Heather Cox Richardson Quotes
In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.
Richardson, Heather Cox. How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
He had been a politician and was serving in the Union Army. At the time he was an Army officer just returned from the front and was not yet president.
While Douglas and Lincoln were political opponents with little love lost between them, both were patriots. Douglas’s position were much more popular in the South, and the moment he realized that Lincoln would win the Presidency, he headed South where he was very persuasive in trying to hold the Union together, but he could not see all the potential rebels and was only effective with some. South Carolina not only seceded, but in order to prevent any changing of minds, some the worst of the South Carolinians, attacked Fort Sumter firing on the American Flag and attacking and capturing the Union troops who were totally outnumbered. The Civil War was then inevitable.
While Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, at the time the Civil War was not going well for the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation caused the South great distress in terms of practicality and their morale. The slaves if they escaped could come to a Union State and would be forever free. The South would lose labor that they could ill afford to lose as well as they were forced to devote more white manpower to keeping the slaves in bondage. While most people think the Proclamation freed all the slaves, it did not; it only freed slaves in the rebellious Southern states. Border states such as Maryland, not in rebellion, could keep their slaves legally and did until they were freed later.
The Mystery was for many years the only Black Newspaper in America.
After the Presidential years of James Buchanan who protected the South from slavery reform and abolition as the North was gaining political power and the abolitionists were having a greater and greater effect on public opinion in the North. While Southerners did not believe Lincoln would emancipate the slaves, they realized that the majority of the growing nation was opposed to slavery, and more and more Northern states were passimg laws making any slave who sets foot in the State a free person. Slaves coud not only have more reason to run away, but slave owners would not be able to get their “property” back. Lincoln would not help the South as Buchanan did, and the Southerners realized that over time, slavery would no longer be feasible or profitable. Cobb, very experienced at Washington politics, realized the changes that would come and thought that they would be “certain and speedy.” The irony was that if the South had not seceded and simply dragged its feet legislatively, it would have taken two or three decades for slavery to end. However, by seceding and initially fighting so hard and well while poor Union generals were in command, Lincoln was forced to try more drastic measures and issued the Emancipation Proclamation after only a few years. The Civil War and seccession was not only a tactical and strategic error for the South, but rapidly brought about just what the Southerners were fighting to prevent.
While this assessment was true up until the 1980s. By the 21st century there were almost no serious historians who thought that the motivation of the Confederate States for the Civil War was anything but slavery and the economic impact that abolition might bring. However, one of your advantages having this collection of historical quotations is that you can see for yourself why the Southern states say they were seceding. This following are four of the official secession resolution documents. Read these and you will see that all the claims that there were other major reasons for secession are just attempts to make the Confederacy a little less brutal and greedy. See {621371}, {619793}, {621372}, {621375}
This is an important quotation because it helps to dispel a myth that the Civil War was not about slavery. That was the reason that the rebelling states gave for secession, but apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that the average soldier on both sides did not care about slavery. (Two thirds of the Southern Soldiers came from families that did not own slaves; nonetheless it was clear that the main motivation of the Confederate Soldier was to protect the institution of slavery, while that of the Union soldiers was to destroy slavery.) Professor Manning found this in her book: What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War.
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.
Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.
Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
