Quotes from James M. McPherson

The principal form of property in the South was, of course, slave property. Southern states had seceded because they feared that the Lincoln administration would interfere with the institution—despite the president's repeated assertions, well into the war, that he had neither the intention nor the power to do so.

Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time. More than 90 percent of white Union soldiers and more than 80 percent of Confederate soldiers were literate, and most of them wrote frequent letters to families and friends... I am convinced that [their letters and diaries] bring us closer to the real thoughts and emotions of those men than any other kind of surviving evidence.

conservative because "he accepted the need of dealing with things as they were, not as he would have wished them to be."2

Whether both or neither was a legitimate government I leave to the reader.

We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."5

The Civil War started out as one kind of conflict and ended as something quite different.

Governor Beriah Magoffin

The South was rebelling "not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. … Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.

the right of revolution, is never a legal right. … At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power."14

He had been willing to risk war rather than let the nation perish.

Some employers banned drinking on the job and tried even to forbid their workers to drink off the job. For men who considered their thrice-daily tipple a right, this was another mark of slavery.

Yankee" in all three senses of the word: Americans; residents of northern states in particular; and New Englanders especially. Of 143 important inventions patented in the United States from 1790 to 1860, 93 percent came out of the free states and nearly half from New England alone—

Given the advantages of fighting on the defensive in its own territory with interior lines in which stalemate would be victory against a foe who must invade, conquer, occupy, and destroy the capacity to resist, the odds faced by the South were not formidable.

a Quaker abolitionist with "a reasonable leaning toward wrath in cases of emergency

It began to appear that something larger than a lady's thimble might be needed to hold the blood shed in this war.