Skip to content

It is impossible to point to any other local issue but slavery and say that Southerners would have seceded and fought over it.

— William C. Davis The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996)

Another quote →

Topics

Slavery

More quotes by William C. Davis

Always there had been the complicated factor of the one institution that peculiarly set the South apart from the North, slavery...

Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002)

All peoples part with their myths reluctantly, and historians are at some risk when they try to dismantle those of the Confederacy.

The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996)

There are very few ways to legally break a contract unilaterally.

The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996)

Confederates were terrified of what was happening to slavery.

Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002)

The only substantial difference between them, and the one that divided them politically almost since birth, was their system of labor.

Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002)

All William C. Davis quotes →

You may also like

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?

Abraham Lincoln

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

Abraham Lincoln

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William C. Davis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.