Quotes About Secessionists

Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.

There were of course many moderates in the South, including some of the most influential planters, who wanted to give the Lincoln government a trial, even after South Carolina seceded. Not that they doubted the right of secession. The question was rather one of expediency. But Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for volunteers took the ground from under these middle-of-the-roaders. The issue now was whether to fight with or against secessionists, and this left no choice for most Southerners.

South Carolina senator James Chestnut facetiously promised to drink all the blood that was shed, since he thought the war woudn't amount to anything serious. "Southern secessionists believed northerners would never mobilize to halt national division or that they would mount nothing more than brief and ineffective resistance," writes Drew Gilpin Faust in her book on the Civil War, This Republic of Suffering.