War & Peace Quote by Corrine Brown

Brown’s line tries to do two things at once: explain Confederate resolve and foreclose the most common euphemisms that still cling to Civil War memory. The phrasing “way of life” is baited language, deliberately invoked because it’s the old, soft-focus shorthand for a social order built on racial domination. By stapling it to “made possible in large part through the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves,” she yanks the phrase out of nostalgia and back into material reality: coerced labor, violence, extraction.

As a politician, Brown’s intent isn’t neutral description; it’s moral argument shaped for a public fight over monuments, textbooks, and what counts as “heritage.” The sentence refuses the comforting detour that treats secession as an abstract constitutional quarrel. “Not ready to give up their fight” frames the Confederacy as active agents, not tragic losers swept along by history. That agency matters because it turns the debate from “complexity” to culpability.

The subtext is aimed at contemporary audiences who still discuss the Civil War in coded language. Brown anticipates the dodge: that slavery was incidental, that “states’ rights” floats free of human bondage. Her construction makes that dodge harder by linking secession’s emotional intensity to slavery’s economic engine. Even the familiar cadence of “blood, sweat and tears” functions as rhetorical judo: a phrase usually reserved for noble struggle is reallocated to enslaved people whose forced suffering subsidized someone else’s “life.”