Fateful Lightning Quotes

“It seems only human nature to hang the label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality in what we are studying. For that reason, it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of history (or any other human endeavor) too quickly.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“have got Lee just where I want him; he must fight me on my own ground.” So he waited to see what would happen—which was usually a fatal thing to do in the vicinity of Robert E. Lee.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”23”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“On the side of the Union,” Lincoln said, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.70”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“The struggle of the Union and Confederate economies to supply and support their armies thus became a reflection of the prewar antagonism between liberal democracy and slavery. The free-labor ideology of the Republican Party, with its confidence that a “harmony of interests” naturally existed between capital and labor, found convenient expression in Stanton’s decision to step back from drastic economic interventions and allow Northern capitalism to lay its own golden eggs for the war effort. The Confederacy, insensibly obeying the logic of an authoritarian labor system, conscripted, confiscated, and imposed state-ordered controls. And within that logic lay many of the seeds of the Confederacy’s destruction.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, or the difference of color.”92 Nor did Lincoln mean”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“Men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests should after a while accumulate capital, and after that should be allowed to enjoy it in peace, and also if they should choose when they have accumulated it to use it to save themselves from actual labor and hire other people to labor for them is right. In doing so they do not wrong the man they employ.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? … It is absolutely certain that the African race were not included under the name of citizens of a State… and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. The government did”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“One voice was raised in dissent. A Springfield lawyer, a former member of Congress and longtime Whig named Abraham Lincoln, took up Douglas’s defense of Kansas-Nebraska at the Illinois statehouse in Springfield the day after Douglas spoke at the state fair. In the course of a three-hour speech, Lincoln proceeded to tear Kansas-Nebraska and popular sovereignty to shreds.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

“And so Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which organized the new territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin so that slavery would be permanently illegal there.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction