Confederates Quotes

“Confederates called Lincoln a dictator and fanatic who must be stopped by any means, including 'revolution or private assassination.”
― Teri Kanefield, Abraham Lincoln: The Making of America #3

“One young man, upon taking the loyalty oath, was upbraided by his patriotic Southern father: "You have disgraced the family!" The son noted that General Lee advised him to do it. "Oh," the father sighed, "that alters the case. Whatever General Lee says is all right.”
― Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America

“You know what Forrest had the nerve to do?”

“Son of a bitch has the nerve to do damn near anything. That's what makes him such a nuisance,” Major Bradford said. “What is it this time?”

“He sent Memphis a bill for the five thousand and however many dollars Colonel Hurst squeezed out of Jackson while he held it,” Leaming said.

Bradford laughed again, this time on a different note. “He better not hold his breath till he gets it, that's all I've got to say. He'll be a mighty blue man in a gray uniform if he does.”
― Harry Turtledove, Fort Pillow

“My mother says that groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans will soon become extinct, that their members are all old and dying out, but when I look up this chapter online I see young white men--college age or even younger--in the photos. They all look to be the same type of white: blondish, sweaty, pink. White is a sickness that is passed on and on.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Want to meet a Daughter of the Confederacy?" I asked.

Connor laughed. "You heard what the man said. Some folks here think it's still Scarlett and Mammy days."

I remembered something. "You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met."

Connor shook his head. "You call it prejudice. I call it sense.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“I told her about the journey I'd just begun, and asked why she thought Southerners still cared about the Civil War.

"War Between the States," she gently corrected me. "The answer is family. We grow up knowing who's once removed and six times down. Northerners say, 'Forget the War, it's over.' But they don't have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We've lost so much."

Strictly speaking, she was right. Roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in the War. For Yankee men, the death rate was about one in ten, and waves of post-War immigration left a far lower ratio of Northerners with blood ties to the conflict.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“When the singing ended, I chatted with others in my pew, including a tall, aristocratic-looking man with pomaded gray hair. I told him about the Lee-Jackson gatherings I'd attended and asked how he felt about people still celebrating the Confederacy.

"I'm happy they have the freedom to celebrate those men, the same way we celebrate [Martin Luther] King here," he said. "But you didn't see nobody black at those meetings, did you? We had white folks here, at least a few. Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside." A wry smile creased his lips. "I got one word for those folks--Appomattox. The game's up, you lost. Get over it.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Michael King was a young preacher with horn-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped beard and mustache. "The Bible says, if eating meat offends your brother, eat meat no more," he said. "Worship of the Confederacy offends me."

"When I asked why, he walked me to the Confederate monument, which occupied a median strip on Salisbury's busiest street. The 1909 memorial depicted a bronze angel cradling a dying rebel soldier and holding forth a laurel crown. Chiseled on the granite base was the Confederate motto, Deo Vindice. With God As Our Defender.

"What's the message here?" King said. "God dispatched an angel to ferry this brave rebel to heaven. As a Christian pastor, I got a problem with that. The whole notion that God was involved with one race putting down another, that's going against the grain of a Christian nation. God ain't with racism or anything to do with subdividing people.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“During a break, I approached Byrd in the hall and asked what he meant by the term Confederate-American. "A Confederate-American—then and now—is simply anyone who's against big government," he said. "We as Southern Americans just want to be left alone."

"Yeah, the South wanted to be left alone—to oppress people!" a long-haired man shouted.

"It was not about slavery!" a man with a rebel-flag T-shirt barked back. "It was states' rights!"

"Exactly. The right to own slaves. Tear the statues and plantations down!"

"Should we tear down the Pyramids because they were built by slaves? And what about Washington and Jefferson? They owned slaves. Should we tear down memorials to them?"

I noticed a white man in jeans and duckbill cap standing off to the side, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head as the others shouted. Wallace Faison was a peanut farmer from a small town near the North Carolina line. "For me it's not political at all," he said quietly. "The South—we lost. I feel like I lost, too. Monument Avenue is like that last Valhalla, that spiritual place I can go. It's crazy, I can't explain it, but that's how I feel.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“No matter how many Northerners flocked to Atlanta, an essential Southernness would endure. "We have an extra layer of armor. Our culture."

Collins's armor deflected every arrow I tried to fling at his arguments. The heritage movement wasn't backward-looking, he said; it was tuned precisely to the times. "We're anti-federal. Con-federal, if you like. I'd rather that Georgia not get one federal dollar." He believed this same independent streak had sparked the Civil War, which in his view was fought over economic issues and constitutional sovereignty. "If all the South wanted to do was to maintain slavery, the easiest way was to stay in the Union, where slavery was legal." Nor did the rebel flag symbolize the oppression of blacks; after all, the Stars and Stripes flew over slavery for eighty years, which the battle flag of the South never did. "The Confederacy was an attempt to institute a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Period.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“But his best seller by far was a T-shirt emblazoned with another fierce Confederate: Nathan Bedford Forrest, the “Wizard of the Saddle” and first Imperial Wizard of the Klan. “[Robert E.] Lee, of course, used to be our best seller,” Dresch said. “But Forrest has eclipsed Lee fivefold in the last few years.”

Dresch’s success in selling Forrest T-shirts gave commercial confirmation to the trend I’d sensed across the South: a hardening, ideological edge to Confederate remembrance. As Dresch put it, “Southerners are getting tired of taking it on the chin. They’re getting more aggressive. Lee’s the Southern gentleman who represents reconciliation with the Union. Forrest represents the spirit of going after them with everything you’ve got.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Like so many neo-Confederates I'd met, the two men had walled themselves inside a stockade of their own creation and erected around it an ideological deadline. Anyone who made so much as a feint toward the opposite side had to be gunned down as a traitor to the Cause.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War