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" The Civil War was ABOUT something. It was fought FOR something. And—let us never for a moment forget it—it WON something.
Under everything else, the war was about Negro slavery.
It was fought for freedom—and if ever anything was worth fighting a war for, freedom was and is the cause. . . .
And that is why the Civil War is worth remembering. It gave us a broader freedom, and it laid upon us the obligation to live up to that freedom and to make it unlimited, for everybody. Freedom is indivisible. Winning it for the Negro, we won it also for all of the people who then were or ever would become Americans—for the man who has fled from oppression, misery and discrimination overseas as well as for the fugitive from the American slave pen and auction block. We can never have, permanently, a second-class citizenship in this country; because of the Civil War, we are no longer that kind of country. We might just as well stop trying to find a comfortable middle ground between the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. There simply isn't any such place. "
― Bruce Catton , The Meaning of the Civil War: An Address Delivered at the Chicago Historical Society, April 12, 1961 (Classic Reprint)
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" Bear in mind, now, that most of this work was done by men who had no intention whatever, when they enlisted, of making war to end slavery. Slavery was killed by the act of war itself. It was the one human institution on all the earth which could not possibly be defended by force of arms, because that force, once called into play, was bound to destroy it. The Union armies which ended slavery were led by men like Grant and Sherman, who had profound sympathies with the South and who had never in their lives shown the slightest sympathies with the abolitionists. But they were also men who believed in the one great, fearful fact about modern war--that when you get into it, the guiding rule is that you have to win it. "
― Bruce Catton