James Henry Hammond, the planter and former U.S. senator who had coined the phrase “cotton is king,” and whose proslavery writings had so influenced the South, had written nothing in his diary for over three years. He resumed making entries two days after the surrender. It became a chronicle both of his own physical decline and of his despair at the effects of war, though he had come to believe it was necessary; that only separation from the Union could save the South from abolition and the inevitable slave insurrections that would accompany it. But he recognized that the war had become
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Keep this in mind when talking to a Lost Causer.
