Quotes About Secession

There are some who contend that we should have retained our seats and "fought for our rights in the Union." Could anything be less rational or less consistent than that a Senator, an ambassador from his State, should insist upon representing it in a confederacy from which the State has withdrawn? What was meant by "fighting in the Union" I have never quite understood

For Genovese, slave owners' moral commitment to slavery was the foundation of a distinctive worldview that explained secession and the creation of the Confederacy.

Before Will was two years old, Abraham Lincoln was elected president and the slave states of the South seceded from the Union, launching the Civil War. The war would be murderous and merciless beyond the capacity of any American to imagine in 1861, and both sides used their religion and their notion of God and his justice to define and defend their parts in the mayhem.

The welfare of Catalonia is only possible outside of Spain.

January 18th. Georgia secedes [from the union]. 21st. Withdrawal from the Senate of Jefferson Davis and other southern senators. 26th. (To Mrs. C. W. Pratt) Herewith I send you my autograph, which you request. 26th. Louisiana secedes.

Southern states in the confederacy were not ready to give up their fight to secede or give up their way of life, which was made possible in large part through the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves.

Thinking the move suicidal, Grant believed the South would stop short of the "awful leap" of secession.

Fearful of being overshadowed by an expanding Republican slave empire in the west, some New England Federalists began to talk of secession from the union. Such plans formed part of the context for the Hamilton-Burr duel.

Are we ready to sell reality for a phantom?" Houston vainly asked, as propagandists and demagogues fanned the clamor for secession with deluded visions of victory. To

Right next door to the question of secession—a right that the Founders should have made more explicit than they did—is the equally challenging matter of expulsion. There needs to be a mechanism for frog-marching somebody to the curb. But enough about California.

The price of slaves grew so high that a sizable number of white southerners urged the reopening of the African slave trade. In the 1850s, legislatures in several states, including South Carolina, proposed reopening the trade. Adopting this measure would have violated federal law. Some "reopeners" believed that the federal ban on the trade was unconstitutional; others were keen to nullify it, in a dress rehearsal for secession.

1845, when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society declared that any slave owner would be disqualified from consideration for missionary service, Baptist churches in the South seceded and formed the Southern Baptist Convention so that members would not have to choose between their slaves and their calling to be missionaries.

The influence of the doctrine of states' rights, especially in the version promulgated by Jefferson, reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. At the close of that war, James Garfield of Ohio, the future president, wrote that the Kentucky Resolutions "contained the germ of nullification and secession, and we are today reaping the fruits.

Those who, even today, claim that "states' rights" caused Southern secession and the Civil War use these statistics to argue that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but that is false. Every settler in the Southern states aspired to own land and slaves or to own more land and more slaves, as both social status and wealth depended on the extent of property owned.

Thus, it seems to me beyond doubt that, if one section of the Union seriously decided to split off from the rest, not only could no one prevent its happening but that no one would attempt to do so. The present Union will, therefore, last only as long as all the constituent states continue to wish to belong.

The Confederacy was formed for the purpose of seceding from the Union because those states could not part with their rights to own slaves.

The idea that 'if you don't like how things are going, you can just leave' is so ingrained in Texas, the secession movement is no surprise.

I always support secession, and I think that the founders made a mistake by not having that in the Constitution…

If you persist in your purpose of secession, there will be war - a bloody and cruel war. Not only will the North fight, but she will also triumph. The experiment of secession will fail, and the South, in ruin and desolation, will bitterly repent the day when she attempted to overthrow a wise and beneficent government.

A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran's northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran's Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.

The Texas Republic, whose constitution expressed an overheated enthusiasm for America's peculiar institution, had been created in 1836 in part as a way for slave-owners to keep their human property by effectively seceding from Mexico where slavery was illegal. These are well-known facts, except possibly in Texas,

What is there to hold a post-prosperity, constrained-liberty, un-dreamt America together? The nation's ruling class has, in practical terms, already seceded from the idea of America. In the ever more fractious, incoherent polity they're building as a substitute, why would they expect their discontented subjects not to seek the same solution as Slovenes and Uzbeks?

But of course you must endure the ill-effects of his influence, — be they what they may. When you seceded from our Government you looked for certain adverse consequences. If you did not, where was your self-sacrifice? That such men as Mr. Bonteen should feel that you had scuttled the ship, and be unable to forgive you for doing so, — that is exactly the evil which you knew you must face.

In all her history, from the formation of the federal government until the hour of secession, no year stands out more prominently than the year 1858 as evidencing the national patriotism of Virginia.