The Fall of the House of Dixie Quotes

“education is what makes a man free!”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“A fascinating quality of the human mind is its ability to hold firmly and simultaneously to contradictory ideas. Slave owners were a case in point. They”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Robert E. Lee was simply echoing conventional wisdom when he wrote that “the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, is the best that can exist between the white and black races.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Throughout the South, one out of every three children born into slavery died before reaching his or her first birthday; a white infant’s chance of surviving was twice as good.50 Conditions were even harsher in the rice and sugar districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Three hundred thousand white men from southern states donned Union uniforms during the war; one in three came from states that adhered to the Confederacy.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“The war destroyed a third of the South’s livestock and halved the value of all its real property.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Such people, one soldier acidly observed, certainly “would like” to see the Confederacy triumph “and no doubt weary heaven with their prayers for peace and independence.” But they prayed at least as fervently “to get through with whole skins and full purses.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Objections such as these finally cut to the core of the Richmond regime’s problem. How could it offer enough to its slaves to attract them to its banner while simultaneously retaining enough of the old South to make the war worth winning?”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“The white residents of Confederate states who served under the Union flag would together have filled out an army larger than any that Richmond fielded throughout the war.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Abraham Lincoln thus displayed little interest in fundamentally changing the pattern of land ownership in the rebellious slave states. But he remained committed to uprooting slavery, and before long he would further broaden and deepen that commitment.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Although the Emancipation Proclamation excluded Tennessee, slavery no longer enjoyed the active, enthusiastic support of and enforcement by those who now wielded political power. It had lost, in other words, precisely the monopoly of violence that its champions always knew was essential to its survival.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“And Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, Marx judged, was “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“[was] at home accumulating for the benefit of his master”?49 In the hill country of northern Alabama, farmer James Bell cautioned his son Henry in April 1861 not to be seduced by the rhetoric of the South’s large “Negroholders.” “All they want,” the elder Bell advised, “is to git you pupt up and go fight for there infurnal negroes and after you do there fighting you may kiss there hine parts for o they care.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“The conflict now on the eve of decision in the United States is neither more nor less than one of the manifold phases of the struggle between aristocracy and democracy”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“It was the nearly universal determination of southern whites to keep blacks subordinate that ultimately proved to be the secessionists’ strongest card.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“A fascinating quality of the human mind is its ability to hold firmly and simultaneously to contradictory ideas.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“In 1860, nearly all whites regarded African Americans as inherently inferior, degraded, and dangerous, and found the idea of living alongside them as anything like equals simply inconceivable.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Owning other human beings outright shaped the very core of the typical planter’s personality. At home, after all, they were at once employers, legislators, policemen, prosecutors, judges, juries, jailers, and executioners.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“reminded herself, they were “incapable of self-government.”81 Robert E. Lee was simply echoing conventional wisdom when he wrote that “the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and enlightened public sentiment, is the best that can exist between the white and black races.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Benjamin Morgan Palmer, minister of New Orleans’s First Presbyterian Church and a prominent theologian, put the matter squarely in a major sermon two decades later. “This system is interwoven with our entire social fabric,” he emphasized. “It has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our civilization.”71”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“At prices quoted on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion—an immense sum, especially at that time, a sum that exceeded the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South, a sum fully three times as great as the construction costs of all the railroads that then ran throughout all of the United States.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“In fact, about five thousand white North Carolinians served in Union uniforms over the course of the war. Three thousand white Alabamians did the same thing, as did seven thousand white Louisianans and ten thousand white Arkansans. Virginia alone (especially its western counties) supplied some thirty thousand recruits. The largest single contingent hailed from Tennessee—some forty-two thousand in number.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“Free blacks and white abolitionists in the Union hailed the actions of Frémont and Hunter as gains for human freedom and brilliant strokes of military strategy. So did many of the Union’s substantial contingent of German-born troops. For them the American Civil War was an extension of a larger, international struggle against oppressive social and political institutions, a war that some of them had already fought (and lost) in Europe during the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. In their eyes, Frémont’s militant policy represented the right way to pursue the fight for freedom.24 Kindred sentiments were common among Union soldiers recruited in Kansas. Many of them were veterans of the already years-long guerrilla war there. Now serving in Tennessee, they continued to advise slaves to flee from their masters, and they welcomed into their camps those who did.25”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“While four slave states of the upper South had joined the Confederacy, another four (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, which together became known as the “loyal border states”) remained in the Union.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“In North Carolina, for example, circulars warned that continued statehood in the Union would bring emancipation, which would mean “having three hundred thousand idle, vagabond free negroes turned loose upon you with all the privileges of white men—voting with you; sitting on juries with you; going to school with your children, and intermarrying with the white race.”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

“a concession”
― Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South