Congregationalist Church Quotes
Resolved, That without one feeling of either despondency or of impatience, we watch the progress of the armies of the Union in putting down the most criminal rebellion the world ever saw; without despondency, for we believe God is on our side...
This is one of the documented examples of the use of the phrase “God is on our side.”
Congregational Churches, Resolution Regarding the Civil War, General Conference of the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts, September, 1864
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although escaped slaves could not fight for the North, they could be very useful on road building and other military engineering projects needing labor. Every time a slave escaped, it diminished the military engineering labor of the Confederates by one but added to that of the Union. Pinkerton and others however engaged many escaped slaves who volunteered for an incredibly dangerous mission. They returned back to the Southern lines into the slave work gangs, and organized slave escapes of groups of Blacks. In addition, many of them, by observing and overhearing the Confederate soldiers gained information regarding supply and troop levels and movements, and this they brought back to the Union officers. Those that were caught were executed as spies. Escaped slaves were espionage and covert operations agents before they were allowed to be soldiers.
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 Virginia Campaign of May 1864 was clearly the beginning of the end of the war. This was clear at the time, not only to the military leaders of both sides, but also to the media and thence the general public in the North. At the beginning of the war the Army of the Potomac, the largest Union Army was commanded by McClellan whose concerns were with his own political career and not winning the war. He had an aversion to heavy fighting and did not see the war strategically as Lincoln, Grant and Sherman did: To cripple the capacity of the South to wage war. So the early history of the Army of the Potomac was a series of undecisive battles which were either standoffs or the Confederates won despite the much larger and better armed and equipped Union army. As soon as McClellan was replaced, things began to turn around and when Grant was selected for Command of all Union Troops, the Army of the Potomac performed much better, including taking Richmond, the Confederate Capital.
The Civil War produced more deaths than all other American wars put together. Lee’s skill and gentlemanly demeanor subdue the fact that his treasonous efforts caused more American soldiers to die than the entire Second World War—and yet some Americans regard him as a hero while others see him as a traitor.
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.
Lincoln and the Union leaders were still hopeful of ending the rebellion and getting things back to a pre-war footing economically. At this point they were trying to preserve components of the Southern Economy at no small cost. As that hope was shown to be futile, the Total War strategy of Grant and Sherman prevailed to the satisfaction of men like Opdycke. That actually ended the war quickly, but the Southern Economy was devastated in the process.
General Grant had just accepted the “Unconditional Surrender” of the 15,000 Confederate troops and 48 large cannon. Yet the South described the battle as a “standoff” and a “draw”. This quotation is very significant because it illustrates two very important dynamics of the Confederacy. First that the Southerners consistently lied to themselves and to each other about their situation in the war. Whether this was the elite manipulating the mass of the people or large scale self-delusion by most has been debated since. Second, Chesnut’s statement illustrates that it was common knowledge that the reports about the war were false and exaggerated for the Confederate side and just part of the extensive propaganda campaign of the Confederacy.
This was one of the several early unofficial Emancipations that was issued in the Civil War.
Vladimir Lenin
The simplistic view that the American colonists were patriots and the British were the colonizers against whom the colonists revolted is not really accurate. The American colonists were polarized into patriots and loyalists. The Loyalist Americans ranged from many of those merchants whose business depended upon England, those whose family were still in England, those whose religion made them loyal to the Church of England, slaves who would be free under British law, Americans who had strong cultural and intellectual ties to England and those Americans who were great believers in monarchy and whose honor required that they fulfill the oath that they had taken to the King of England. Some of the worst atrocities of the American Revolution occurred in the battles of these Americans against each other. See {82105} for more on this point.
Congregational churches (also Congregationalist churches; Congregationalism) are Protestant churches in the Reformed tradition practising congregationalist church governance, in which each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs.
