AP United States History – PLEASE RETURN THIS COPY SO I MAY RE-USE IN FUTURE YEARS…. THANKS!

Instead of the assigned readings from Mary Chestnut, please review these quotes from the Fort Sumter National Monument (http://www.nps.gov/fosu/historyculture/upload/ls_exhibit_text.pdf)

“In walking about Charleston, I was forcibly reminded of some of the older country towns in England...The appearance of the city is highly picturesque... It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the Northern cities, but a look of state...a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity... Charleston has an air of eccentricity, too and peculiarity, which formerly were not deemed unbecoming ...” British actress Frances Ann Kemble, 1839

“But go to the bottom of this security and dependence and you come to police machinery ... I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston, than at Naples (under Bomba) in a week.” Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1850.

“I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land... the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children - & every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds... ”

Mary Boykin Chesnut, March 18, 1861

“Ours is the property invaded; ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake ... all of which rests upon what your course may ultimately make a great heaving volcano of passion and crime... Bear with us, then, if we stand sternly upon what is yet that dormant volcano, and say we yield no position here until we are convinced we are wrong.” W.L. Yancey, a native South Carolinian, “fire-eating” secessionist from Alabama, Democratic Convention, April 1860

“There exists a great mistake...in supposing that the people of the United States are, or ever have been, one people. On the contrary, never did the sun shine on two peoples as thoroughly distinct as the people of the North and...South....Like all great nations of antiquity we are slaveholders and understand free governments. The North does not.” Robert Barnwell Rhett, November 10, 1860

“The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery...The Southern States are now in the crisis of their fate; and, if we read aright the signs of the times, nothing is needed for our deliverance, but that the ball of revolution be set in motion.” Charleston Mercury (November 3, 1860)

“South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.”

Federal Judge James L. Petigru of Charleston, December 1860

“The slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world.... Would any sane nation make war on us? Without firing a gun, ...we could bring the whole world to our feet....No, you dare not make war on cotton....Cotton is king.” James Henry Hammond, U.S. Senator from South Carolina addressing Congress, 1858

“This...momentous election...will serve to show whether these southern states are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved...” Agriculturalist Edmund Ruffin, Diary, 1860

“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Declaration of Causes of Secession, December 24, 1860

“ Slavery with us is no abstraction - but a great and vital fact. Without it our every comfort would be taken from us...all lost and our people ruined for ever. Nothing short of separation from the Union can save us.”

A.P. Hayne to President Buchanan, December 22, 1860

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

South Carolina's Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession

“Oh my God! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected...Lord we know not what is to

be the result of this but I do pray, if there is to be a crisis, that we all lay down our lives

sooner than free our slaves in our midst....” Eliza Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard diary,

November 9, 1860 entry.

“Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not

equal to the white man; that slavery...is his natural and normal condition.” Alexander

Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, referring to the Confederate government,

March 1861.

“Representative liberty will remain in the States after they are separated. Liberty was not

crushed by the separation of the colonies from the mother country, then the most

constitutional monarchy and the freest Government known. Still less will be destroyed by

the separation of these States to prevent the destruction of the spirit of the Constitution by

the maladministration of it.”

U.S. Congressman Jefferson Davis, speech to U.S. Senate, January 10, 1861

“The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position toward the Northern States

that our ancestors in the colonies did toward Great Britain.” Robert Barnwell Rhett, The

Address of South Carolina to the Slaveholding States of the United States, December

1860

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous

issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without

yourselves being the aggressors.”

Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

“The firing upon that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet

seen.” Robert Toombs, Confederate secretary of state, 1861.

“There stands Fort Sumter, and thereby hangs peace or war.”

Mary Boykin Chesnut, March 31, 1861

“All this morning I felt restless and anxious, listening to every sound with a beating

heart, fearing to hear the announcement of the beginning of civil war. What fearful

meaning is concentrated in those two little words.”

Charlestonian Emma Holmes, April 9, 1861

Mary Chesnut was aware of the tense negotiations because her husband was one of

Beauregard's staff taking messages back and forth to Fort Sumter. In the early hours of

April 12, 1861, Mary Chesnut wrote, "I do not pretend to go to sleep. How can I? If

Anderson does not accept terms at four o'clock the orders are he shall be fired upon.”

Hearing cannon fire, Mrs. Chesnut joined others on the house roof. "Prayers from the

women and imprecations from the men; and then a shell would light up the scene."

Later, "after all that noise, and our tears and prayers, nobody has been hurt. Sound and

fury signifying nothing! A delusion and a snare!"

Miss Emma Holmes wrote in her diary on April 12, "All last night the troops were under

arms, and, at half past four this morning, the heavy booming of cannons woke the city

from its slumbers... Every body seems relieved that what has been so long dreaded has

come at last...”

“The plot thickens, the air is red-hot with rumors.”

Mary Boykin Chesnut, April 6, 1861