Lincoln (19 April 1865).
H
- In the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should... [T]he election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions - nothing less than an open declaration of war - for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.
- Stephen F. Hale, letter to the Governor of Kentucky (December 1860)
- The states with the largest proportions of slaves and slave-holders seceded earliest.
- Andy Hall, "Not Surprising, Part Deux" (22 December 2013), Dead Confederates: A Civil War Era Blog.
- The Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department did not formally surrender until June 2, 1865, two months after the fall of Richmond. During that whole time, except for a few isolated areas, Texas was not occupied by Union troops and the whole area was in a sort of limbo, still officially in rebellion but without a clear course and without a national leadership. The U.S. Navy officially took possession of Texas on June 5, but did not have soldiers to establish a formal presence. General Granger arrived with troops at Galveston on June 17, and two days later issued a series of administrative notices formally notifying all of Texas that the state was now under formal military occupation, who the key officers and departments were, and so on. The third of these notices was General Order No. 3, that formally announced emancipation under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. These notices were published in papers around the state, first in Galveston and then elsewhere as the news was carried inland by telegraph and railroad.
- Andy Hall, "A Juneteenth Follow-Up" (22 June 2014), Dead Confederates: A Civil War Era Blog.
- June 5, 1865. Federal forces formally took possession of Texas. Captain Benjamin F. Sands, commanding the division of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron stationed off Galveston, boarded a small Union steamer, USS Cornubia, and entered Galveston harbor, followed by another gunboat, USS Preston. Sands disembarked with a handful of other officers, but took no armed escort, and was met on the wharf by a Confederate officer. The officer escorted the Union men a few blocks to City Hall, where both Sands and the mayor of Galveston addressed a crowd that had gathered there. Both men made assurances of their goodwill and urged the population to go about their business peaceably. Sands told the crowd that he carried a sidearm that day not out of any fear for his own safety but as a sign of respect for the mayor and local officials. Then, along with the mayor, Sands continued on to the old U.S. Customs House, where he 'hoisted our flag, which now, at last, was flying over every foot of our territory, this being the closing act of the great rebellion'.
- Andy Hall, "The Closing Act of the Great Rebellion" (5 June 2015), Dead Confederates: A Civil War Era Blog.
- The central, motivating, pivotal purpose driving the South to secede was slavery.
- Clark B. Hall, letter to the editor (2011), Middleburg, Virginia
- It is difficult to determine whether Georgians hated Sherman and his army as much as the Spartans despised Epaminondas and the Thebans. Both men had wrecked their centuries-old practice of apartheid in a matter of weeks. It is a dangerous and foolhardy thing for a slaveholding society to arouse a democracy of such men.
- Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (1999), New York City: The Free Press, p. 9
- The southern slave's eagerness to be free and willingness not just to leave but to fight, the Union army's embrace of their plight, the physical destruction of the plantation, and the psychological humiliation of the plantation class, all this illustrated that an apartheid state, once cracked, shatters and can ever be reconstituted again. From the freeing of the slaves Sherman's men gained the moral imperative... In turn, from Sherman's men the slaves at last could prove they too were human, even more humane than their masters.
- Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (1999), New York City: The Free Press, p. 210
- Had he been in command of white troops, I should have given him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the common trench with the niggers that fell with him.
- Johnson Hagood, Confederate officer, regarding Robert Gould Shaw. As quoted in Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-century Reform (2003), by Lorien Foote, Ohio University Press, p. 119.
- There would have been no Confederate government if the southern states had not seceded. There would have been no secession if the southern states had not felt that the future of slavery was threatened by their continuance in the Union. Slavery is the root of it ALL. Take slavery out of the equation, and there would have been no secession and no war.
- John Hartwell, Civil War Talk (6 September 2015)
- Fellow citizens, in the name of your rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by the Convention, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the Constitution of Texas, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of my own conscience and manhood, which this Convention would degrade by dragging me before it, to pander to the malice of my enemies, I refuse to take this oath. I deny the power of this Convention to speak for Texas....I protest....against all the acts and doings of this convention and I declare them null and void
- Sam Houston, as quoted in Sam Houston (2004), by James Haley, University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 390–91
- Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence if God be not against you, but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of states rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.
- Sam Houston, as quoted in Sam Houston (2004), by James Haley, University of Oklahoma Press, p. 397
- Our people are going to war to perpetuate slavery, but the war will be its death knell.
- Sam Houston, as quoted in "Revering Sam Houston, anti-Confederate patriot" (18 March 2016), by Michael Zak, Grand Old Partisan
- Why has the south become so toadyish and sycophantic? I think it is because the best and noblest were killed off during the war and that the scum eleemnt is now in the ascendancy.
- D.H. Hill, letter to Jubal Early
- The CSA definitely wanted a huge government which would permanently enslave the three million blacks living in the south. They wanted a government which would control every aspect of a slave's life.
- Gregory Hilton, "The Libertarian Attack on Abraham Lincoln" (5 June 2010), The DC World Affairs Blog, WordPress
- This is the last disgusting death-rattle of a corrupt and outworn system which is a blot on the history of this people. Since the civil war, in which the southern states were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. In that war, it was not the Southern States, but the American people themselves who were conquered. In this spurious blossoming of economic progress and power politics, America has ever since been drawn deeper into the mire of progressive self-destruction. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.
- Adolf Hitler, during an after-dinner discussion in Munich (1933), regarding the American Civil War
- It certainly makes the rebels wince to see their 'niggers' taken off which is a source of private satisfaction to me.
- Lucius Hubbard, letter to Mary Hubbard (8 September 1862)
- You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-beings in ignorance and degradation;–liberty to separate parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister;–liberty to steal the products of their labor, exacted with many a cruel lash and bitter tear;–liberty to seduce their wives and daughters, and to sell your own children into bondage;–liberty to kill these children with impunity, when the murder cannot be proven by one of pure white blood. This is the kind of liberty–the liberty to do wrong–which Satan, Chief of the fallen Angels, was contending for when he was cast into Hell.
J
- Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the 'silent minority', the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so. Stephens, who was Vice President of the Confederacy, had also been widely known, north and south, as one of the intellectual luminaries of his time... The vice-president and the president of the Confederate States of America grounded their justification of American slavery on the grounds of a fraudulent science and a crazy fundamentalism. No sane person today can regard them as other than pathetic reminders of a society, like Nazi Germany, mentally unbalanced by its commitment to human inequality... Calhoun was the philosopher-king of the old south, the spiritual mentor of Stephens, Davis, and most of the political leaders of the Confederacy... We see here the essence of the southern understanding of equality, why it was so highly prized, and why so resolutely defended. Every white man can be proud of himself, can consider himself an aristocrat, not because of his virtues or accomplishments, but simply because he is not black! By rejecting the principle that all men are created equal, by keeping 'the degenerate sons of Ham' under foot, and under the lash, one need never do anything to become important, like members of the royal family. It is not without reason that Lincoln compared slavery to the divine right of kings! Calhoun demanded equality no less than Lincoln. But his equality required a 'cornerstone' of slavery.
- Harry V. Jaffa, "Defending the Cause of Human Freedom" (15 April 1994), The Claremont Institute, The Claremont Institute.
- This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. From the end of Reconstruction until after World War II, the idea of racial inequality gripped the territory of the former Confederacy, and not only of the former Confederacy, more profoundly than it had done is slavery. Nor is its influence by any means at an end.
- Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, p. 223.
- If a minority, losing an election, can break up the government rather than accept the results of the election, free government is impossible. If the only alternatives to rule by a constitutional majority, I say, constitutional majority, a majority formed under the rules of the constitution with minority rights secured. There were no examples of the Republicans doing anything to prevent the opposition from having freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association. There was a great deal of interference with those rights in the southern states. But they lost the election according to their own rights. And Lincoln said that if people can break up the government rather than accept the results of a fairly conducted election, then the only alternatives are anarchy or tyranny. What is to prevent, he said, anyone of the states seceding from any future union?
- Harry V. Jaffa, "The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate" (7 May 2002), The Independent Institute.
- You can not have free government if you can not bind the people who participate in the government to accept the results of the election. It is the exercise of our inalienable right to life that enables us, and justifies us, in forming legitimate governments. When those governments are formed, we cannot reject them because we don't like the results... There were many reasons why the south did not appeal to the right of revolution. One reason was that there were no abuses that they had been subject to, comparable to the ones enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said that there was not a single constitutional right which anybody could point to, to say that that had been violated. They were exercising this right as something that was to their pleasure, for their own purposes, but that had nothing to do with the Constitution, and yet they were claiming it as a Constitutional right to withdraw from the Union... It was a terrible war. The idea that the cost of the war is due to Lincoln is simply absurd. It was a terrible war because the country was deeply divided, and the question of the future of the nation, whether or not it would be based upon principles recognized as principles of individual liberty, or whether the idea of one race dominating another race would be accepted as a means for governance.
- Harry V. Jaffa, "The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate" (7 May 2002), The Independent Institute.
- The South knew that it would never in future possess the same power relative to the North that it did in 1861. From that perspective, it was now for never or Southern independence, if slavery was to be preserved.
- Harry V. Jaffa, "The Speech That Changed the World" (6 February 2009), Writings, The Claremont Institute.
- This great national strife originated with men and measures that were … opposed to a democratic form of government.… The fact is, these bombastic, high-falutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think … that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride and suspicion the poor.
- Alexander H. Jones, as quoted in "The South's Inner Civil War: The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became. To fully understand the vast changes the war unleashed on the country, you must first understand the plight of the Southerners who didn't want secession" (March 1989), by Eric Foner, American Heritage, Volume 40, Issue 2, pp. 4
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- The South understood that to appeal to the right of revolution, as Jefferson had in the Declaration, was necessarily to appeal to the idea of individual natural rights. Southern leaders balked at such an appeal, because they understood that natural rights flew in the face of their fantastic justifications for slavery.
- Thomas L. Krannawitter, "Dishonest About Abe" (10 May 2002), Claremont Review of Books, The Claremont Institute
- No one reading the literature of the antebellum period can honestly deny that slavery and race were at the heart of the Southern resolve to make war on the Union rather than accept Lincoln's election. It is why, on the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln wrote to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens.
- Thomas L. Krannawitter, "Why Lincoln Still Matters" (11 February 2005), Precepts, The Claremont Institute
- Alexander H. Stephens: Which now extinguishes slavery. And with it our economy. All our laws will be determined by a Congress of vengeful Yankees, all our rights will be subject to a Supreme Court benched by bloody Republican radicals. All our traditions will be obliterated. We won't know ourselves anymore.
- Lincoln (2012), written by Tony Kushner
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- Our plain view of the war is simply this. For a long series of years the people of the North differed with those of the South upon the question of slavery and the relations between the states and Federal government. All peaceable means of adjustment were resorted to and failed to reconcile us. At last the controversy was referred to that tribunal from whose decision there is no appeal–to the tribunal of war,–the arbitrament of the sword.
- Ladies of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, letter to Andrew Johnson (22 September 1865).
- The southern man could see no reason of state, of law, or of religion which required him to yield his most ancient rights and his most valuable property to the new-born zeal of adversaries whom he more than suspect of being actuated by mere malignity under the guise of philanthropy. All that he knew or had ever known of the policy of the state, of religion, or of law was on the side of slavery. It was his inheritance in the land descended from his most remote ancestry.
- Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 (1895), p. 63
- It is no wonder that Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis became the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. Who but a Democrat could be so devoted to slavery?
- Michael Todd Landis, "Dinesh D’Souza Claims in a New Film that the Democratic Party Was Pro-Slavery. Here's the Sad Truth" (13 March 2016), History News Network
- Confederates openly celebrated the cause of establishing a slaveholding republic and the defense of white supremacy. They embraced it as the foundation of their new nation and as an improvement on the nation from which they left behind. It constituted their understanding of Confederate exceptionalism.
- Kevin Levin, "The White Man's Flag" (1 July 2015), Civil War Memory.
- The Confederate States of America came into existence to preserve African American slavery and white supremacy. After slavery's legal abolition, the defenders of white supremacy quite logically looked back upon the slaveholders' republic as their true forebears. If the country is at last really ready to cease celebrating and honoring the Confederacy and its symbols, it should do so with a full awareness of the long and poisonous traditions that makes this necessary.
- The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint.
- The Lieber Code of 1863, United States Department of War, referring to Confederate enslavement of captured U.S. soldiers.
- The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same name — liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable names — liberty and tyranny.
- President Abraham Lincoln, address at sanitary fair, Baltimore, Maryland (18 April 1864)
- As quoted in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 7, p. 301–2 (1953)
- Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
- Abraham Lincoln, Letter to H.L. Pierce and others (Springfield, Illinois, April 6, 1859), published in Essential American History: Abraham Lincoln - The Complete Papers and Writings, Biographically Annotated, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 2012, Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck, 86450 Münster, Germany, ISBN: 97838496200103
- You say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers... You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it, and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry? John Brown? John Brown was no Republican, and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander. Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair... But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union, and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' To be sure, what the robber demanded of me, my money, was my own, and I had a clear right to keep it, but it was no more my own than my vote is my own, and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle... What can we do to satisfy our Southern brethren? No assurances that we give them that we will have no intention of interfering with the institution of slavery where it exists will satisfy them. We must get rid of all anti-slavery sentiments from our state constitutions... The Democrats cry John Brown invasion. We are guiltless of it, but our denial does not satisfy them. Nothing will satisfy them but disinfecting the atmosphere entirely of all opposition to slavery. They have not demanded of us to yield the guards of liberty in our state constitutions, but it will naturally come to that after a while. If we give up to them, we cannot refuse even their utmost request. If slavery is right, it ought to be extended; if not, it ought to be restricted, there is no middle ground. Wrong as we think it, we can afford to let it alone where it of necessity now exists; but we cannot afford to extend it into free territory and around our own homes. Let us stand against it!
- Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union address (27 February 1860), New York City, New York.
- This Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.
- Abraham Lincoln, address to the New Jersey Senate (21 February 1861); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 4, p. 236.
- The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was to form a more perfect Union...
Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern states that, by the accession of a Republican administration, their property and peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension...
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these states is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law (constitution) for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever....
Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by the constitutional checks and limitations... is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism....
No State upon its mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.... There needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forded upon the national authority....
In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend' it...
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
- Abraham Lincoln, first inaugural address (4 March 1861)
- We, on our side, are praying Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, look for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
- Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, as quoted in The Life of Abraham Lincoln: Drawn from Original Sources (1900), Volume 3, New York: Lincoln History Society, p. 124.
- The assault upon and reduction of Fort Sumter was in no sense a matter of self-defense on the part of the assailants. They well knew that the garrison in the fort could by no possibility commit aggression upon them. They knew, they were expressly notified, that the giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison was all which would on that occasion be attempted, unless themselves, by resisting so much, should provoke more. They knew that this government desired to keep the garrison in the fort, not to assail them, but merely to maintain visible possession, and thus to preserve the Union from actual and immediate dissolution, trusting, as herein before stated, to time, discussion, and the ballot box for final adjustment; and they assailed and reduced the fort for precisely the reverse object, to drive out the visible authority of the federal union, and thus force it to immediate dissolution. That this was their object the executive well understood; and having said to them in the inaugural address, 'You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors', he took pains not only to keep this declaration good, but also to keep the case so free from the power of ingenious sophistry as that the world should not be able to misunderstand it... This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or can not maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?
- Abraham Lincoln, July 4th message to Congress (4 July 1861).
- This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend.
- Abraham Lincoln, July 4th message to Congress (4 July 1861).
- It might seem at first thought to be of little difference whether the present movement at the South be called 'secession' or 'rebellion'. The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much pride in and reverence for the history and Government of their common country as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all the incidents to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. With rebellion thus sugar coated they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretense of taking their State out of the Union who could have been brought to no such thing the day before.
- Abraham Lincoln, message to the U.S. Congress (4 July 1861)
- The Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.
- Abraham Lincoln, private conversation (January 1862)
- In my opinion the religion that makes men rebel and fight against their government is not the genuine article, nor is the religion the right sort which reconciles them to the idea of eating their bread in the sweat of other men's faces. It is not the kind to get to heaven on.
- Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 (1895), by Ward Hill Lamon, p. 90
- With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.
- President Abraham Lincoln, address at sanitary fair, Baltimore, Maryland (18 April 1864)
- As quoted in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 7, p. 301–2 (1953)
- In this great struggle, this form of government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by everyone. There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed. I say this in order to impress upon you, if you are not already so impressed, that no small matter should divert us from our great purpose. There may be some irregularities in the practical application of our system. It is fair that each man shall pay taxes in exact proportion to the value of his property; but if we should wait before collecting a tax to adjust the taxes upon each man in exact proportion with every other man, we should never collect any tax at all. There may be mistakes made sometimes; things may be done wrong while the officers of the government do all they can to prevent mistakes. But I beg of you, as citizens of this great republic, not to let your minds to carried off from the great work we have before us. This struggle is too large for you to be diverted from it by any small matter. When you return to your homes rise up to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government, and we will carry out the great work we have commenced. I return to you my sincere thanks, soldiers, for the honor you have done me this afternoon.
- Abraham Lincoln, speech to the One Hundred Sixty-fourth Ohio Regiment (18 August 1864), delivered at Washington, D.C.
- One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it... Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.
- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (March 1865), Washington, D.C.; Lincoln was alluding to Jesus' words in in Matthew 7:1 "Judge not, that ye be not judged." (KJV)
- You talk of the North cutting the throats of the Southern people. You have all cut your own throats, and, unfortunately, have cut many of those of the North.
- Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), by David Dixon Porter, p. 308
- Between 1890 and about 1970, northerners found it less embarrassing to let Dixie tell the story of the cause it lost than to reminisce about the cause they had abandoned. The Civil War had been about something other than states' rights after all. It began as a war to force or prevent the breakup of the United States. As it ground on it became a struggle to end slavery. At Gettysburg in the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln was already proclaiming 'a new birth of freedom', black freedom. Conversely, on their way to and from Gettysburg, Lee's troops seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery. This was in keeping with Confederate national policy, which virtually re-enslaved free people of color into work gangs on earthworks throughout the south.
- During the civil war, northern Democrats countered the Republican charge that they favored rebellion by profession to be the 'white man's party'. They protested the government's emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia and its diplomatic recognition of Haiti. They claimed Republicans had nothing but 'nigger on the brain'. They were enraged when the U.S. Army accepted African American recruits; and they made race a paramount factor in their campaigns. In those days before television, parties held coordinated rallies. On the last Sunday before the election, Democratic senators might address crowds in each major city. Local officeholders would hold forth in smaller towns. Each of these rallies featured music. Hundreds of thousands of songbooks were printed so the party faithful might sing the same songs coast to coast. A favorite in 1864 was sung to the tune of 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'. The new national anthem, 'Nigger Doodle Dandy'.
- James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007), New York: New Press
- Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological contradictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began. John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the 'Black Republicans' who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates but only pushed them toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was truly dangerous, as slave owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy slaves would never revolt... White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white supremacy. Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sold them south into slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them.
- According to Confederate ideology, blacks liked slavery; nevertheless, to avert revolts and runaways, the Confederate states passed the 'twenty nigger law', exempting from military conscription one white man as overseer for every twenty slaves. Throughout the war, Confederates withheld as much as a third of their fighting forces from the front lines and scattered them throughout areas with large slave populations to prevent slave uprisings. When the United States allowed African Americans to enlist, Confederates were forced by their ideology to assert that it would not work; blacks would hardly fight like white men. The undeniable bravery of the 54th Massachusetts and other black regiments disproved the idea of black inferiority. Then came the incongruity of truly beastly behavior by southern whites towards captured black soldiers, such as the infamous Fort Pillow massacre by troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest, who crucified black prisoners on tent frames and then burned them alive, all in the name of preserving white civilization...
- James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007), New York: New Press, pp. 224–225
- Some Confederate soldiers switched sides, beginning as early as 1862. When Sherman made his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because thousands of white southerners volunteered along the way. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the Confederate army disappeared through desertion. Eighteen thousand slaves joined Sherman, so many that the army had to turn some away. Compare these facts with the portrait common in our textbooks of Sherman's marauders looting their way through a united south. The increasing ideological confusion in the Confederate states, coupled with the increasing strength of the United States, helps explains the Union victory... Many nations and people have continued to fight with far inferior means and weapons... The Confederacy's ideological contradictions were its gravest liabilities, ultimately causing its defeat.
- James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007), New York: New Press, pp. 225–226
- Take Kentucky. Kentucky's legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found 'no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility … in Kentucky.' Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.
- Neo-Confederates also won western Maryland. In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put a soldier on a pedestal at the Rockville courthouse. Montgomery County never seceded, of course. While Maryland did send 24,000 men to the Confederate armed forces, it sent 63,000 to the U.S. Army and Navy. Nevertheless, the UDC's monument tells visitors to take the other side: 'To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland / That we through life may not forget to love the Thin Gray Line'. In fact, the Thin Grey Line came through Montgomery and adjoining Frederick counties at least three times, en route to Antietam, Gettysburg and Washington. Lee's army expected to find recruits and help with food, clothing and information. They didn't. Maryland residents greeted Union soldiers as liberators when they came through on the way to Antietam. Recognizing the residents of Frederick as hostile, Confederate cavalry leader Jubal Early demanded and got $300,000 from them lest he burn their town, a sum equal to at least $5,000,000 today. Today, however, Frederick boasts what it calls the 'Maryland Confederate Memorial', and the manager of the Frederick cemetery — filled with Union and Confederate dead — told me in an interview, “Very little is done on the Union side” around Memorial Day. “It’s mostly Confederate.”
- 'The Thin Grey Line' came through Montgomery and Frederick counties at least three times, en route to Antietam in 1862, Gettysburg in 1863, and Washington in 1864. Lee's army expected to find recruits and help with food, clothing, and information. This did not happen, although the army did kidnap every African American it came upon, dragging them back into Virginia as slaves. In a further irony, on the courthouse grounds not far from the Confederate monument, a historical marker tells of J.E.B. Stuart's 1863 raid nearby, in which he captured 'as many as a hundred' African Americans and enslaved them, but they are invisible. The marker only mentions the capture of '150 U.S. wagons'. During the first invasion, Maryland residents greeted Union soldiers 'as liberators' when they came through on their way to Antietam, according to historian William F. Howard. During the last invasion, when Confederate cavalry leader Jubal Early came through, he demanded and got $300,000 from the leading merchants of Frederick, lest he burn their town, a sum equal to at least five million dollars today.
- James W. Loewen, "What Does Rockville, Maryland's Confederate Monument Tell Us About the Civil War? About the Nadir? About the Present?" (19 July 2015), History News Network
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- We are a band of brothers and native to the soil, fighting for the property we gained by honest toil!
- Harry McCarthy, "The Bonnie Blue Flag" (1861), Louisiana: A.E. Blackmar
- The U.S. Constitution also bent over backwards to avoid using the term 'slave' or 'slavery' in the document, but the pro-slavery CSA apparently didn't have a problem calling a spade a spade.
- In February of 1861 six states seceded from the United States of America and declared themselves independent. They formed a new, rival country known as the Confederate States of America. In the months that followed, seven more American states followed suit, slicing the former United States into two clearly-divded rival factions. The Civil War that followed, in which the armies of the Confederacy fought the armies of the remaining United States, is one of the seminial events of American history. But why was the Civil War even fought in the first place? Heck, why did the Confederacy even exist? Modern-day Confederate apologists insist the southern states only separated in response to legitimate political grievances, namely that the south's capacity for self-government was being unjustly restrained by a tyrannical federal government dominated by northern politicians who had no respect for 'states' rights', federalism, and local sovereignty. Everyone else insists the Confederacy was founded for a much less noble reason, namely to keep slavery legal at a time when the rest of country was uniting against the practice. We can get a good glimpse into the founding principles of the Confederacy by taking an in-depth look at the Confederate constitution, which was approved, and came into use by the rebel states on March 11, 1861. The document is largely a word-for-word copy of the United States constitution, but with several key changes. The changes offer the clearest window of insight into how precisely the CSA intended to be different from the USA, and why.
- The CSA constitution does not radically alter the federal system that was established by the United States constitution. It is therefore very debatable as to whether the CSA was a significantly more pro-'states' rights' country, as supporters claim, in any meaningful sense. At least three states rights are explicitly taken away, the freedom of states to grant voting rights to non-citizens, the freedom of states to trade freely with each other, and of course the freedom of states to outlaw slavery within their borders. States only gain four minor rights under the Confederate system, the power to enter into treaties with other states to regulate waterways, the power to tax foreign and domestic ships that use their waterways, the power to impeach federally-appointed state officials, and the power to distribute 'bills of credit'. As previously noted, the CSA constitution does not modify many of the most controversial, from a states' rights perspective, clauses of the American constitution, including the 'Supremacy' clause, the 'Commerce' clause, and the 'Necessary and Proper' clause. Nor does the CSA take away the federal government's right to suspend habeus corpus or 'suppress insurrections'. As far as slave-owning rights go, however, the document is much more effective. Four different clauses entrench the legality of slavery in a number of different ways, and together they virtually guarantee that any sort of anti-slave law or policy would be unconstitutional... People can claim the Civil War was 'not about slavery' as much as they want, but the fact remains that anyone who fought for the Confederacy was fighting for a country in which a universal right to own slaves was one of the most entrenched laws of the land.
- To a good many southerners the events of 1861–1865 have been known as 'The War of Northern Aggression'. Never mind that the South took the initiative by seceding in defiance of an election of a president by a constitutional majority. Never mind that the Confederacy started the war by firing on the American flag. These were seen as preemptive acts of defense against northern aggression...
- James M. McPherson, "The War of Southern Aggression" (19 January 1989), The New York Review of Books
- The Alabama Democratic convention [instructed] its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories. Other lower-South Democratic organizations followed suit. In February, Jefferson Davis presented the substance of southern demands to the Senate in resolutions affirming that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common territories.
- James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), p. 214
- Slavery was at the root of what the Civil War was all about. If there had been no slavery, there would have been no war, and that ultimately what the Confederacy was fighting for was to preserve a nation based on a social system that incorporated slavery. Had that not been the case, there would have been no war. That's an issue that a lot of Southern whites today find hard to accept.
- James M. McPherson, "James McPherson: What They Fought For, 1861-1865" (22 May 1994), Booknotes, United States of America: National Cable Satellite Corporation
- Once the decision was made to use black soldiers to put down the rebellion, the conviction began to grow that blacks who fought for the Union were far more deserving of rights and political power than Southern whites who fought to destroy the country. And I think that is the fundamental reason for the transformation of attitudes of a lot of Northerners. Southern slaves were now friends of the Union, they were fighting, risking their lives to preserve this Union against their masters who were killing northern soldiers and were traitors trying to destroy the great republican experiment of 1776. That sort of attitude persisted through, I'd say, about 1868 or 1870.
- James M. McPherson, as quoted in "An exchange with a Civil War historian" (19 June 1995), by David Walsh, International Workers Bulletin
- Confederate soldiers from slaveholding families expressed no feelings of embarrassment or inconsistency in fighting for their own liberty while holding other people in slavery. Indeed, white supremacy and the right of property in slaves were at the core of the ideology for which Confederate soldiers fought.
- James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), New York City: Oxford University Press, Inc., p. 106
- It would be wrong, however, to assume that Confederate soldiers were constantly preoccupied with this matter. In fact, only 20 percent of the sample of 429 Southern soldiers explicitly voiced proslavery convictions in their letters or diaries. As one might expect, a much higher percentage of soldiers from slaveholding families than from nonslaveholding families expressed such a purpose: 33 percent, compared with 12 percent. Ironically, the proportion of Union soldiers who wrote about the slavery question was greater, as the next chapter will show. There is a ready explanation for this apparent paradox. Emancipation was a salient issue for Union soldiers because it was controversial. Slavery was less salient for most Confederate soldiers because it was not controversial. They took slavery for granted as one of the Southern 'rights' and institutions for which they fought, and did not feel compelled to discuss it. Although only 20 percent of the soldiers avowed explicit proslavery purposes in their letters and diaries, none at all dissented from that view. But even those who owned slaves and fought consciously to defend the institution preferred to discourse upon liberty, rights, and the horrors of subjugation.
- James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), New York City: Oxford University Press, Inc., pp. 109–110
- Confederate victory would destroy the United States.
- James M. McPherson, "No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865" (2003), American Historical Association
- While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states' rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.
- James M. McPherson, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (2007). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3-9
- Southern political leaders were threatening to take their states out of the Union if a Republican president was elected on a platform restricting slavery.
- James M. McPherson, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (2007), p. 188
- The bottom line in the Civil War, after all is said and done, showed that every Confederate state was a slave state and every free state was a Union state. These facts were not a coincidence, and every Civil War soldier knew it.
- James M. McPherson, North & South Magazine (January 2008), Vol. 10, No. 4, p. 59
- I have never doubted what Virginia would do when the alternatives present themselves to her intelligent and gallant people, to choose between an association with her sisters and the dominion of a people, who have chosen their leader upon the single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon, and with the purpose of placing our slaves on equality with ourselves and our friends of every condition! and if we of South Carolina have aided in your deliverance from tyranny and degradation, as you suppose, it will only the more assure us that we have performed our duty to ourselves and our sisters in taking the first decided step to preserve an inheritance left us by an ancestry whose spirit would forbid its being tarnished by assassins. We, of South Carolina, hope soon to greet you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies, and from which we may transmit to our posterity the rights, privileges, and honor left us by our ancestors.
- John McQueen, Correspondence to T. T. Cropper and J. R. Crenshaw (24 December 1860), Washington, D.C., as quoted in "Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought" (25 January 2011), by Gordon Rhea, Civil War Trust
- For it and its perpetuation we commenced and have kept at war.
- Memphis Appeal, regarding slavery, as quoted in Macon Telegraph and Confederate (31 October 1864)
- The Confederate flag symbolizes racism. It's not a gentle association, or one that grew over time. It was created explicitly and transparently to be a symbol of white superiority over blacks, and to be the international symbol for a white south.
- Daniel Miessler, "William Thompson Designed the Confederate Flag Explicitly as a Racist Symbol" (27 June 2015), Daniel Miessler
- The south went to war on account of slavery. South Carolina went to war, as she said in her Secession proclamation, because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln... I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery, a soldier fights for his country, right or wrong, he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in. The South was my country.
- John S. Mosby, letter to Samuel "Sam" Chapman (4 June 1907)
- I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the north about. I've never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.
- John S. Mosby, letter (1894), as quoted in The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (2005), by John M. Coski
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- As ensigns of an unholy cause the Confederate flags are, and of right ought to be, odious to the eyes of loyalty.
- National Tribune, Washington
- Many people still believe in delusions about the Confederacy seceding for benign reasons. That’s because misconceptions about the Civil War are still too prevalent in the general public.
- David Navarro, "Race and Slavery, North and South: Some Logical Fallacies" (10 July 2015), Crossroads.
- I know enough of the southern spirit that I think they will fight for the institution of slavery even to extermination.
- New York corporal, as quoted in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), by James M. McPherson, New York City: Oxford University Press, Inc., p. 108
- Leaders of such a catastrophe must account for themselves. Justification is necessary. Those who followed their leaders into the catastrophe required similar rationalization. Clement A. Evans, a Georgia veteran who at one time commanded the United Confederate Veterans organization, said this: 'If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country.'
- Alan Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000), pp. 13-14
O
- No serious historian still denies that the Southern states seceded in order to protect slavery.
- Mackubin Thomas Owens, "The South Was Right, the Historians Are Wrong: Taking the Antislavery Origins of the Civil War Seriously" (12 September 2013), Liberty & Law
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- A comrade wearing the badge or uniform of the order and participates in any demonstration where the 'Rebel' flag is displayed, violates his obligation to maintain true allegiance to the United States of America... and brings disgrace upon the order of which he is a member.
- John A. Palmer, order (1891), Grand Army of the Republic
- There still lurks in the hearts of a few a desire, by display of the flag, to fire the hearts of the young generation of the south to rebellion.
- John A. Palmer Grand Army of the Republic
- A rebel officer... has as much right to bear the traitor's flag through thestreets of a loyal city as he has to wear the traitor's garb. It is against the terms of surrender and is an act of hostility against the government of the United States.
- John A. Palmer Grand Army of the Republic
- Our masters tried all they could to make us fight... They promised to give us our freedom and money besides, but none of us believed them; we only fought because we had to.
- John Parker, as quoted in "Slavery and Freedom at Bull Run" (27 July 2011), by Kate Masur, The New York Times, New York
- I have never been in favor of the abolition of slavery until since this war has determined me in the conviction that it is a greater sin than our Government is able to stand... It is opposed to the Spirit of the age – and in my opinion this Rebellion is but the death struggle of the overgrown monster.
- Eli K. Pickett, U.S. sergeant, in a letter to his wife (27 March 1863)
- It looked queer to me to see boxes labeled 'His Excellency, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America'. The packages so labeled contained Bass ale or Cognac brandy, which cost 'His Excellency' less than we Yankees had to pay for it. Think of the President drinking imported liquors while his soldiers were living on pop-corn and water!
- David Dixon Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 274
- Why did southern states secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861? Read Charles Dew's clear and penetrating interpretation of what the Southern secession commissioners said and wrote at the time, making their case not just for the act of secession but for establishing a new nation based on the protection and perpetuation of its 'institutions', and one especially. Slavery... The impulses behind secession and the war secession brought about, about the motives of white Southerners who sought to establish an independent Southern nation, one based on the protection and perpetuation of its 'institutions', and one institution especially. Slavery.
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- Oh, I'm a good old Rebel soldier, now that's just what I am. For this 'Fair Land of Freedom' I do not give a damn! I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won, and I don't want no pardon for anything I done. I hates the Constitution, this 'Great Republic', too! I hates the Freedman's Bureau and uniforms of blue! I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss, and the lying, thieving Yankees, I hates them wuss and wuss! I hates the Constitution, this 'Great Republic', too! I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do. I hates the Declaration of Independence, too!
- Secession was required to preserve slavery. Why should non-slaveholders care? Because slavery was the will of God, and those who opposed the institution–the abolitionists–were by definition anti-God. More to the point, secession was necessary to preserve white supremacy, to avoid a race war, and to prevent racial amalgamation. For Southerners to remain in the Union, be they slave-owners or non-slave-owners, meant losing their property, their social standing, and the 'sacred purity of our daughters'. Tariffs appear nowhere in these sermons and speeches, and 'states' rights' are mentioned only in the context of the rights of states to decide whether some of their inhabitants can own other humans. The central message was to play on the fear of African barbarians at the gate. The preachers and politicians delivered on their promise. The Confederate States were established explicitly to preserve and expand the institution of slavery. Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president, said so himself in 1861, in unambiguous terms.
- Gordon Rhea, "Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought" (25 January 2011), Civil War Trust
- While the rest of the western world followed an historic trajectory dedicated to abolishing slavery and bringing an expanded meaning to the concepts of human rights and participatory democracy, the south marched off in an opposite direction. The Confederacy was a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal, and that the government's job is to preserve and ensure that inequality... In sum, the commissioners described one apocalyptic vision after another, emancipation, race war, miscegenation. The collapse of white supremacy would be so cataclysmic that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause, they argued. Secession was necessary to preserve the purity and survival of the white race. This was the unvarnished, near universal message of southern political leaders to their constituencies.
- Gordon Rhea, "Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought" (25 January 2011), Civil War Trust
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- The Confederacy sought to overthrow our constitutional government. When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, they were not merely firing at 'Federals' or the Union army. They were firing at the United States Army and the U.S. flag... The long-term preservation of slavery was the primary motivation for secession. It was a direct reaction to the election, for the first time in the nation's history, of a Republican administration that opposed expansion of slavery into the territories. The national debate leading up to the war focused on slavery, as did last-minute attempts to avert war in 1861. Slavery permeates Lincoln's first inaugural address and also the official declarations of five of the seceding states explaining their secession from the Union.
- Frank Scaturro, "The Confederate Flag Debate is Revising our Revisionist History" (14 July 2015), Washington Examiner.
- Taxation may be tyrannical. But when compared to the enslavement of a large percentage of the population, how could the Confederate States presume to throw stones?
- Richard Shedenhelm, "Some Doubts About The Confederate Case" (2001), Open Thought.
- Secession was illegal. The Union was and is perpetual. The founders intended it so. Madison's letter to Hamilton, 'The Constitution requires an adoption in toto, and for ever', during the New York ratification debates demonstrate that decisively. But on an even more profound scale, the ratification process itself demonstrates that the founders intended the permanence and strength of the Union. They had had it with powerful states. That's why the founders stated in Article VII that ratification had to happen in special conventions, not the state legislatures. If the founders had left it to the state legislatures, those legislatures would have rejected the document out of hand. But the special ratifying conventions were different. They were composed of delegates elected by 'We The People' of each state, not the state itself. In addition, the states liberalized voting rules by getting rid of the property qualifications. This was a special one-time-only thing in order to ensure the broadest possible participation to select delegates in order to make it as democratic as the 18th century mindset would allow. In the north, five states even allowed blacks the right to vote.
- Christopher Shelley, "Chat-Room" (7 April 2014), Crossroads.
- When the Constitution says 'We the People' that's not just a rhetorical flourish. That's a description of the nature of the Union. See Akhil Reed Amar's excellent book The American Constitution: A Biography for this interpretation in full. Why did they do this? Because the founders did not want the national government to be a creature of the states. They had had one of those in the Articles of Confederation, and it didn’t work for them. That’s why the Constitution is very clear in Article VI that it supersedes the states; that’s why all federal and state officials MUST swear or affirm their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, look it up. The nature of the American Union, then, is based on popular sovereignty, the idea that the people have the right to rule. The American people spoke during ratification and created a new federal government in which they vested their sovereignty. The federal government is not merely an agent of the states, as John C. Calhoun asserted; it was not and is not a compact between states. The founders specifically avoided that. So, if a state wants to leave the Union, the only possible way is for 'We the People' to agree to let it go. But there is no specific mechanism for secession in the constitution as it stands. And really, there is no way to read a right of secession into its text. It isn't there, and that's because the Founders never intended for states to break away. Therefore, secession, which would effectively destroy the Constitution, was and is illegal. And Lincoln was simply carrying out his oath of office to 'preserve, protect, and defend' it.
- Christopher Shelley, "Chat-Room" (7 April 2014), Crossroads.
- If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place. I know thousands and millions of good people who at simple notice would come to North Alabama and accept the elegant houses and plantations there. If the people of Huntsville think different, let them persist in war three years longer, and then they will not be consulted. Three years ago by a little reflection and patience they could have had a hundred years of peace and prosperity, but they preferred war; very well. Last year they could have saved their slaves, but now it is too late.
All the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves, any more than their dead grandfathers. Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.
- General William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to Major R.M. Sawyer (31 January 1864), from Vicksburg.
- War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. Yon know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in till we are whipped or they are.
- General William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to James Guthrie (14 August 1864), Georgia.
- The South began the war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation... You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.
- General William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to the members of the city council of the City of Atlanta (12 September 1864)
- I was satisfied and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the south must be killed outright than in conquest of territory.
- Still on the whole the campaign is the best, cleanest and most satisfactory of the war. I have received the most fulsome praise of all men from the President down, but I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.
- General William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to wife
- The cause of the Confederacy was in fact blatantly racist and all about slavery.
- Robert Siegel, "Rejection Of Flag Exposes Larger Truths About The Confederacy" (2 July 2015), NPR
- Responsible scholars recognize the persistence and depth of racism among white northerners during the Civil War period. It's a key component in constructing the narrative of the sectional crisis, the war, and Reconstruction. One of the reasons Lincoln hesitated in issuing a proclamation of emancipation was because he knew it would arouse opposition in the free north among Democrats. None of that, however, has anything to do with the centrality of slavery in southern society or the reasons why secessionists advocated separation and independence, to protect slavery from the threat posed by Lincoln's election and the long term implications of the Republican triumph in 1860. Moreover, pointing to the existence of northern racism does not make it disappear from southern society. Nor does it necessarily follow that because in 1861 most white northerners did not support going to war to destroy slavery, let alone to secure black equality, that white southerners did not go to war to protect a society and a way of life that was ultimately grounded upon and supported by the enslavement of several million human beings. To deny that is to deny historical reality.
- Brooks D. Simpson, "Race and Slavery, North and South: Some Logical Fallacies" (18 June 2011), Crossroads.
- So, what's next? Will this debate subside or continue, as people look to other uses of Confederate icons and symbols? Is this simply about a flag that is as much a symbol of resistance to civil rights and equality as it was a symbol for soldiers whose performance on the battlefield might have secured the independence of a republic founded upon the cornerstone of white supremacy and inequality? One thing is clear: it has not been a good ten days for Confederate heritage advocates. Between licence plates, several SCV divisions rebuking other Confederate heritage groups for outrageous and childish behavior, and the fallout from Charleston, it may be that in 2015 people marked the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War by doing to Confederate heritage what Grant and Sherman did to the Confederacy itself in 1865.
- Brooks D. Simpson, "Down it Comes: Now What?" (22 June 2015), Crossroads
- Once we understand that the flags in question are those of an army, we can have a more intelligent discussion about what those armies did, such as the fact that the Army of Northern Virginia was under orders to capture and send south supposed escaped slaves during that army's invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863.
- Brooks D. Simpson, "The Soldiers' Flag?" (5 July 2015), Crossroads
- We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel. Now, is there any man who wished to reproduce that strife among ourselves? And yet does not he, who wished the slave trade left for the action of Congress, see that he proposed to open a Pandora's box among us and to cause our political arena again to resound with this discussion. Had we left the question unsettled, we should, in my opinion, have sown broadcast the seeds of discord and death in our Constitution. I congratulate the country that the strife has been put to rest forever, and that American slavery is to stand before the world as it is, and on its own merits. We have now placed our domestic institution, and secured its rights unmistakably, in the Constitution. We have sought by no euphony to hide its name. We have called our negroes 'slaves', and we have recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property.
- Robert Hardy Smith, An Address to the Citizens of Alabama on the Constitution and Laws of the Confederate States of America (1861), Mobile, p. 19. As quoted in The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism (1991), by Marshall L. DeRosa, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, p. 66.
- Religious character to the present struggle. Anti-slavery is essentially infidel. It wars upon the Bible, on the Church of Christ, on the truth of God, on the souls of men.
- 'The people of the South', says a contemporary, 'are not fighting for slavery but for independence'. Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy, a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland... Our doctrine is this. WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the ground work.
- "The New Heresy" (1864), Southern Punch (19 September 1864), Richmond. As quoted in The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (2005), by John M. Coski, United States of America: First Harvard University Press
- The South is now in the formation of a Slave Republic...
- L.W. Spratt, The Philosophy of Secession: A Southern View (13 February 1861), "THE PHILOSOPHY OF SECESSION: A SOUTHERN VIEW", Presented in a Letter addressed to the Hon. Mr. Perkins of Louisiana, in criticism on the Provisional Constitution adopted by the Southern Congress at Montgomery, Alabama, by L. W. Spratt, Editor of the Charleston Mercury, 13 February 1861.
- African slavery as it exists amongst us; the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture... Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split'. He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place.
- Alexander H. Stephens, "The Cornerstone Speech" (21 March 1861), Savannah, Georgia: The Athenaeum.
T
- It should be constantly kept in view, through all the bloody phases and terrible epochs of this relentless war, that slavery was the caus beli, that the principle of State Sovereignty, and its sequence, the right of secession, were important to the South principally, or solely, as the armor that encased her peculiar institution, and that every life that has been lost in this struggle was an offering upon the altar of African Slavery.
- Telegraph (6 January 1865), by Q., Macon, Georgia.
- Better, far better! Endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the south to the altar.
- William M. Thompson, letter to Warner A. Thompson (2 February 1861), as quoted in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), by James M. McPherson, New York City: Oxford University Press, Inc., p. 19
- As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause... As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. Another merit in the new flag is, that it bears no resemblance to the now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals.
- William T. Thompson, Savannah Morning News (23 April 1863), as quoted in "The Birth of the Stainless Banner" (13 May 2013), by John M. Coski, The New York Times, New York: The New York Times Company
- The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.
- James Henley Thornwell, as quoted in "Why Non-Slaveholding Southeners Fought" (25 January 2011), by Gordon Rhea, Civil War Trust
- We need to understand what the Confederacy stood for. It's all been romanticized. The whole thing was based on white supremacy, but we're in a state of denial. We've got to take on the Confederacy.
- Tom Turnipseed, as quoted in Lies Across America: What American Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), by James W. Loewen, pp. 239-240
U
- Down with the traitor, up with the star!
- "Union Battle Cry of Freedom".
- Away down south in the land of traitors, rattlesnakes and alligators, right away, come away, right away, come away. Where cotton's king and men are chattels, Union boys will win the battles. Right away, come away, right away, come away. Then we'll all go down to Dixie, away, away! Each Dixie boy must understand that he must mind his Uncle Sam. Away, away, and we'll all go down to Dixie.
- Much patience and forbearance, the North has always shown, toward her Southern brethren, who had each way their own; But when we made our President, a man whom we desired. Their wrath was roused, they mounted guns, and on Fort Sumter fired... They forced the war upon us, for peaceful men are we. They steal our money, seize our forts, and then as cowards flee. False to their vows, and to the Flag, that once protected them. They sought the Union to dissolve, earth's noblest, brightest, gem.
V
- Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks... is either a fool or liar.
- The Vidette (2 November 1862), the unit newspaper of Morgan's Confederate Brigade.
W
- Whether the massacre was premeditated or spontaneous does not address the more fundamental question of whether a massacre took place. It certainly did, in every dictionary sense of the word.
- Andrew Ward, as quoted in River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (2005) New York: Viking Adult, p. 227.
- Soldiers had enlisted for twelve months only, and had faithfully complied with their volunteer obligations; the terms for which they had enlisted had expired, and they naturally looked upon it that they had a right to go home. They had done their duty faithfully and well. They wanted to see their families; in fact, wanted to go home anyhow. War had become a reality; they were tired of it. A law had been passed by the Confederate States Congress called the conscript act. A soldier had no right to volunteer and to choose the branch of service he preferred. He was conscripted. From this time on till the end of the war, a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. It was mighty rough on rebels. We cursed the war, we cursed Bragg, we cursed the Southern Confederacy. All our pride and valor had gone, and we were sick of war and the Southern Confederacy... A law was made by the Confederate States Congress about this time allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of "rich man's war, poor man's fight." The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and the pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript.
- Sam Watkins, Company Aytch, Chapter III: "Corinth".
- A legalized system of involuntary servitude, dehumanization, rape, mass murder.
- Royce West (2011), as quoted in "The Supreme Court Just Dealt the Confederate Flag a Blow, Here's How" (June 2015), The Washington Post.
- The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South... This war is the servant of slavery.
- John Wightman, The Glory of God, the Defence of the South (1861), Yorkville, South Carolina.
- Louisiana looks to the formation of a southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery...
- George Williamson, speech to the Texan secession convention (March 1861), as quoted in Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas (1861), by E.W. Winkler, Texas.
- I yield to no one precedence in love for the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.
- Woodrow Wilson, Essay on John Bright, Virginia University Magazine, 19:354-370 (March 1880).
- Fast forward to the civil war era. You have rich white folks in the south, where I come from, standing up and admitting that the reason they are willing to secede from the union, and the only reason they ever articulated publicly ever, was to maintain and extend slavery and white supremacy. Not only where it already existed, but into the newly acquired, that is to say, stolen territories, from Mexico to the west. Now we lie about it, and say it wasn’t about slavery, and say it was about states’ rights. Yes, the right of the states to keep and maintain slaves, exactly. But back then, they had no shame. So they didn’t try to cover it up. They openly said it. But once again, the rich didn’t want to go do the work, are you kidding? No. They are going to get poor people to go fight for them. And the poor folks didn’t even own slaves. Now think, how do you get poor people who don’t even own the shirt on their back, let alone slaves, to go fight to go keep your slaves for you? You’ve got to convince them that their skin is more important than their economic interest. Because, think about it. If I am a farmer who has to charge you a dollar a day, or two dollars a week to work on your farm, and harvest that tobacco or pick that cotton, but you can get a black person to do it for free because you own them, whose going to get the job? Not me. In other words, slavery actually undermined the wages and the wage based the economic floor of the typical white working class, or low-income person. But they were told, 'If these people are free, they are going to take your jobs.' No fool. They’ve got your job. That’s the point.
- Tim Wise, "The Pathology of Privilege: Racism" (2008), Media Education Foundation.
Y
- The question of slavery is the rock upon which the old government split. It is the cause of secession.
- G. T. Yelverton, speech to the Alabaman secession convention (25 January 1861).
See also
- Abolitionism
- American Civil War
- Bigotry
- Democratic Party
- Racism
- Republican Party
- Slavery
- Union
- United States of America
- War
External links
- Historians' analyses
- Primary source documents