The Quotable American Civil War
By Iain C. Martin
(December 2008 Civil War News)

Index, 292 pp; 2008. The Globe Pequot Press, P.O. Box 480 Guilford, CT 06437 $16.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: George Khoury
George Khoury is an adjunct professor at University of Central Florida. He will present a workshop this summer at the Civil War Preservation Trust's Teacher Institute. He has taught the war from a Southern perspective and is the winner of six National Endowment for the Humanities History grants.

Review:
This book is another title that should be included in your personal library. Martin has searched many known and little known documents for poignant quotes. This book is also an excellent gift for the Civil War student who you think has a complete library or young enough to start one.

Martin’s Introduction presents an excellent overview of the conflict in clear and unbiased terms. The Table of Contents divides the sections by such topics as: A House Divided; On Slavery; Terrible Swift Sword: 1861; Mr. Lincoln’s War: 1862; High Watermark of the Confederacy: 1863; The Road to Appomattox: 1864-1865 and others.
The best way to describe this book to the reader is to present various quotes for your edification.

I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with blood.
John Brown, last words written before his execution, December 2, 1859

If the cotton states shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace…We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to another by bayonets
Horace Greeley, editorial, New York Tribune, November 8, 1860

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. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about –war is a terrible thing!
U.S. Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, comment to friend, Professor David F. Boyd of Virginia, December 24, 1860, quoted by Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol.1, 1958

I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than the dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation.
U.S. Colonel Robert E. Lee, letter to his Custis, January 23, 1861

The time for compromise has now passed, and the South is determined to maintain her position, make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.
C.S. President Jefferson Davis, inaugural speech, February 18, 1861. [Editor’s Note: This quotation is not from the inaugural address, but was spoken when Davis arrived in Montgomery on Feb. 16]

The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.
C.S. Lieutenant General Thomas J. Jackson, speech to the cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, April 13, 1861

We did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.
C.S. Colonel Richard Henry Lee

In saving the Union, I have destroyed the republic. Before me I have the Confederacy which I loath. But behind me I have bankers which I fear.
Abraham Lincoln comment on the National Bank Act, February 1863

The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.
Karl Marx, 1861

I believe we have no power, under the Constitution of the United States; or rather under the form of government under which we live, to interfere with the institution of Slavery, or any other of the institutions of our sister States, be they Free or Slave States
Abraham Lincoln, speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, September 17, 1859

Only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born; or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.
Robert Penn Warren, “ The Legacy of the Civil War,” 1961