Confederate States Quotes
Queen Victoria
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.
Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.
One of the puzzles of American Civil War history has been how the poor whites of the South (who provided most of the military manpower that fought and died in the Civil War) were persuaded to fight against a much stronger, more highly industrialized, and more affluent few, that had many more soldiers. One of the main reasons, though difficult for us to understand today, was that the Southern leadership actually persuaded the Southerners that men from the North were cowards and lacked the character, virtue or will to fight. The general “party line” of the South was that one Southern solder was worth more than 5 Northern Soldiers,
While Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, at the time the Civil War was not going well for the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation caused the South great distress in terms of practicality and their morale. The slaves if they escaped could come to a Union State and would be forever free. The South would lose labor that they could ill afford to lose as well as they were forced to devote more white manpower to keeping the slaves in bondage. While most people think the Proclamation freed all the slaves, it did not; it only freed slaves in the rebellious Southern states. Border states such as Maryland, not in rebellion, could keep their slaves legally and did until they were freed later.
The writer was a free Black minister in Maryland. Maryland was a slave state, and the whites were very anti-Lincoln. The free Blacks were under constant scrutiny as there were rumors that the election of Lincoln would be the instigation of a free Black and slave revolt.
Much of the South was so insular that people knew nothing about the notion of abolition and just assumed that no one would ever consider freeing the slaves. Many never knew that it was the South that first fired on the Union troops and flag. If the North won the war, the assumption was that Northerners would then own the plantations and the valuable slaves. In reality, while all slaves were emancipated in the South, very few plantations and farms were confiscated from their Southern owners by Northerners despite the fact that there was political pressure in the North to confiscate the land of all rebels who had committed treason and use the value to repay the Union bonds and care for the wounded Union veterans and the widows of dead Union Soldiers. Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
The Prime Minister had a penchant for mis-assessing world affairs in both the old world and the new.
