1861 Quotes

“By the age of twenty-five, [Louis T. Wigfall] had managed to squander his considerable inheritance, settle three affairs of honor on the dueling ground, fight in a ruthless military campaign against the Seminoles, consume a small lakeful of bourbon, win an enviable reputation in whorehouses throughout the South, and get hauled before a judge on charges of murder. Three years after that, he took the next logical step and went into Texas politics.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The Confederacy was never truly much of a cause - lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect; a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The North’s three greatest generals would all be Ohioans: Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.3 And of the next six men to be elected president of the United States—through 1900, that is—all but one would be Ohio-born Republicans who had fought for the Union.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“For my own part,” the president began, “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only alternative was authoritarianism.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Numerous reports attest that by mid-1861 it had fallen to half or even a third of what it had been the year before. The “property” that slaveholders were fighting for was now not only less reliable (you never knew when it might run off in the night) but less valuable—perhaps, in a sense, less worth fighting for.121”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“In a long missive to the secretary of war, Simon Cameron, Butler also took the opportunity to argue that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were—in a legal sense—no longer things, but people.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Lincoln returned again and again to the idea of “the people.” He was determined to prove that the Union was not fighting against the cause of freedom, as the Confederates maintained, but actively for it—and according to a very different understanding of the word. To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only alternative was authoritarianism. “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States,” he wrote.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fortress Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in northern Virginia, along the James, on the Mississippi, in Florida.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery—and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had refused to concede any meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with black skin.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Were these blacks people, or property? Free, or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable, for answering them would have raised a whole host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook, by allowing the escaped Negroes to be all of those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The president left no record of his own thoughts on the news from Fortress Monroe. But he might have agreed with Frederick Douglass’s recent words, had he known of them: The control of events has been taken out of our hands … we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces—which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“(The Blairs may have been rabid Unionists, but they had no more love of Negroes than the Herald—which, by the way, proposed that all the confiscated slaves should be held by the federal government and then eventually sold back to their owners, at half price, to finance the cost of the war.)75”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“If it be the business of the North to squander her millions, and to give up her sons, simply that we can place the old flag-staff again in the hands of those who ask protection to slavery, then … you will see an inglorious termination to the campaign. But, if we are to fight for freedom; if we are to wipe out the curse that infects our borders; if we are to establish justice, teach mercy, and proclaim righteousness, then will our soldiers be animated by a heroic purpose that will build them up in courage, in faith, in honor, and they will come back to us respected and beloved.73”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“General Ruggles told headquarters that he had immediately dispatched mounted troops “to intercept and recover the slaves supposed to have escaped, but thus far without satisfactory results.”71 In other words, the Confederates were fighting Negroes on Virginia soil weeks before they fought even a single Yankee.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“(The following year the Confederate Congress would reluctantly vote to exempt owners of twenty or more slaves from conscription, exacerbating Southern complaints that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”) Some state governments even refused to turn over their arms stockpiles or dispatch all their troops to the Confederate authorities, afraid of being left helpless when the Negroes rose up to butcher their masters. They cited “local defense” as their justification, and the authorities in Richmond—committed as they were to the doctrine of states’ rights—found it difficult to overrule.70”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The “black Confederates”—a misleading term, since the Confederacy never accepted Negro enlistments—have received a great deal of attention from present-day apologists for the Lost Cause. Far more widespread throughout the South in early 1861, though, were signs of white fear and black rebellion.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Behind his boss’s back, Hay had recently given Lincoln a nickname: “the Tycoon.” This word had entered American slang within just the past year or so, as part of the fad for all things Japanese. Taikun was the title of the chief shogun, and suggested—at least to the Western mind—not just a wise and powerful ruler but a figure of deep oriental inscrutability.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Though California may officially have been free territory, its political leadership was still dominated by Southern sympathizers—voters called them the Chivalry faction, or the Chivs. No Northern state had more draconian laws restricting the lives and rights of its black inhabitants”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“There was little room for anecdote or sentiment in a Pony Express pouch; each half ounce of mail cost its sender a five-dollar gold piece plus surcharges, and each rider could carry only ten pounds.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The filibusters were gangs of young freelance military adventurers who set out to invade, in the name of Manifest Destiny, various soft parts of Latin America: Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, northern Mexico. These soldiers of fortune sailed from American ports under fanciful flags of nonexistent republics, of which they imagined themselves the founding fathers.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Keeping blacks out of white Northerners’ midst was a good reason for opposing slavery’s expansion.77 What did gain wide currency among Northerners—even many who detested blacks and abolitionists in equal measure—was the self-congratulatory conceit that the North was the land of liberty and the South the land of slavery.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“The more new territory was opened to slave agriculture, the greater the fresh demand for slave labor, and the higher the value of those human investments would soar.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“In 1858, Lincoln himself noted in a speech that the region’s four million slaves were valued at no less than two billion dollars. (Most recent historians have put the figure even higher.)”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Any person of African descent was barred from entering the grounds of the Capitol—except, of course, for the servants”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“As the banners passed, he read them one by one: Vigilance the Price of Liberty; No More Slave Territory; The Pilgrims Did Not Found an Empire for Slavery. But the sight that made his heart leap was the company of West Boston Wide Awakes: two hundred black men marching proudly in uniform, keeping stride in perfect tempo with their white comrades, under a banner that read God Never Made a Tyrant or a Slave.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“Boston would see many young men march through over the next five years: parades both ebullient and somber, strutting off toward glory or trudging homeward, shattered, from the fields of death. The Wide Awake rally of October 16, 1860—the last great parade of the peace—was an unwitting dress rehearsal for all that would follow.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening

“By October, many estimates put the organization’s national membership at half a million men.”
― Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening