James M. McPherson - Confederate Quotes

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The bottom line in the Civil War, after all is said and done, showed that every Confederate state was a slave state and every free state was a Union state. These facts were not a coincidence, and every Civil War soldier knew it.

James M. McPherson
Defeat would blot the Confederate States of America from the face of the earth. Confederate victory would destroy the United States and create a precedent for further balkanization of the territory once governed under the Constitution of 1789.

James M. McPherson
What were these rights and liberties for which Confederates contended? The right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories.

James M. McPherson
While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states' rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.

James M. McPherson
These soldiers were using the word slavery in the same way that Americans in 1776 had used it to describe their subordination to Britain. Unlike many slaveholders in the age of Thomas Jefferson, Confederate soldiers from slaveholding families expressed no feelings of embarrassment or inconsistency in fighting for their own liberty while holding other people in slavery. Indeed, white supremacy and the right of property in slaves were at the core of the ideology for which Confederate soldiers fought.

James M. McPherson