Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he turned the Civil War into a revolution.

You gotta understand - the state of Mississippi was in rebellion. It had rebelled against the United States. Now that has been a very difficult story for America to tell, but that's what actually happened.

The force that has come closest across American history to actually ending America was white supremacy. That was the Civil War.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.

America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.

The South was my country but the South went to war on account of slavery.

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.

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us.

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

African-American history is American history.

As long as it served his purpose, Mr. Lincoln boldly advocated the right of Secession.

I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

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.