“If pretended revelations have caused wars where they were opposed, and slavery where they were received, the pretended wise inventions of politicians have done the same. But the slavery has been much heavier, the wars far more bloody, and both more universal by many degrees.”

— Edmund Burke , book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: If pretended revelations have caused wars where they were opposed, and slavery where they were received, the pretended wise inventions of politicians have done the same. But the slavery has been much heavier, the wars far more bloody, and both more universal by many degrees. Show me any mischief produced by the madness or wickedness of theologians, and I will show you an hundred resulting from the ambition and villany of conquerors and statesmen. Show me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to show you an hundred for one in political laws and institutions. 'If you say, that natural religion is a sufficient guide without the foreign aid of revelation, on what principle should political laws become necessary? Is not the same reason available in theology and in politics? If the laws of nature are the laws of God, is it consistent with the Divine wisdom to prescribe rules to us, and leave the enforcement of them to the folly of human institutions? Will you follow truth but to a certain point?

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Edmund Burke 270

Anglo-Irish statesman 1729–1797

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“Inextricably intertwined in the question was slavery, and it only became the more so in the years that followed. Socially and culturally the North and South were not much different. They prayed to the same deity, spoke the same language, shared the same ancestry, sang the same songs. National triumphs and catastrophes were shared by both. For all the myths they would create to the contrary, the only significant and defining difference between them was slavery, where it existed and where it did not, for by 1804 it had virtually ceased to exist north of Maryland. Slavery demarked not just their labor and economic situations, but power itself in the new republic.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002), p. 9

“The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Conclusion
1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)
Context: The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that 'A state half slave and half free cannot exist.' All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.

“There were abuses, many of them. I do not pretend to defend these abuses. There were kind masters and cruel masters. There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries. In this one particular slavery doomed itself. When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four bloody years of war.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

On slavery, in her 1919 autobiography Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth Felton, p.79 http://www.google.com/books?id=gHsLIvQ_BN0C&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton&printsec=frontcover&source=in#PPA79,M1.

“Slavery was at the root of what the Civil War was all about. If there had been no slavery, there would have been no war, and that ultimately what the Confederacy was fighting for was to preserve a nation based on a social system that incorporated slavery. Had that not been the case, there would have been no war. That's an issue that a lot of Southern whites today find hard to accept.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson "James McPherson: What They Fought For, 1861–1865" https://web.archive.org/web/20160309201904/http://www.booknotes.org/FullPage.aspx?SID=55946-1 (22 May 1994), Booknotes, United States of America: National Cable Satellite Corporation
1990s

“There was a national apology for slavery. It was called the Civil War where 700,000 Americans died.”

Ben Shapiro (1984) American journalist and attorney

2019-08-26
The Ben Shapiro Show
The Daily Wire, quoted in * 2019-08-26
Ben Shapiro: “There was a national apology for slavery. It was called the Civil War”
Media Matters for America
https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/ben-shapiro-there-was-national-apology-slavery-it-was-called-civil-war
2019-09-02
2019

“Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a 'War for Southern Independence.' They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Yankee Supremacists Trash South’s Heroes," http://praag.org/?p=19556 Praag.org June 26, 2015.
2010s, 2015

“Our national history has presented various phases of this problem. Slavery showed one; the complexities of interstate commerce have kept others constantly in mind. On the day the Constitution was finished, probably more people would have seen seeds of conflict and dangers to the Union in future commercial relations than in slavery. But commerce became a source of strength, while slavery be- came a cause of division. It brought the Union into danger; and in the end was destroyed itself. Where there was sincere acceptance of the dual sovereignty theory, where the States sought to do their full part, and accepted the de- terminations of the National Government as to the rest, the plan worked. Where the States sought more from the Federal authority than it could give, and resisted national demands — then came dissension and, at length, war.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

“These who are represented here were men in whom courage had reached a high moral quality. They had been brave enough not to shrink from looking at facts and institutions. They had been honest enough to admit that they saw there much that was not good. They glossed over no wrongs, they hid away no skeletons. They did not pretend that wrong was right or ever could be right. They had put much thought to the lessons of hard experience, and had frankly acknowledged that they must deal with a crisis in the Nation's life. They were sure that union was a blessing, that slavery was a wrong, and that domestic war was the supreme human tragedy. This settled, they saw that one of three courses must be taken. They could have had peace with disunion, or they could have had peace and union, with slavery. Freedom with union, they saw at last, meant war. We know how they decided. We know at what fearful cost they supported their decision.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

“And the war was a terrible war, but it was a war for human freedom, and if the South had succeeded and if slavery had been extended, the United States, or part of it, might very well have been on the side of Hitler in the Second World War.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

We would not have been the bastion of freedom we have been in the twentieth century.
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

“Where slavery exists, the republican theory becomes still more fallacious.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Vices of the Political System of the United States http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a4_4s2.html (April 1787), Papers 9:350-51
1780s

“If pretended revelations have caused wars where they were opposed, and slavery where they were received, the pretended wise inventions of politicians have done the same. But the slavery has been much heavier, the wars far more bloody, and both more universal by many degrees.”

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Edmund Burke 270

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