Quotes about Civil War Impact

Winston Churchill

Thus ended the great American Civil War, which upon the whole must be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.

Churchill saw the American Civil War as inevitable as it placed two huge forces in opposition. The moral force to eliminate slavery was up against the economic force of the entire Southern economy. The Southern slaves were worth more than all the factories, railroads, stores, real estate, farms and goods of the entire South. If slavery ended, the upper class Southerners would all be economically ruined. If slavery did not end, the United States would contain the most evil and immoral institution then known to the world.

H. L. Mencken

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

Rebecca Traister

In the nineteenth century, in part because a ton of American men moved west, in part because of the Civil War, and in part because of trepidation about marriage, which was then a very confining institution, there was a big population of women - mostly middle-class white women on the East Coast - who didn't marry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

One terrible idea occurs in reference to this matter [the Civil War]. Even supposing the war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will there be of military titles and pretensions for at least half a century to come! Every country-neighborhood will have its general or two, its three or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without end,—besides non-commissioned officers and privates, more than the recruiting offices ever knew of,—all with their campaign stories, which will become the staple of fireside-talk forevermore. Military merit, or rather, since that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure of all claims to civil distinction. One bullet-headed general will succeed another in the Presidential chair; and veterans will hold the offices at home and abroad, and sit in Congress and the State legislatures

The Founding Fathers wanted to be sure that the American Culture would not be a military one. But with each American war, there was a little more of it as many men identified themselves not by their occupation or current organizational title but by their highest military title. Hawthorne and many other Americans were reluctant to see this occur. However, Hawthorne turned out to be right about the behavior of the Civil War officers long after the war had ended. In Kentucky, the governor was given the right to appoint anyone a Colonel in the state militia, and to this day Kentucky Colonels proliferate. The American military to boost the prestige of retiring officers developed the practice of promoting each officer to the next higher rank the day he retired. So Captains could be Majors, and Majors could thereafter be Colonels, and Colonels, Generals

Gertrude Stein

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

Simon Newcomb

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

Franklin Pierce

I speak of the war as fruitless; for it is clear that, prosecuted upon the basis of the proclamations of September 22d and September 24th, 1862, prosecuted, as I must understand these proclamations, to say nothing of the kindred blood which has followed, upon the theory of emancipation, devastation, subjugation, it cannot fail to be fruitless in every thing except the harvest of woe which it is ripening for what was once the peerless republic.

Barack Obama

The challenge there is that ISIL doesn't have an air force, so the damage done there is not against ISIL, it's against the Syrian regime.

K'naan

It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.

Civil War Impact Quotes