David Zabel Quotes

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

The Civil War always moves me.

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 has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

The Civil war made us a nation rather then an association of states.

The American Civil War was the wrangling of two armed mobs.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

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

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.

If there is anything worse than international warfare, is civil warfare, and the United States was destined to experience it in the extreme of bitterness.

The Civil War is a story about how some people clung to the past, while others sought the future.

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

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

With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.

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.

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

The present Administration had no alternative but to accept the war initiated by South Carolina or the Southern Confederacy. The North will sustain the Administration almost to a man, and it ought to sustain it at all hazards.

There can be no neutrals in this war [the Civil War]—only patriots or traitors.

The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

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

If you persist in your purpose of secession, there will be war - a bloody and cruel war. Not only will the North fight, but she will also triumph. The experiment of secession will fail, and the South, in ruin and desolation, will bitterly repent the day when she attempted to overthrow a wise and beneficent government.

If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to think of the Confederacy only as a romantic lost cause.