Quotes about Northerners

Genevieve Gorder

I think that, in comparison, New Yorkers and Northerners are so guarded.

Carl Schurz

The animosities inflamed by a four years' war, and its distressing incidents, cannot be easily overcome. But they extend beyond the limits of the army, to the people of the north. I have read in southern papers bitter complaints about the unfriendly spirit exhibited by the northern people — complaints not unfrequently flavored with an admixture of vigorous vituperation. But, as far as my experience goes, the "unfriendly spirit" exhibited in the north is all mildness and affection compared with the popular temper which in the south vents itself in a variety of ways and on all possible occasions. No observing northern man can come into contact with the different classes composing southern society without noticing it. He may be received in social circles with great politeness, even with apparent cordiality; but soon he will become aware that, although he may be esteemed as a man, he is detested as a "Yankee

Anne Hull

Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids.

Ruth Wilson

I come from the south, so you're useless and you're a bit pathetic. That's the first thing that the northerners think of you.

Carl Schurz

Yankee" still signifies to them those traits of character which the southern press has been so long in the habit of attributing to the northern people; and whenever they look around them upon the traces of the war, they see in them, not the consequences of their own folly, but the evidences of "Yankee wickedness.

For years after the Civil War, many Southerners blamed the negative manifestations of the war on the wicked Yankees, rather than look to their own actions of starting the war and prosecuting it long after it was clear that they could not win.

Billy Carter

I never spoke to this many Yankees at one time.

William Tecumseh Sherman

You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail.

Sherman had friends in the South and he saw rebellion and war coming. Most Southerners had a romanticized view of war and were so wrapped up in trying to preserve their economic and cultural way of life that they did not think through the implications of such a war. After and during the war, Sherman was particularly angry with the Southerners who had brought such terrible casualties and destruction upon the land and its people and he was the leader of the March through Georgiam the most effective and humiliating campaign against the South.

John Brown

Sir, the people of the northern states are cowards. Slavery has made cowards of them all. The whites are afraid of each other, and the blacks are afraid of the whites. You can effect nothing among such people

Ira Berlin

[The Underground Railroad] demonstrated to northerners, white northerners, who were not committed to the end of slavery, how horrendous an institution slavery was. How much black people desired freedom. What they would do, the extent they would do to gain that freedom. This against the slave holders' propaganda that slavery was a benevolent institution and that black people were happy as slaves.

Mary Parkman Peabody

'Oh, glory, I've said it so many times already: We are not just Northerners. We are part of the U.S.A.

The Southern authorities were particularly angry with people form the North coming South to demonstrate over unconstitutional and immoral segregation laws. Northerners were considered as having no business with Southern desegregation. Mrs. Peabody, and the wives of a number of wives of Christian Bishops, black and white, went to a restaurant in St. Augustine and requested service which was contrary to the segregation laws of Florida at the time. The women were arrested. The act of civil disobedience in integrating the restaurant was one act of a planned desegregation strategy worked out with Martin Luther King’s SCLC organization. The mature age of the women and their prominent husbands brought a great deal of newspaper coverage which is just what the demonstrators wanted. The photo is of Mrs. Peabody getting arrested. See {637404} and {637406} for more on this incident.

Jefferson Davis

You have shown yourselves in no respect to be the degenerate sons of our fathers. You fight against the offscourings of the earth… worse than hyenas.

Like many war leaders, Davis tried to dehumanize the Northerners, against whom the Confederates were fighting. His “”theory” was that The Southerners were the good and upright sons of the Founding Fathers but the Northerners were the “degenerate” sons.

Henry Lee

I will not live in the same country as these insolent Northerners.

Genevieve Gorder

I think we typically, as Northerners, stereotype what the South is in so many negative ways. We kind of forget all the beautiful things that they contribute to make this country a country.

Northerners Quotes