Rebel Yell

Quotations

 
"In war, Truth is the first casualty,"  Aeschylus

" All warfare is based on deception."  Sun Tzu

" In war, the winners write the story.  Therefore History should be spelled with a double "s"--His Story.  Unknown

" I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming for twelve years; I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battles, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery, we are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination."  Jefferson Davis, CSA

"Any people, any where, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable and most sacred right. A right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to causes in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any porton of such people, that can, may revolutionize and make their own of so many of the territory they inhabit."  Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848

  "If a separation of the states shall ever take place, it will be, on occasion, when one portion of the country undertakes to control, to regulate, and to sacrifice the interest of another."  Daniel Webster, during the War of 1812

"If I thought that this war was being fought solely for the freeing of the slave, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side."  U.S.. Grant when asked about ending slavery as an objective of the U.S.. Government.

"I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the free negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people.  I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races. which , I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."   A. Lincoln, 1858, Lincoln-Douglas Debates  Quincy, Il. Oct.13th.

"All we ask is to be left alone."  Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States

“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late…It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision…The conqueror’s policy is to divide the conquered into factions and stir up animosity among them…
…It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”  Pat Cleburne, Maj. Gen. CSA
January, 1864

"It is not humanity that influences you...it is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the Government into an engine of Northern Aggrandizement...you want, by an injust system of legistation to promote the industry of the United States at the expense of the people of the South." Jefferson Davis Speech to the Senate before the War.

"What were the causes of the Southern independence movement in 1860?...Northern commercial and manufacturing interests had forced through Congress taxes that oppressed Southern planters and made Northern manufacturers rich... the South paid about three-quarters of all federal taxes, most of which were spent in the North." _
"For Good and Evil  The impact of taxes on the course of civilization,""       Charles Adams, 1993, Madison Books, Lanham, USA, pp.325-327

"The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country.  Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole...we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe.   This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually."   Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860

They (the South) know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the north, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interest... These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the Union.  They (the North) are enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto.  They are as mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it."   New Orleans Daily Crescent, Jan.21, 1861

From the Web Page of the Sons of Union Veterans:
"In 1866, Union Veterans of the Civil War organized into the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and became a social and political force that would control the destiny of the nation for more than six decades."  The underline is mine and it says it all.

"If Northerners... had peaceably allowed the seceders to depart, the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy; but when Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war rather than suffer any abatement of national power, it was clear that nature at Wahington was precisely the same as nature at St. Petersburg....Democracy broke down, not when the Union ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms."  London Times, September 13, 1862.

"From January of 1860 to August of 1861 a thousand times ships left New York Harbor to get slaves for the slave market in the New World."  Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace, Oxford Unv. Press, New York, 1999.