Drew Gilpin Faust Quotes
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian." 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2 May 2011.
As just one example of Southern States' reasons, see {583044}. Many of the Northern States had passed laws declaring everyone in the state was free and making it illegal to return or assist in the returning of escaped slaves. The Southerners got the Federal Fugitive Slave Act passed which required all Americans to assist in recapturing escaped slaves. It was the Northern States who claimed states' rights were being trampled. The South was vehemently opposed to States' Rights when it came to allowing individual states to decide who was free and who was not. The Southerners had only one fundamental reason for secession—the maintenance of the Negro slavery system on which much of their economy depended as did their sociology, culture, and way of life.
The Southern states were illegal rebels. A confederacy had always meant a voluntary association of otherwise independent entities. However technically the Southern states were not independent but in a state of illegal rebellion against the United States. Lincoln, a lawyer, could not being himself to refer to the South by their preferred name—the Confederacy. So this was how he and many in his administration referred to the South.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
Some Southerners, in order to obtain support in England for the Confederate cause claimed in their propaganda that slavery was not the issue but their issue with the Union was just one of local and regional autonomy. The British and most Europeans at that time were strongly against slavery so this “spin” might have gotten some support. Stowe and others put the lie to this, and the Confederacy never did get any significant material support from any country in Europe. The secession resolutions of the Southern States all state that Slavery was the cause (and often the ONLY cause stated) of secession. Also Southern General Mosby, called the spin for what it was. See {584991}.
He stated that he had a vision and made these two prophesies that indeed came true. The first was the South Carolina secession starting the Civil War. The second, when the North used former slaves as soldiers who fought their old masters.
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and was the 28th President of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; she was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South.
