Drew Gilpin Faust Quotes

I grew up 60 minutes way from Richmond, in Charlottesville, Virginia and, as a child, I was obsessed with the Civil War. I used to do re-enactments and all that stuff.

An army took on the Union; an army lost. That nation, the Confederate States, lost. And if - that flag - in terms of publicly or state-sponsored things, or local or county or city-sponsored things - should be forever wiped from the memory, because that side lost.

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

The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

The Civil War always moves me.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

The Army runs Fort A.P. Hill, named for a Confederate general whose men killed African American soldiers after they surrendered.

[Jefferson] Davis and the whole gang of them ought to be hung.

Every man that lowered our flag was a Democrat.... Every preacher that said slavery was a divine institution was a Democrat. Recollect it! Every man that shot a Union soldier was a Democrat. Every wound borne by you Union soldiers is a souvenir of a Democrat.

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

Make common cause with the South and refuse to allow passage of Union troops through the city.

… the commencement of the difficulties which will cause much bloodshed previous to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina. It may probably arise through the slave question. … concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters.

She always insisted, too, that the Northern troops came South and made war for the sole purpose of taking possession of our lands and negroes, and she was astonished almost out of her wits when she learned that the negroes were free. She had supposed that they were simply to change masters, and even then she lived for months in daily anticipation of the coming of "the new land owners," who were waiting, she supposed, for assignments of plantations to be made to them by military authority.

I regard it as a foregone conclusion that we shall ultimately whip the Yankees. We are bound to believe that, anyhow; but the war is going to be a long and terrible one, first. We've only just begun it, and very few of us will see the end. All I ask of fate is that I may be killed leading a cavalry charge

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

Magazines and newspapers commonly took to celebrating the military valor of both Confederate and Union soldiers, as though bravery, rather than morality, were the chief quality to be commemorated.

Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.

It's the state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That is our heritage. It is what makes us Virginia.

In a very short time the army of Northern Virginia was face to face with the Army of the Potomac.

Men, today we die a little.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.

The men and women who serve in our military have won for us every hour we live in freedom, sometimes at the expense of the very hours of the lifetimes they had hoped to live.

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.