“Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southern man apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance. Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again.”

Jefferson Davis (June 3, 1807/1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American soldier and politician, and was the President of the Confederate States of America (the former seceded southern states of the United States of America) during the American Civil War, 1861 to 1865

About him U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney said that he or former slaves and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Dred Scott - was an enslaved African American man in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857, popularly known as the "Dred Scott Decision."

I feel incompetent to perform duties... which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me.

Andrew Johnson-17th President of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson became president as he was Vice President at the time of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination.

Sic semper tyrannis is a Latin phrase meaning "thus always to tyrants".

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865.

I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.

Robert E. Lee - American soldier best known for commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War from 1862 until his surrender in 1865

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln- the 16th president of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the

black man's misery.

Frederick Douglass-African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement. Douglass wrote several autobiographies.

If you see the President, tell him from me that whatever happens there will be no turning back.

18th President of the United States (1869–1877). In 1865, as commanding general, Grant led the Union Armies to victory over the Confederacy in the American Civil War.

It is said the South will never submit — that we cannot conquer the rebels —that they will suffer themselves to be slaughtered, and their whole country to be laid waste. Sir, war is a grievous thing at best, and civil war more than any other ; but if they hold this language, and the means which they have suggested must be resorted to ; if their whole country must be laid waste and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction, so let it be. I would rather, Sir, reduce them to a condition where their whole country is to be re-peopled by a band of freemen, than to see them perpetrate the destruction of this people through our agency. I do not say it is time to resort to such means, and I do not say that the time will come, but I never fear to express my sentiments. It is not a question with me of policy, but a of question principle.

• Thaddeus Stevens (April 4, 1792 – August 11, 1868) was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania and one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

William T. Sherman - American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Famous for his scorched earth policy in his march to the sea against the Confederacy.