Yankees Motivational Quotes

Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the civil war to defend slavery. And its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery they argued Ad nauseam was the foundation for a virtuous biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states. When 19th century deep southerners spoke of defending their “traditions”, “heritage”, and way of life they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the center piece of all three. Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower class people should be enslaved regardless of race for their own good. In response to Yankee and midland abolitionist the Deep South’s leaders developed an elaborate defense for human bondage. James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers where happier, fitter and better looked after than their free counter parts in Brittan and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists. Free societies were therefore unstable as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up creating a fearful crisis in republican institutions. Salves by contrast were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist or testify, ensuring the foundation of every well designed and durable republic. Enslavement of the white working class would be in his words a most glorious act of emancipation. Jefferson’s notion all men are created equal, he wrote, was ridiculously absurd. In the deep southern tradition, Hammond’s republic was modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome. Featuring rights and democracy for the elite, slavery and submission for inferiors. It was sanctioned by the Christian god whose son never denounced the practice in his documented teachings. It was a perfect aristocratic republic, one that should be a model for the world. George Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people. Aristocrats, he explained, were really the nations Magna Carta because they owned so much and had the affection which all men feel for what belongs to them. Which naturally lead them to protect and provide for wives, children and slaves. Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular declared he was quite as intent on abolishing free society as you northerners are on abolishing slavery.

While the post-Civil War southerners were pushing as fast as they could into the New South, were grasping Yankee dollars with enthusiasm, they purified their motives in the well of Lost Causism. Politicians found it a bottomless source of bombast and ballots, preachers found it balm and solace to somewhat reluctant middle-class morals, writers found it a noble and salable theme.

Gustavus Swift achieved fame and fortune by refrigerating—and, in so doing, revolutionizing—the American meat supply. “He was not to change the world’s maps, nor make military history,” his eldest son, Louis, wrote in his biography of his father, The Yankee of the Yards, coauthored with journalist Arthur Van Vlissingen Jr. “Instead, he was the human instrument by which destiny transformed the world’s sources and supplies of an essential class of foodstuffs.” According to his son, Swift wasn’t driven by grand ambition or a desire to benefit mankind. Instead, his motivation sprang from a much less lofty place: a mania for saving money.

So much blood has been spilled that redemption may be out of reach, in the end. Maybe all we can hope for is to be so exhausted by hate that we settle for the ceremonies of reconciliation. But I see that the great enemy in this battle is not the abolitionist, the Yankee soldier with his repeating-gun and well-made boots, or the negro who drops his work and runs towards the first scrap of blue cloth he spies between the trees. Our enemy is Nolan Oglesby and all the people like him, who never question their motives or doubt their desires. They are put on this earth to cause misery, because what they take so freely for themselves comes always at great cost to others.

significant difference between the economic systems of the North and South was not in industry versus agriculture but in motivation. The free Yankee worked to better himself. The Southern slave worked to keep from being punished. That difference was slowly rotting the South from the inside.