Helmuth von Moltke Quotes

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter.

Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.

The Civil War always moves me.

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

The present Administration had no alternative but to accept the war initiated by South Carolina or the Southern Confederacy. The North will sustain the Administration almost to a man, and it ought to sustain it at all hazards.

The Civil war made us a nation rather then an association of states.

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

As long as it served his purpose, Mr. Lincoln boldly advocated the right of Secession.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

The civil war now being inaugurated will be as horrible as his Satanic Majesty could desire.

One [section of the nation] would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

Everyone knew at the time that the war was ultimately about slavery. After the war, some began saying that it was really about states’ rights, or a clash of two different cultures, or about the tariff, or about the industrializing North versus the agrarian South. All these interpretations came together to portray the Civil War as a collision of two noble civilizations from which black slaves had been airbrushed out.

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he turned the Civil War into a revolution.

A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal, and constitutional restraints, has thrown his abolition hosts among you, who are murdering and imprisoning your citizens, confiscating and destroying your property, and committing other acts of violence and outrage too shocking and revolting to humanity to be enumerated. All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned...

…moderates were inexorably sucked into the vortexes of the sectional passions that led to the war. [American Civil War]

The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.

President Lincoln chose to fight a bloody and unpopular war because he believed the enemy had to be defeated. He was right.

If you persist in your purpose of secession, there will be war - a bloody and cruel war. Not only will the North fight, but she will also triumph. The experiment of secession will fail, and the South, in ruin and desolation, will bitterly repent the day when she attempted to overthrow a wise and beneficent government.