Look Away! Quotes

“It was one more reason for Rhett to conclude that if the Confederacy was to be saved from Davis and his ilk, it was up to him to do it in the Permanent Constitution. Unlike Davis, Rhett always preferred to strike the first blow, and though over the years he had lost almost all his political battles, he still believed that initiative meant advantage.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“59Southern society and politics had always been fueled in large degree by personality and temperament as much as policy”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“This is the secret of our strength and national vitality,” he went on. Significantly, DeBow spoke of Southerners as a “nationality.” Nations were ruined by a diversity of interests pulling them apart, he said, and in the case of the North by too much immigration from inferior north European peoples such as Poles, Russians, shanty Irish, and especially Germans, who instead of assimilating into the population and being elevated by it, rather remained apart in their own ethnic communities and thus dragged down the whole.21Somehow, he failed to grasp that by his own logic the African root stock of Southern slaves would be superior to the whites’ balmier Mediterranean origins.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Not a few Southern statesmen representing the common people tried to highlight the way they were being used. “How long will you suffer politicians to flatter you as sovereigns and use you as victims, without awakening your resentment?” Benjamin H. Hill asked a Georgia audience. “How often shall they settle and unsettle the slavery question before you discover the only meaning they have, is to excite your prejudices and get yourvotes? For how many years shall changing demagogues shuffle you as the gambler shuffles his cards—to win a stake—and still find you willing to be shuffled again?”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“by spring 1862 it became universal throughout Confederate regiments for the soldiers to elect their leaders from colonel down to sergeants, the very imposition of military democracy that would lead some to bemoan the demagoguery and wire-pulling with the men in order to seek election.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“87The Confederacy had become virtually a welfare state ahead of its time, and yet again the antithesis of the hands-off government ethic upon which so much of Southern political and social ideology lay based.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“The lesson offered by the breakdown of determination and morale on the Confederate home front was that democracy might be strong, but not strong enough to survive in the face of a sustained inability to keep peace and protect life and property.Protection proved to be the defining element in individual and community morale among the civil population. They would suffer hardship and scarcity, starvation and dislocation, and even the deaths of their sons and brothers, but in a culture that for generations had been accustomed to the maintenance of civil order by national, state, or local authorities, such a breakdown was near fatal. In the end, the greatest internal enemy of Confederate democracy was fear.112”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Thanks to inaccurate reports of the number of men paroled in the two surrenders, he concluded that Lee and Johnston had yielded less than 40,000. “Is there not something remarkable in these numbers?” he asked. “Is there not something that both the Yankees and our own people have strangely overlooked? Where is Lee’s real army? Where is Johnston’s army? Not surrendered, by at least eighty thousand good men as ever shouldered a musket.” Rationalizing that the two generals had surrendered only some state militia and a lot of officers to fool the Yankees, he concluded that there must be up to 100,000 unparoled Confederate soldiers somewhere in the East and that they “will yet be heard from in this war.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“These well-to-do were many of the same men who so enthusiastically supported secession at the outset—the ones who so confidently blustered that independence would be so quick and easy that they would eat all the flesh of those killed in any war, and drink all the blood spilled. Now in mid-1864 still “those that brought the war on is at home & our boys are fighting for there property”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Before long the impetus for prohibition spread to all of the states, and even without martial law their legislatures began to pass laws prohibiting distillation for any purposes other than medicinal use.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“But the most interesting of all slave maladies was what Cartwright chose to call “drapetomania,” the disease that made blacks want to run away from slavery.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“he recognized slavery as a vital element of social morale, for even the lowliest white still could stand with pride knowing that he was the superior of a black. Slavery gave poor whites a social status nowhere else enjoyed by the peasantry, and as proof he argued that some of the most ardent supporters of slavery were whites too poor themselves to own slaves.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Significantly, in a movement that all declared to be predicated on the sovereignty of the states, the one area in which now and again in the future they would deny state sovereignty would be slavery. To theold Union they had said that Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not state rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“They did retain the prohibition on the African slave trade, not from any opposition to slavery but simply as sound business policy. The South no longer needed it, and introduction of new slaves from abroad served only to act on supply and demand by reducing the value of those already there.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“South Carolina wanted to be certain that no misguided egalitarianism led to an excess of democracy. After all, that was partially what they were seceding from.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“A poor man might count for very little, but he was still free and white, which at least made him better than a free black or a slave, and in a society deeply dominated by class and caste, that was something worth fighting for.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“26They might not be able to inflame poor non-slaveholding whites to secession and possible war to protect the planter’s investment in slaves, but an appeal to fears of racial amalgamation cut across class lines.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America