Quotes from Bruce Levine

When still a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, he referred to a hostile opponent who had entered the chamber as "the thing which has crawled into this House and adheres to one of the seats by its own slime.

In North Carolina, for example, circulars warned that continued statehood in the Union would bring emancipation, which would mean "having three hundred thousand idle, vagabond free negroes turned loose upon you with all the privileges of white men—voting with you; sitting on juries with you; going to school with your children, and intermarrying with the white race.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation excluded Tennessee, slavery no longer enjoyed the active, enthusiastic support of and enforcement by those who now wielded political power. It had lost, in other words, precisely the monopoly of violence that its champions always knew was essential to its survival.

education is what makes a man free!

While four slave states of the upper South had joined the Confederacy, another four (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, which together became known as the "loyal border states") remained in the Union.

And Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, Marx judged, was "the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union.

Abraham Lincoln thus displayed little interest in fundamentally changing the pattern of land ownership in the rebellious slave states. But he remained committed to uprooting slavery, and before long he would further broaden and deepen that commitment.

The white residents of Confederate states who served under the Union flag would together have filled out an army larger than any that Richmond fielded throughout the war.

Throughout the South, one out of every three children born into slavery died before reaching his or her first birthday; a white infant's chance of surviving was twice as good.50 Conditions were even harsher in the rice and sugar districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.

The war destroyed a third of the South's livestock and halved the value of all its real property.

a concession

Three hundred thousand white men from southern states donned Union uniforms during the war; one in three came from states that adhered to the Confederacy.

Robert E. Lee was simply echoing conventional wisdom when he wrote that "the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, is the best that can exist between the white and black races.

In fact, about five thousand white North Carolinians served in Union uniforms over the course of the war. Three thousand white Alabamians did the same thing, as did seven thousand white Louisianans and ten thousand white Arkansans. Virginia alone (especially its western counties) supplied some thirty thousand recruits. The largest single contingent hailed from Tennessee—some forty-two thousand in number.

reminded herself, they were "incapable of self-government."81 Robert E. Lee was simply echoing conventional wisdom when he wrote that "the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, is the best that can exist between the white and black races.

It was the nearly universal determination of southern whites to keep blacks subordinate that ultimately proved to be the secessionists' strongest card.

Owning other human beings outright shaped the very core of the typical planter's personality. At home, after all, they were at once employers, legislators, policemen, prosecutors, judges, juries, jailers, and executioners.

The conflict now on the eve of decision in the United States is neither more nor less than one of the manifold phases of the struggle between aristocracy and democracy

Objections such as these finally cut to the core of the Richmond regime's problem. How could it offer enough to its slaves to attract them to its banner while simultaneously retaining enough of the old South to make the war worth winning?

Such people, one soldier acidly observed, certainly "would like" to see the Confederacy triumph "and no doubt weary heaven with their prayers for peace and independence." But they prayed at least as fervently "to get through with whole skins and full purses.

A fascinating quality of the human mind is its ability to hold firmly and simultaneously to contradictory ideas. Slave owners were a case in point. They

At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion—an immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.

was] at home accumulating for the benefit of his master"?49 In the hill country of northern Alabama, farmer James Bell cautioned his son Henry in April 1861 not to be seduced by the rhetoric of the South's large "Negroholders." "All they want," the elder Bell advised, "is to git you pupt up and go fight for there infurnal negroes and after you do there fighting you may kiss there hine parts for o they care.

In 1860, nearly all whites regarded African Americans as inherently inferior, degraded, and dangerous, and found the idea of living alongside them as anything like equals simply inconceivable.