The Coming Fury Quotes

“Out of Bull Run would come an effort so prodigious that simply to make it would change America forever. In the dust and smoke along the Warrenton Road an era had come to an end.”
― Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury

“Perhaps it was not really possible for slavery to die peacefully and quietly, while everyone waited hat in hand for the mills of God to finish their grinding. Perhaps the essential fact about slavery was that it could neither be kept alive nor done to death rationally. Its foundations went far down into the pit, down to blackest wrong and violence, and when the foundations were torn out, wrong and violence would surely be loosed for a season. The institution's defenders had both overplayed their hands and overstayed their time.”
― Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury

“Negro slavery was specifically mentioned, and was given permanence; there never could be a law “denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves,” and slavery was fully protected in territories then or later acquired.”
― Bruce Catton, Coming Fury, Volume 1

“We are opposed to Negro equality. To prevent this we are willing to spare the last man, down to the point where women and children begin to suffer for food and clothing; when these begin to suffer and die, rather than see them equalized with an inferior race we will die with them.”
― Bruce Catton, Coming Fury, Volume 1

“the ruin of the South, by the emancipation of her slaves, is not like the ruin of any other people. It is not a mere loss of liberty … but it is the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having.”7”
― Bruce Catton, Coming Fury, Volume 1

“Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the prosperity of the South and to that of the North as well; and, furthermore, it was nothing any Northerner need worry about. “It is an institution, too, that doesn’t harm you, for we don’t let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don’t trouble you with that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the”
― Bruce Catton, Coming Fury, Volume 1

“It would slowly become evident that when they committed themselves at last to secession, not as a threat but as an accomplished fact armed for violence, the devoted men who wanted to preserve the Southern way of life had made a tactical error. The ultimate fate of their cause would be largely determined by what was done in Washington. Leaving Washington forever, they had fatally surrendered the initiative. Now their enemies would seize it.”
― Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury