Quotes from James M. McPherson

That a large percentage of the white "proletariat" in both North and South either supported the Confederacy or opposed emancipation, however, is something of an embarrassment to the Marxian interpretation.

sees the revolutionary dimension of the war not simply as a triumph of freedom over slavery, or industrialism over agriculture, or the bourgeoisie over the plantation gentry—but as a combination of all these things. Plantation agriculture in the South was not a form of feudalism, Moore insists; rather, it was a special form of capitalism that spawned a value system and an ideology that glorified hereditary privilege, racial caste, and slavery while it rejected bourgeois

Thus the war was a struggle between two conflicting capitalist systems—one reactionary, based on slave labor, and fearful of change; the other progressive, competitive, innovative, and democratic.

slave system presented no obstacle to the growth of industrial capitalism as an economic system

formidable obstacle to the establishment of industrial capitalist democracy

conception of democracy that includes the goals of human equality, even the limited form of equality of opportunity, and human freedom. … Labor-repressive agricultural systems, and plantation slavery in particular, are political obstacles to a particular kind of capitalism, at a specific historical stage: competitive democratic capitalism we must call it for lack of a more precise term.

It was a violent breakthrough against an older social structure.

The Civil War marked a milestone in the transformation of nursing from a menial service to a genuine profession.

The sleek warship took on her guns at a deserted Bahamian Cay and began her fearsome career as the Florida. She destroyed thirty-eight American merchant vessels before the Union navy captured her by a subterfuge in the harbor of Bahia, Brazil, in October 1864.

Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Although the theories of conquered provinces, state suicide, and the like did not disappear, the "republican form of government" clause became by 1863 [Page 703] the basis for both presidential and congressional approaches to reconstruction.

essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property.

This belief in a Southern Unionist majority turned out to be a delusion.

But this truth actually supports rather than contravenes the Beard and Moore theses. Most

Of course people live in the short run, and the average worker trying to make ends meet during economic downturns in, say, 1841 or 1857 lacked the molifying perspective of an historian.

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as the pursuit of political goals by other means. Confederate strategy in 1864 certainly conformed to this definition. If southern armies could hold out until the election, war weariness in the North might cause the voters to elect a Peace Democrat who would negotiate Confederate independence.

From Meade came promises to try, but also reports of supply difficulties, roads of bottomless mud, the exhaustion of his men, and a strong defensive perimeter at Williamsport established by Lee while his engineers worked feverishly to rebuild a pontoon bridge. Lincoln had heard it all before, and he must have sighed with exasperation.

The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.

1860 the South's share of national wealth was 30 percent; in 1870 it was only 12 percent.

The wit of man," said Democratic Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, "has never discovered a means by which paper currency can be kept at par value, except by its speedy, cheap, certain convertibility into gold and silver." If this bill passed, "prices will be inflated . . . incomes will depreciate; the savings of the poor will vanish; the hoardings of the widow will melt away; bonds, mortgages, and notes—everything of fixed value—will lose their value.

Although the working poor of New York would explode into the worst riot of American history in 1863

all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state's rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress. This irony resulted from the Supreme Court's decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). In the typical oblique

the slaves in the seven cotton states of the lower South had received in the form of food, clothing, and shelter only 22 percent of the income produced by the plantations and farms on which they worked.

What Lincoln probably did not know was that Halleck suffered severely from hemorrhoids, which grew even more painful under stress, and that he was taking opium to ease the pain.