Quotes about Southern Confederacy

James Buchanan

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.

William Tecumseh Sherman

I know that the Southern People prefer a Govt. of their own but as soon as it is demonstrated that there cannot be an independent Southern Confederacy, many then will yield obedience rather than lose their Estates.

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.

Leonidas W. Spratt

That the Republic of the South shall sustain her independence, there is little question. The form of our society is too pregnant of intellectual resources and military strength to be subdued.

Southern intellectuals at the beginning of the Civil War were convinced of their invincibility. They misjudged both the effect of the industrial and technological might and the moral intensity of the North.

Jefferson Davis

The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union through the agency of committees, congressional legislation or constitutional amendments, is extinguished. We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people require the organization of a Southern confederacy.

George Cary Eggleston

It is impossible to say precisely when the conviction became general in the South that we were to be beaten. I cannot even decide at what time I myself began to think the cause a hopeless one, and I have never yet found one of my fellow-Confederates, though I have questioned many of them, who could tell me with any degree of certainty the history of his change from confidence to despondency. We schooled ourselves from the first to think that we should ultimately win, and the habit of thinking so was too strong to be easily broken by adverse happenings. Having undertaken to make good our declaration of independence, we refused to admit, even to ourselves, the possibility of failure. It was a part of our soldierly and patriotic duty to believe that ultimate success was to be ours

Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view. Here he reveals that the Confederacy had developed a culture of positivism about winning the Civil War in which it was unpatriotic to consider reality. This caused the war to go on longer than was rational from a Southern military and economic point of view.

New York Herald

In certain portions of the South there are expeditions forming for the purpose of sailing to San Domingo, and of conquering that island; and in other parts, expeditions are forming for a descent on the Island of Cuba; and others are looking to the acquisition of Mexico, with the ultimate creation of a new republic, commencing with Virginia at the North, and embracing San Domingo, Cuba, and Mexico up to Central America. All these wild measures, to our certain knowledge, are embraced more or less by certain parties now in Washington, and scattered over the South.

Secession of the South was not a new idea stimulated by the election of Abraham Lincoln. Fully 10 years before, there was this plan to form a Slave state union which would expand into Mexico and the Caribbean.

Leonidas W. Spratt

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

Andrew Johnson

I tell our sisters in the South that so far as Tennessee is concerned she will not be dragged into a Southern or any other confederacy until she has had time to consider; and then she will go when she believes it to be her interest, and not before.

Southern Confederacy Quotes