Whitelaw Reid: “Let us have a truce to profitless disputes about what cannot be reversed.”

No matter what we wish, the old continental isolation is gone forever.

Suppose it to be merely a war in defense of our own just rights and interests.

Extravagant living left nearly every planter enormously in debt when the war came.

I would rather give up my crop to the negroes than the lives of my wife and children.