Compromises Before The Civil War Quotes

#1. Your little army, derided for its want of arms, derided for its lack of all the essential material of war, has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and now it flies, inglorious in retreat before our victorious columns. We have taught them a lesson in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia. #Quote by Jefferson Davis

#2. She was as lovely as ever, my Jessie Anne. I paused for a moment, taking her beauty in, laying up this vision of her in the deepest and most secret place of my mind, allowing the sight of her to renew my spirit. I stepped slowly down to the platform, never allowing my gaze to drift from her. Jessie Anne was looking toward the front of the car, and it was a moment or two before she turned and spotted me.
The bright and hopeful smile I had so expected and longed for darkened, just for a moment to be sure, but long enough for me to recognize a fleeting glimpse of shock and anguish, possibly of horror. No longer did she see the man she had known, the man she had given her life to. No, she saw me for the man I truly was, the man with blood on his hands. #Quote by Karl A. Bacon

#3. The story of theology in the Civil War was a story of how a deeply entrenched intellectual synthesis divided against itself, even as its proponents were reassuring combatants on either side that each enjoyed a unique standing before God and each exercised a unique role as the true bearer of the nation's Christian civilization. #Quote by Mark A. Noll

#4. I never understand these "the south will rise again" people. Again? It never rose before. It tried to and Lincoln stomped its ass. #Quote by T.J. Kirk

#5. It would be altogether simpler if the rugged man before her wore gray, but instead he would be handsomely attired in Union blue. #Quote by A.M. Heath

#6. Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial-like the popular strategy of suasion-is suicidal. #Quote by Ibram X. Kendi

#7. Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace. #Quote by E. M. Forster

#8. I'd often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he'd seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn't think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I'd traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more - or maybe less - cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were. #Quote by Amy Harmon

#9. When the liberal comes before the electorate as a candidate for public office and is asked by those whose votes he solicits what he or his party intends to do for them and their group, the only answer he can give is: Liberalism serves everyone, but it serves no special interest.
To be a liberal is to have realized that a special privilege conceded to a small group to the disadvantage of others cannot, in the long run, be preserved without a fight (civil war): but that, on the other hand, one cannot bestow privileges on the majority, since these then cancel one another out in their value for those whom they are supposed to specially favor, and the only net result is a reduction in the productivity of social labor. #Quote by Ludwig Von Mises

#10. So, we have an element newly prominent in American religious and political life, a new form of entitlement, a self-declared elect. What some have seen as a resurgence of Christianity, or at least a bold defense of American cultural tradition - even as another great awakening! - has brought a harshness, a bitterness, a crudeness, and a high-handedness into the public sphere that are only to be compared to the politics, or the collapse of politics, in the period before the Civil War. Its self-righteousness fuels the damnedest things - I use the word advisedly - notably the acquisition of homicidal weapons. I wonder what these supposed biblicists find in the Gospels or the Epistles that could begin to excuse any of it. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#11. Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.' #Quote by W.E.B. Du Bois

#12. All of this goes back to Bill Clinton. It's not a coincidence that radical welfare reform took place on the same watch that also saw a radical deregulation of the financial services industry. Clinton was a man born with a keen nose for two things: women with low self-esteem and political opportunity. When he was in the middle of a tough primary fight in 1992 and came out with a speech promising to "end welfare as we know it," he could immediately smell the political possibilities, and it wasn't long before this was a major plank in his convention speech (and soon in his first State of the Union address). Clinton understood that putting the Democrats back in the business of banging on black dependency would allow his party to reseize the political middle that Democrats had lost when Lyndon Johnson threw the weight of the White House behind the civil rights effort and the War on Poverty. #Quote by Matt Taibbi

#13. I think it was probably both the coincidence and the beer that made Miralles say at some point that we were going to end up the same, defeated and alone and
punch-drunk in a dead-end city, pissing blood before going into the ring to fight to the death against our own shadows in an empty stadium. #Quote by Javier Cercas

#14. Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn't seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn't at all great for business. #Quote by Henry Rollins

#15. Some of you from outside the South may be wondering why we're emphasizing this irrefutable historical fact that everyone should know so strongly already. Well, it's because there has been an unfortunate tendency down here to deflect as much attention as possible away from the atrocities that the South was responsible for before, during, and after the war, and to focus on the glory, the courage, and all that kind of shit instead. We name roads, schools, and parks after Confederate leaders. We erect statues in their honor. We revere them and honor them, all while ignoring the gigantic racist elephant in the room. 4 Look, it ain't nothin' wrong with glory and courage, and it's completely legitimate to acknowledge the military greatness of some of the Confederacy's leaders, but what's not okay is to do so without also acknowledging their complicity in and tacit acceptance of one of the single most reprehensible and inhumane practices in human history. 5 It's disingenuous. It's cheap. It's cowardly. We gotta cut that shit out.

So, yes, we fought a war for slavery, and because sometimes the universe gets some shit right (waterfalls, potatoes, Scarlett Johansson), we lost. Which is another thing we apparently need to remind some of our fellow Southerners of. Not only did we fight a war for slavery, but we got our asses whupped. Until we can all agree to accept this and act accordingly, we're never going to be able to move on. It's nothing to be proud of, y'all - it reall #Quote by Trae Crowder

#16. Now, Reverend Father Abbot asked me to make the following announcements:

"First, for the next three days we shall sing the Little Office of Our Lady before Matins, asking her intercession for peace.

"Second, general instructions for civil defense in the event of a space-strike or missile-attack alert are available on the table by the entrance. Everybody take one. #Quote by Walter M. Miller Jr.

#17. I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War. #Quote by Nigel Hamilton

#18. One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed. #Quote by Quentin Tarantino

#19. Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren't any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn't necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you. #Quote by Drew Gilpin Faust

#20. For a mile up and down the open fields before us the splendid lines of the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia swept down upon us. Their bearing was magnificent. They came forward with a rush, and how our men did yell, 'Come on, Johnny, come on!' #Quote by Rufus Dawes

#21. America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law. #Quote by Marco Rubio

#22. It was a strange thing to be in a distant land, among things you'd never seen before, all because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get along and there were hotheads in the South who thought more of their Negroes and their pride than they did of their country #Quote by Shelby Foote

#23. I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War. #Quote by Kirk Douglas

#24. In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government. #Quote by John Moody

#25. You take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There's been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it. #Quote by Noam Chomsky

#26. More African American adults are under correctional control today - in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.7 The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.8 The absence of black fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites. #Quote by Michelle Alexander

#27. All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War - when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there's a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious. #Quote by Carl Sagan

#28. Not knowing how mant troops Jenkins truly had, Johnson refused to surrender "unless forced to do so by an exhibition of your boasted strength."
Jenkins fought for more than five hours before pulling back. #Quote by Clint Johnson

#29. You will never find peace with these fascists
You'll never find friends such as we
So remember that valley of Jarama
And the people that'll set that valley free.
From this valley they say we are going
Do not hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We'll set this valley before we're through.
All this world is like this valley called Jarama
So green and so bright and so fair
No fascists can dwell in our valley
Nor breathe in our new freedoms air. #Quote by Woody Guthrie

#30. From the accession of Henry the Seventh to the breaking out of the civil wars, England enjoyed much greater exemption from war, foreign and domestic, than for a long period before, and during the controversy between the houses of York and Lancaster. These years of peace were favorable to commerce and the arts. Commerce and the arts augmented general and individual knowledge; and knowledge is the only fountain, both of the love and the principles of human liberty. #Quote by Daniel Webster

#31. American slavery was specifically racist slavery. It could not exist apart from racism, and could not be separated from it. Slavery was a massive institution, but its evil was only enabled by the constraints of law and power. Change the law, and you can end the slaver, for the slavery rested on law. But racism rests in the heart and mind. You can change laws, but changing hearts is a whole different matter. Once the slavery was taken away, the racism still existed. The hearts of millions of whiles hated and despised blacks just as before, only now even more so. Now they would have the added insult of an occupying government and military force attempting to make them live as equals - politically at the very least. If the racism remained, unrepentant and unhealed - and it certainly did - the evil would only manifest in a new way. #Quote by Joel McDurmon

#32. The vast army of McClellan spread out before me. The marching columns extended back as far as eye could see in the distance. It was a grand and glorious spectacle, and it was impossible to look at it without admiration. #Quote by Daniel Harvey Hill

#33. What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset. #Quote by Andrew Young

#34. I had often thought about people who lived through strange and compelling times - World War II, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement. These were periods that shaped people in some indelible way. I wondered how this moment would define us. I had never before believed that there was anything special about the era I was growing up in. #Quote by Aditi Khorana

#35. On January 1, they proclaimed the independence of a new country, which they called Haiti - the name they believed the original Taino inhabitants had used before the Spaniards killed them all. Although the country's history would be marked by massacre, civil war, dictatorship, and disaster, and although white nations have always found ways to exclude Haiti from international community, independent Haiti's first constitution created a radical new concept of citizenship: only black people could be citizens of Haiti. And who was black? All who would say they rejected both France and slavery and would accept the fact that black folks ruled Haiti. Thus, even a "white" person could become a "black" citizen of Haiti, as long as he or she rejected the assumption that whites should rule and Africans serve.18 #Quote by Edward E. Baptist

#36. There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began. #Quote by Michelle Alexander

#37. learned that knowledge is power. If you want to control people's lives, limit their knowledge. That is why, throughout history, despots have burned books and exiled (and even killed) those with knowledge who threatened their power. Before the Civil War in America, it was against the law in many states to teach slaves to read and write. Knowledge is the most powerful force on earth. That is why the control of knowledge is essential to the control of power. The formula is: Information x Education = Knowledge Knowledge is power - and lack of knowledge is weakness. #Quote by Robert T. Kiyosaki

#38. In the closing years of John Wesley's life, he became a friend of William Wilberforce. In England, Wilberforce was a great champion of freedom for slaves before the American Civil War. He was subjected to a vicious campaign by slave traders and others whose powerful commercial interests were threatened. Rumors were spread that he was a wife-beater. His character, morals, and motives were repeatedly smeared during some twenty years of pitched battles. From his deathbed, John Wesley wrote to Wilberforce, "Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be won out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Be not weary in well-doing." William Wilberforce never forgot those words of John Wesley. They kept him going even when all the forces of hell were arrayed against him. The #Quote by John C. Maxwell

#39. I'm American. Like I told you. And I'm American and not something else because they failed that day. They couldn't do it and most of them probably knew they couldn't do it before they even started, but they went anyhow. There's honor in that. I don't reckon there's much honor left in the world now, but they had it that day and I honor them on both sides by knowing what I can about it. Much as I can. #Quote by Lance Weller

#40. Treatment of returning soldiers throughout history. Did you know one-third of the Union dead in the Civil War were buried before the bodies had been identified? Or that black soldiers in the south, coming home from World War I, were beaten for wearing uniforms in public? And now there are tens of thousands of guys like me just waiting, you know, standing in line for help? We trusted our country, we fought for it, and now it is blowing us off. It happens in every war, is the point. Soldiers are mistreated when they come home. Joel said everyone complains about people spitting on Vietnam vets, but who knows? Maybe that was more honest. #Quote by Stephen P. Kiernan

#41. People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. ('Todo mi familia!' as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. 'Todo mi familia!') From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people 'disappeared' all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one's former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….]

I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the bana #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#42. The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force. #Quote by Walter Lippmann

#43. Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. #Quote by Margaret Atwood

#44. If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don't look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights. #Quote by Paul Watson

#45. Further, more African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision - either in prison, on parole or probation - than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War (Alexander 2012 #Quote by Merrill Singer

#46. If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black "leaders."

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed "legacy of slavery" found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowe #Quote by Thomas Sowell