-- Political Quotations on Secession

“If we were wrong in our contest, then the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a grave mistake and the revolution to which it led was a crime. If Washington was a patriot; Lee cannot have been a rebel.”

Wade Hampton
 
"The Southern folk were always debaters, loving logic and taking off their hats to a syllogism. They had never been able to understand how any reasonable mind could doubt the right of secession, and they were in a chronic state of surprised incredulity, as the war began, that the North could indeed be about to wage a war that was manifestly forbidden by unimpeachable logic."

From the book, The Civil War Infantryman: In camp, in the march, and in battle, by Gregory A. Coco, Introduction, page 1.
 
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Washington won. Lee lost.

Washington won. Lee lost.

You forgot to thank the French, Dutch and Spanish. :wink:

“If we were wrong in our contest, then the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a grave mistake and the revolution to which it led was a crime. If Washington was a patriot; Lee cannot have been a rebel.”
Wade Hampton
 
“ The outbreak of hostilities and Lincoln’s call for troops, followed his proclamation blockading Southern ports, unified North Carolina. When the only choice was the choice of sides in the war, Unionists in every section of the state became Secessionists. “We are all one now,” said Jeremy F. Gilmer, staunch unionist, to George Howard. Ex-Governor [William A.] Graham said, “Blood is thicker than water.” Thomas Ruffin urged North Carolinians to “fight, fight, fight.” The fourteen Unionist newspapers in the state, led by [William] Holden’s North Carolina Standard all went over to the Secessionist Party.”

Hugh T. Lefler and Albert R. Newsome write on page 423 of North Carolina; The History of a Southern State
 
"The world look on with scorn and derision. We have, it is said, no government--a mere voluntary association of independent states--a debating society, or a moot court, without any real power to uphold the laws or maintain the Constitution. We have no country, no flag, no Union; but each state at its pleasure, upon its own mere whim or caprice, with or without cause, may secede and dissolve the Union. Secession, we are told, is a constitutional right of each state, and the Constitution has inscribed its own death-warrant upon its face. If this be so, we have indeed no government, and Europe may well speak of us with contempt and derision."

Robert J. Walker, former US Senator from Mississippi, in a speech at the Union Meeting in Union Square, New York City, April 20, 1861.
 
"I shall go [to jail] because I have failed to recognize the hand of God in the work of breaking up the American Government, and the inauguration of the most wicked, cruel, unnatural, and uncalled-for war ever recorded in history."

William G. Brownlow, editor of the Knoxville Whig, October 26, 1861.
 
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"My friend, look around you; the whole State is one vast insane asylum."

James L. Petigru, South Carolina Judge.

*Petigru was responding to a stranger who stopped him on a street in Columbia, South Carolina, to ask directions to the insane asylum. This was when secession fever was at its height.

"They have this day set a blazing torch to the temple of constitutional liberty and, please God, we shall have no more peace forever."

Judge James L. Petigru, December 20, 1860, the day that South Carolina left the Union.

"South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum."

Judge Petigru was responding in the Christmas week of 1860 to a secessionist leader and former US congressman, Robert Barnwell Rhett, who had asked if he was with them.
 
"I do not see how secession is now to be avoided. In making this statement, however, it is important to define what secession is. It is easier to say what it is not than what it is. It is not order and good government. It is not submission to the law, and accepting a President elected in the manner provided by the Constitution and the laws. It is not a regard for the rights of others. It is nothing, in fact, which law-abiding Englishmen are taught to respect and observe."

J. Bancroft Davis, American lawyer and correspondent for the London Times, December 19, 1861.
 
"The South went to war on account of slavery...South Carolina went to war as she said in her secession proclamation, because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln...don't you think South Carolina ought to know why it went to war?"

John Singleton Mosby

Unionblue

Shewee, I'm going to rock this one until the wheels pop off
 
"It is a rope of sand, this Confederacy, founded on the doctrine of Secession, and will not last many years--not five."

--Sarah Morgan Dawson, from her work, A Confederate Girl's Diary, 1913.
 
"If this Union of ours is a confederacy of States which is liable to be dissolved at the will of any of the States, and if no power rests with the General Government to enforce its laws, it would seem that we have been laboring under a delusion these eighty years in supposing we were a nation and the fact would appear to be that the several States of the union have really been united by no closer bond than that which connects us with Great Britain and France--a mere treaty stipulation, which any of the parties were at liberty to annul at pleasure."

--editorial, Harper's Weekly, April 20, 1861.
 
"My God...What if we had succeeded?"

--Louisiana Confederate veteran and later Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Edward Douglass White, in a letter to a fellow veteran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Douglass_White

(I stole this quote from cash's Student of the American Civil War blog. Sorry, cash, but it was way too good to let pass.)
 
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"But if, through division in the ranks of those opposed to Mr. Lincoln, he should be elected, we have no excuse for dissolving the Union."

"The Union is worth more than Mr. Lincoln, and if the battle is to be fought for the Constitution, let us fight it in the Union for the sake of the Union."

Sam Houston, Address on Secession, Austin, Texas, 1860.
 
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