Southern Identity Quotes
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.
After his speech was interrupted several times by Ku Klux Klansmen:
This was a decade before there was a Civil War. Secession and war had been advocated by many Southerners for years before. Most people are not aware that the move toward secession did not suddenly appear when Lincoln was elected President. It had been festering for over a decade. The other importance of the quotation is that the Southernors knew perfectly well that their actions would lead to a civil war. Some Southern apologists claim that the South never saw their actions as treason, rebellion or the cause of a civil war. This quote shows that they well knew what they were doing and the result was exactly as most Southern leaders expected.