Quotes Leading Up to the War

thea_447

Cadet
Joined
Feb 20, 2005
Location
The Deep South, Alabama
There are so many voices from the past who warn of the consequences of the war that was certainly coming that I thought it would be best to have a thread devoted entirely to such men who had a huge impact on their various regions.

The war didn't just suddenly appear out of whole cloth with the firing on Fort Sumter. Politicians, learned men, ordinary men, all, preceded the horror of four years of war.

Let us hear from some of those long silenced voices who still call out to us over the years. And again, step back and wonder: How is it that war could not be averted?

I will begin this thread with Robert Barnwell Rhett.

We know very little of Rhett's early years except that he came from a family of fifteen children and his father was an accomplished scholar, a barrister from London and his mother was a distant relative of John Q. Adams! In 1828, in the tariff struggle, he revealed the temper and qualities which would characterize his entire public life. When others hesitated, he spoke sharply for open resistance and rejoiced at the glorious inalienable right of a people to throw off an oppressive government. He praised revolution as the "dearest and holiest word to the brave and the free." By the late 30's, he asked: "If a Confederacy of the Southern States could now be obtained, should we not deem it a happy termination?"

After 1848 Rhett had hoped that the North would go the distance in abolishing slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia but he said to his people, "You have tamely acquiesced until to hate and persecute the South has become a high passport to honor and power in the Union."

And after the Nashville Convention, he openly proclaimed himself a disunionist.
"Let it be that I am a Traitor. The word has no terrors for me...I have been born of traitors, but, thank God, they have been Traitors in the great cause of liberty, fighting against tyranny and oppression. Such treason will ever be mine whilst true to my lineage. No, No, my friends! Smaller States before us struggled successfully, for their independence, and freedom against far greater odds; and if it must be, we can make one long, last, desperate struggle, for our rights and honor, ere the black pall of tyranny is stretched over the bier of our dead liberties. To meet death a little sooner or a little later, can be of consequence to very few of us..." (Robert Barnwell Rhett, Laura A. White, p.109.)
 
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