Drew Gilpin Faust > Quotes

“Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.”
― Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering

“Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God’s grace he might lie.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“Richmond's Mrs. William McFarland. "Let us remember that we belong to that sex which was last at the cross, first at the grave…Let us go now, hand in hand, to the graves of our country’s sons, and as we go let our energies be aroused and our hearts be thrilled by this thought: It is the least thing we can do for our soldiers.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future”
― Drew Gilpin Faust

“Death has no power to change moral qualities,” he insisted in a Decoration Day speech in 1883. “Whatever else I may forget,” the aging abolitionist declared, “I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“Joynes was careful to maintain the notion of separate spheres, even as he advocated significant change. A reformed system of women's schooling "should be based upon the idea that woman is woman, and not man-nor a butterfly," neither man's "plaything nor his rival.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“She had, she declared, "no patience with women whom I hear telling what wonders they would do if they were only men, when I see so much of their legitimate work left undone.... I could name many things they could do," she continued in a revealing concession to prevailing anxieties about respectability, "without ever going into a ward."47”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“For many women like Sarah Morgan, clothing at once expressed desire and dread, possibility and impossibility. "If I was only a man!" she exclaimed. "I dont know a woman here who does not groan over her misfortune in being clothed in petticoats; why cant we fight as well as the men[?]”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“Ladies keep the stores here now ... their husbands having joined the army. It looks funny in Dixie to see a lady behind the counter, but it would be natural if we were in Yankeedom as it has always [been] the custom there, a custom however I do not like. The idea of a lady having to face and transact business with any and every body. It is alone suited to the North[ern] women of brazen faces. But I say if it is necessary, our ladies ought to shopkeep and do everything else they can to aid in the great struggle for Liberty."4”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“Where there are so many negroes upon places as upon ours," wrote an Alabama woman to the governor, "it is quite necessary that there should be men who can and will controle them, especially at this time." Faced with the prospect of being left with sixty slaves, a Mississippi planter's wife expressed similar sentiments. "Do you think," she demanded of GovernorJohn Pettus, "that this woman's hand can keep them in check?" Women compelled to assume responsibility over slaves tended to regard their new role more as a duty than an opportunity.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“Empowered by her strong sense of mission, Cumming was undaunted by male opposition. "It is useless," she proclaimed, "to say the surgeons will not allow us; we have our rights, and if asserted properly will get them. This is our right and ours alone.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“For Cumming the Christian and feminine imperative of service far outweighed superficial notions of female delicacy. Employing one dimension of feminine ideology to dismiss another, Cumming despaired of her southern sisters, inhibited by false claims of modesty and respectability from undertaking desperately needed hospital work.45”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“Working women seemed "brazen," even to those like Lila Chunn who understood and encouraged necessary departures from tradition.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War: Women of the Slave-Holding South in the American Civil War

“I was attracted, rather, to the logic of Christian ethics, to the fundamental fairness of the Golden Rule.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“Martin Luther King, Jr., had closed his speech at Groton—with words he told us he’d heard from an old Black preacher: “Lord we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.”9”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“For Whitman, immortality rested, as he wrote in another poem, in mother earth’s absorption of bodies and blood rendered “in unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“Mid-twentieth-century Virginia congratulated itself on having devised the “Virginia Way,” a distinctive form of Jim Crow in which Blacks and whites lived peaceably together in lives of “separation by consent,” in the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, a Richmond newspaper editor and renowned Robert E. Lee biographer. Freeman acknowledged that this was a social order designed to perpetuate “the continued and unchallengeable dominance of Southern whites,” who, he told his readers, would work to provide the assurance of safety and security to Black Virginians in return for their acquiescence in the status quo. “Southern Negroes,” he explained, “have far more to gain by conforming than by rebellion … by deserving rather than demanding more.” Elite white Virginians, he posited, had inherited a legacy of gentility accompanied by the imperatives of noblesse oblige; Virginia’s Black people, in turn, were “inherently of a higher type than those of any other state.” Nowhere else, Freeman insisted, “are the Negroes more encouraged through the influence of friendship for and confidence in them, on the part of whites, to be law abiding and industrious.” But never to claim equality.5”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“That fatal bullet went speeding forth Till it reached a town in the distant North Till it reached a house in a sunny street Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat Without a murmur, without a cry …….….….…. And the neighbors wondered that she should die.11 Some grieving survivors did indeed literally perish.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“In an increasingly serious world, these young women had never been asked or expected to be serious. (p. 13)”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“A knowledge of reading, writing, and the elements of arithmetic, is convenient and important to the free laborer, who is the transactor of his own affairs, and the guardian of his own interests—but of what use would they be to the slave?”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860

“An intelligent English traveller has characterized as the most miserable and degraded of all beings, “a masterless slave.” And is not the condition of the laboring poor of other countries too often that of masterless slaves?”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860

“honoring the slain offered women a claim to both prominence and power in the new postwar South. Ensuring the immortality of the fallen and of their memory became a means of perpetuating southern resistance to northern domination and to the reconstruction of southern society.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“Females are human and rational beings. They may be found of better faculties and better qualified to exercise political privileges and to attain the distinctions of society than many men; yet who complains of the order of society by which they are excluded from them?”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860

“The war that freed the slaves established broad claims to rights—for blacks as well as whites, for women as well as men, for both the living and the dead.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“there is no more exemption for nations than for individuals from the just retribution due to flagrant and persistent transgression.” But the Civil War’s “tears and blood,” he believed, “may at last bring us to our senses.”33”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“we”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“The establishment of national and Confederate cemeteries created the Civil War Dead as a category, as a collective that represented something more and something different from the many thousands of individual deaths that it comprised.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“We live our lives in accordance with the stories we tell ourselves about what those lives ought to be.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“I knew I had had no choice. I had had to fight with my mother in order to survive.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

“It is by the existence of Slavery, exempting so large a portion of our citizens from the necessity of bodily labor, that we have a greater proportion than any other people, who have leisure for intellectual pursuits, and the means of attaining a liberal education.”
― Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860