Letter to Sir Gilbert Elliot (22 September 1793), quoted in P. J. Marshall and John A. Woods (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VII: January 1792–August 1794 (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 432
1790s
2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)
“You have taken from me the one privilege of civil war – the power of granting life to the defeated.”
Unica belli
praemia civilis, victis donare salutem,
perdidimus.
Book IX, line 1066 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
Interviewed in the documentary series The Civil War, 1990
Context: Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Source: How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 12 The Unbeatable Power Argument : Delivering the Knockout p. 196
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society
Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 29 (p. 331)
Preface
The Great Rehearsal (1948)
Context: The most momentous chapter in American history is the story of the making and ratifying of the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution has so long been rooted so deeply in American life — or American life rooted so deeply in it — that the drama of its origins is often overlooked. Even historical novelists, who hunt everywhere for memorable events to celebrate, have hardly touched the event without which there would have been a United States very different from the one that now exists; or might have been no United States at all.
The prevailing conceptions of those origins have varied with the times. In the early days of the Republic it was held, by devout friends of the Constitution, that its makers had received it somewhat as Moses received the Tables of the Law on Sinai. During the years of conflict which led to the Civil War the Constitution was regarded, by one party or the other, as the rule of order or the misrule of tyranny. In still later generations the Federal Convention of 1787 has been accused of evolving a scheme for the support of special economic interests, or even a conspiracy for depriving the majority of the people of their liberties. Opinion has swung back and forth, while the Constitution itself has grown into a strong yet flexible organism, generally, if now and then slowly, responsive to the national circumstances and necessities.
