David Rice Atchison Quotes

The institution of African slavery, as it existed in about half the States of the Union, and the contests pervading the public mind for many years, between those who desired its curtailment and ultimate extinction and those who desired additional safeguards for its security and perpetuation, culminated in the effort, on the part of most of the States in which slavery existed, to separate from the Federal government, and to resist its authority. This constituted the war of rebellion, and whatever auxiliary causes may have contributed to bring about this war, undoubtedly the overshadowing and efficient cause was African slavery.

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.

The Civil War always moves me.

Lincoln's paper proclamation must now become iron, lead and fire.

Abolitionists are wicked and abominable …. The nation is being led to civil war. Many bloody wars have ensued from less beginnings. A little fuel has sometimes kindled a great fire.

A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding States, combined with a war between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent.

I want to tell you one thing. Do you know that if it was not for the Black man this war never would have been brought to a close with success to the Union, and the liberty to your race? I want you to understand that. Do you know it? Do you know it?...

We are in the midst of war – war of the most bloody kind – a war of extermination. Freedom and slavery are interlocked in deadly embrace, and death is certain for one or the other party.... A crisis is just before us ... and only God knoweth where it will end.

Slavery has perished amid the war flames, and the mirage of the Confederacy has vanished, never again to return.

The terms were that the war was not to be ended until the South is crushed, slavery was abolished and Lincoln was reelected

They [slaves] constitute a military resource, and being such, that they should not be turned over to the enemy is too plain to discuss.

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

O’ Yes. War is better than slavery.

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

The Underground Railroad demonstrated to southerners, to slave holders, the extent to which slaves opposed slavery. To the extent to which some radical abolitionists, black and white, were willing to go to help slaves escape. And demonstrated the slow leaching of slavery from the border states which over time would leave them isolated in a slave-holding republic in the deep south. A slave-holding republic which slavery might be liquidated by constitutional means. They, therefore, struck a preemptive strike to create an independent confederacy. That independent confederacy cession led to a war and war, of course, led to emancipation and ironically the end of slavery itself.

The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.

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.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

True, permanent peace can never be restored, until slavery, the occasion of the war, has ceased.

The civil war which has so long prevailed between Spain and the Provinces in South America still continues, without any prospect of its speedy termination.

When you scan the globe's hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.