Leonidas W. Spratt Quotes
The contest is not between the North and South as geographical sections … nor between the people of the North and the people of the South, for our relations have been pleasant …. But the real contest is between the two forms of society which have become established …. Society is essentially different from government … and within this government two societies had become developed as variant in structure and distinct in form as any two beings in animated nature.
The letter was also published in the Charleston Mercury, February 13, 1861
Leonidas W. Spratt, 19th Century, Editor of The Charleston Mercury, “The Philosophy of Secession; A Southern View, Presented in a Letter Addressed to the Hon. Mr. Perkins of Louisiana, in Criticism on the Provisional Constitution Adopted by the Southern Congress at Montgomery,” Alabama, 1861
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Buchanan us considered by most historians to have been the worst or one of the worst Presidents of the United States. At this point, he was a lame duck president with Abraham Lincoln, the President Elect soon to take office. This speech, just encouraged the South more than ever and helped to bring about the Civil War. His vacillation and lack of any leadership on the slavery question exacerbated the polarization that was tearing the nation apart.
See Mark {606304}; also Matthew {606727}. Lincoln had used the “house divided” biblical metaphor in 1843 when arguing for Whig solidarity. The first political use of the Biblical metaphor and quotation with respect to American slavery appears to have been by Sam Houston in 1850 {603970}. The first use with respect to American slavery was byMassachusetts abolitionist, Edmund Quincy, in 1852. The second sentence of this famous quotation was forsaged earlier. See Lincoln, {619494} & {584918}. Also See Felix Rohatyn who used the Lincoln line to refer to poverty: {70611}.
While this assessment was true up until the 1980s. By the 21st century there were almost no serious historians who thought that the motivation of the Confederate States for the Civil War was anything but slavery and the economic impact that abolition might bring. However, one of your advantages having this collection of historical quotations is that you can see for yourself why the Southern states say they were seceding. This following are four of the official secession resolution documents. Read these and you will see that all the claims that there were other major reasons for secession are just attempts to make the Confederacy a little less brutal and greedy. See {621371}, {619793}, {621372}, {621375}
While Douglas and Lincoln were political opponents with little love lost between them, both were patriots. Douglas’s position were much more popular in the South, and the moment he realized that Lincoln would win the Presidency, he headed South where he was very persuasive in trying to hold the Union together, but he could not see all the potential rebels and was only effective with some. South Carolina not only seceded, but in order to prevent any changing of minds, some the worst of the South Carolinians, attacked Fort Sumter firing on the American Flag and attacking and capturing the Union troops who were totally outnumbered. The Civil War was then inevitable.
The amendments failed as did the compromise.
Fitzhugh was a Southern iconoclast whose view of Northern labor was much like that of Karl Marx but who was an enthusiastic supporter of slavery.
In many respects, it is amazing that secession did not take place earlier.
When the first Southern States seceded, each appointed a whose job it was to persuade the other Southern States to also secede. In this case Hale was marketing secession to Kentucky which with Maryland were the only two Southern States to reject what they regarded as treason and rebellion. The importance of the quotation however is in his argument which was all based on enmity to racial equality and abolition. Later Southern apologists would argue that the Civil War was fought, not about slavery and racism butt about different philosophies of government. See {623715} .
The economic advantage of the North over the South in the Civil War is well known. Not so well-known is the huge technological advantage that the North had. This quotation gives an indication of the extreme difference. The North fought the war on all fronts including the technological one where no weapons and methodologies from the telegraph to the military railroad were critical. The South by contrast did not have the manpower to fight the war and keep industry and scientific technological development going also.
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
