Thaddeus Stevens Quotes
It is said the South will never submit — that we cannot conquer the rebels — that they will suffer themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more than any other ; but if they hold this language, and the means which they have suggested must be resorted to ; if their whole country must be laid waste and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, Sir, reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be re-peopled by a band of freemen, than to see them perpetrate the destruction of this people
Thaddeus Stevens, 1792-1868, U. S. Congressman (Whig and Republican, PA), Titular Republican party leader, House Debate, Quoted in E. B. Callender, Thaddeus Stevens: Commoner
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Committee of the Congress. This was the prevailing Congressional and public view except for the South which had coalesced around an intellectual rationalization. See {618013}.
The South had attacked Fort Sumter
It would be almost 30 years until Jackson would have been proved correct and the Civil War had begun.
This was a decade before there was a Civil War. Secession and war had been advocated by many Southerners for years before. Most people are not aware that the move toward secession did not suddenly appear when Lincoln was elected President. It had been festering for over a decade. The other importance of the quotation is that the Southernors knew perfectly well that their actions would lead to a civil war. Some Southern apologists claim that the South never saw their actions as treason, rebellion or the cause of a civil war. This quote shows that they well knew what they were doing and the result was exactly as most Southern leaders expected.
The Governor was a staunch Confederate supporter but his state legislature majority favored the Union. He was forced out of the governorship when the 1861 election gave the legislature a veto-proof pro Union majority.
There was some political pressure in the North, to offer terms to the South where they could cease the rebellion and return to the Union and return to the status quo ante—before the rebellion.
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 commander complained of the brutal behavior of Bolivar and the revolutionaries, but the atrocities committed by the Spanish forces were even worse and both sides fought with techniques that had no civilized restraints.
England had gone through a bloody Civil War with the Parliament on one side and the King on the other. The King lost and was beheaded later that year. See {597353}.
Gusley had been captured by the Confederates and was in a prison camp. Richardson published Gusley’s diary and Southerners were surprised to find that this Yankee who had been bombarding them from a ship was very similar to them in many ways including slavery but saw the situation regarding succession as worth fighting for preservation of the Union.
Commenting on remedies for possible Southern secession: Abraham Lincoln had already been elected, and Buchanan was sympathetic with the South.
Thaddeus Stevens was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. He was one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. A fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against African Americans, Stevens sought to secure their rights during Reconstruction, leading the opposition to U.S. President Andrew Johnson. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the American Civil War, he played a leading role, focusing his attention on defeating the Confederacy, financing the war with new taxes and borrowing, crushing the power of slave owners, ending slavery, and securing equal rights for the Freedmen.
