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Quotes About Civil War

He suspended habeas corpus, arrested newspaper editors, jailed Northerners without hearings or trials, bypassed Congress, ignored the Supreme Court, and even arrested a member of Congress. He justified these violations as part of the Executive's War Powers and claimed that he violated the Constitution for the sole purpose of protecting it.
~ James D. Best
The Federals "all cheer as one man...The Rebels cheer like a lot of school boys, every man for himself.
~ James I. Robertson Jr.
His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: "I'm fighting because you're down here."7
~ James M. McPherson
The United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War.
~ James M. McPherson
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.
~ James M. McPherson
humanitarian slave regime
~ James M. McPherson
that and throughout the Civil War, this single building housed the entirety of the Smithsonian's collections. But where did this shining testament to science get its true start? Oddly enough, it wasn't an American who founded the institution
~ James Rollins
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.
~ James Sloan Gibbons
We had fed the heart on fantasies. / The heart's grown brutal from the fare." From "Meditations in Time of Civil War," 1923.W.B.Yeats
~ James Thompson
The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sundering of family ties or love of country.
~ Doris Kearns Goodwin
As a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, [preservation of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of our Lord 1863 all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free.
~ Doris Kearns Goodwin
My library has been the greatest possible pleasure to me," he wrote to his parents during his freshman year, "as whenever I have any spare time I can immediately take up a book. Aunt Annie's present, the 'History of the Civil War,' is extremely interesting." From early childhood, he had regarded books as "the greatest of companions." And once encountered, they were never forgotten
~ Doris Kearns Goodwin
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, and Bakke was an engagement whose antecedents were at Gettysburg and Shiloh.
~ Alasdair MacIntyre
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
~ H. W. Brands
In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North.
~ Karen Abbott
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.
~ Ron Chernow
My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.
~ Greg Iles
My mom was a history teacher, so I couldn't really avoid history when I was growing up. But we're very light on American history. We don't really have great opportunities to study both the Civil War and the Revolution.
~ Owain Yeoman
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
~ Margaret Atwood
The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.
~ John Niven
We are a resilient country. We've been through a Civil War; we've been through two World Wars. We've been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years!
~ Rick Perry
I think you can go back in history and look at what the effect in Asia and the world was of a divided, fractured China from, you know, the opium wars through the Chinese civil war, and I don't think it was pretty for Asia or the world.
~ Dennis C. Blair
the American Revolution was our first civil war, pitting neighbors against neighbors and splitting families apart.
~ Ray Raphael
At the time of the Civil War, there were six democracies in the face of the planet. Today, there's 120 and they've been inspired by the American exceptionalism.
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.