Quotes from James M. McPherson

The difficult we can do immediately; the impossible will take a little longer.

Not surprisingly, South Carolina acted first. "There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees." wrote the correspondent of the London Times from Charleston. The enmity of Greek for Turk was child's play "compared to the animosity evinced by the 'gentry' of South Carolina for the 'rabble of the North.' … The State of South Carolina was,' I am

His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: "I'm fighting because you're down here."7

The Civil War was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies.

More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.

The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.

Lincoln too considered secession the "essence of anarchy." He branded state sovereignty a "sophism." "The Union is older than any of the States," Lincoln asserted, "and, in fact, it created them as States." The Declaration of Independence transformed the "United Colonies" into the United States; without this union then, there would never have been any "free and independent States.

The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republicans who threatened to deprive them of these liberties.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War.

And in the final reckoning, American lives lost in the Civil War exceed the total of those lost in all the other wars the country has fought added together, world wars included.

Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a joyful act that caused people literally to dance in the streets. Their fierce gaiety anticipated the celebratory crowds that gathered along the Champs-Elysees and the Unter den Linden and at Pica-dilly Circus in that similarly innocent world of August 1914.

In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—"adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed"—one of the North's leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution.

In cities and factories, the vices of our nature are more fully displayed," declared James Hammond of South Carolina in 1829, while rural life "promotes a generous hospitality, a high and perfect courtesy, a lofty spirit of independence . . . and all the nobler virtues and heroic traits.

As a Virginian, Scott deplored the cry of many Republican politicians and newspapers for an invasion to "crush the rebels." Even if successful, he wrote, an invasion would produce "fifteen devastated provinces [that is, the slave states] not to be brought into harmony with their conquerors, but to be held for generations, by heavy garrisons.

As he shook hands with Grant's military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker's dark features and said, "I am glad to see one real American here." Parker responded, "We are all Americans."39

humanitarian slave regime

Pickett's charge represented the Confederate war effort in microcosm: matchless valor, apparent initial success, and ultimate disaster.

Statues of Confederate soldiers

The custodians of that memory won their postwar battle to celebrate the South's Lost Cause as a valiant crusade for constitutional liberties and state's rights that was overwhelmed only by brute force.

The Lost Cause myth helped Southern whites deal with the shattering reality of catastrophic defeat and impoverishment in a war they had been sure they would win.

All he wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act." Grant, of course, was that someone. "He did not want to know what I proposed to do."7 Grant's account does not ring quite true. After all, the president had vetoed three of his suggestions several weeks earlier.

their unsullied honor became the foundation of the myth.

The Confederacy "had surrendered but was never whipped.