Shelby Foote Quotes

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.

Like many people who live in the South, I'm drawn to the history of the Civil War.

The war for our Union, with all the constitutional issues which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eyes of history. It freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States. More and more, as the years pass, does the meaning stand forth as the sole meaning.

I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded over states' rights. Yet when each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states' rights.

The South is the only part of the country that has been defeated; the rest of the country, unlike most people in the world have never been conquered. But the Southerners have …. The South is the soul of America.

The slave-owning South won the subsequent ideological war…the consensus of history was that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.

I would direct your attention in some detail to the vast and irreparable calamity brought upon our nation in the last century by a tiny group of vociferous and crazed fanatics, the abolitionists, who forced upon the South its tragic war for independence.

Let the undivided voice of the South go forth ... declaring our determination to resist even to civil war

America’s gun culture is an invented tradition. It was not present at the creation of America, whenever we fix that point. Rather, it developed in a single generation, among those who experienced the onset of the Civil War. All cultural attributes have a starting point, and a path of development. America’s gun culture is unusual only in that one can determine the precise period in which a specific artifact became central to a nation’s identity and self-conception. Prior to the 1860s, guns were not perceived as a significant component of America’s national identity, essential to its survival.

Monuments throughout the South were erected to celebrate individuals whose only claim to fame is that they took up arms against the United States in order to retain slavery.

I was born about 80 years too late. If you were a kid in 1910, the Fourth of July was a big deal. You knew all about the Revolution, and you still had Civil War veterans.

The thing about the South is we accept our history. We don't push it under the rug.

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.

I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.

Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.

You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.

Going back to South Sudan after the independence took place was deeply emotional for me because I had gone through the civil war with my family just before going to seek refuge in London.

There are so many books out about Abraham Lincoln out now because it's the bicentennial of his birth. I've known a lot about the Civil War, but I'm just getting more into it.

We know what the Dixie flag represents and its heritage; the Civil War was fought over States rights.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.

It is almost inconceivable that citizens of that time were willing to support so bloody a war, by putting so high a price upon Union and Liberty.

It began with one act of madness, and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically... The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.

Disagreeing with the fervent patriotism of the Confederates: "I think it's hard winning a war with words, gentlemen. . . . I'm saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we. . . . All we've got is cotton and slaves, and arrogance." "I seem to be spoiling everybody's brandy and cigars and dreams of victory."