Jefferson Davis Quotes

“I gave the best and all my life to a girdled tree. It was live oak, and was good for any purpose, except for blossom and fruit, and I am not willing for Belle to be content with anything less than the whole of a man's heart.

[Varina Davis, Letter to a friend, advising against his daughter Belle marrying a widower]”
― Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

“Okay, first of all, they don't "consider" Jefferson Davis racist, he was President of the Confederacy, his racism is not up for any sort of fucking debate. Despite the narrative of some Southern Revisionists, the Civil War was fought almost entirely on the issue of slavery. If you're the leader of the, "we think black people should be slaves" side of that war, then you're a racist — not "racist, question mark," not even "racist, period," but "racist, exclamation point" — racist!”
― T.J. Kirk

“Robert Penn Warren, who watched the [Jefferson Davis] monument's construction as a child, later recalled the bemusement he felt as this "immobile thrust of concrete" soared above his native soil. Remembrance of the Confederacy, he wrote, "had never been of burning importance in Guthrie, where to a certain number of contemporary citizens the Civil War seemed to have been fought for the right to lynch without legal interference.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War