The Civil War (documentary) quotes

News stories described him coolly smoking under fire, and admirers shipped him barrels of cigars. A delighted Northern public now thought they knew what the initials in his name stood for: they called him "Unconditional Surrender Grant."

Once more, let me tell you: it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow...I have never written to you, nor spoken to you, in greater kindness than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you...But you must act.

Shiloh had the same number of casualties as Waterloo, and yet when it was fought there were another twenty Waterloos to follow; and Grant shortly before Shiloh said 'I consider this war practically over and they're ready to give up', and the day after Shiloh he said 'I saw this was going to have to be a war of conquest if they were going to win'. Shiloh did that, and it sobered the nation up something awful with the realization that they had a very bloody affair on their hands.

Years afterward, a Union veteran said the most a soldier could say of any fight was "I was worse scared than I was at Shiloh." Shiloh is a Hebrew word, meaning "place of peace."

April 11, 1862. I firmly believe that, before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.

The Minié ball could kill at half a mile and was accurate at 250 yards, five times as far as any other one-man weapon. The age of the bayonet charge was over, though most officers did not yet know it when the war began. And some had still not yet learned it when the war was over.

A law was made...allowing every person who owned 20 negroes to go home. It gave us the blues. We wanted 20 negroes...there was raised the howl of "rich man’s war, poor man’s fight." From this time on till the end of the War, a soldier was simply a machine: a conscript. All our pride and valor had gone and we were sick of war and cursed the Southern Confederacy.

A worried Jefferson Davis now prepared for a siege of Richmond, relying more and more on the advice of his close military adviser, Robert E. Lee. When Davis asked Lee where Lee though the South’s next defensive line should be drawn once Richmond fell, Lee said, "Richmond must not fall. It shall not be given up." Still, George McClellan refused to attack. Though his army still outnumbered the rebels, he remained convinced the opposite was true. One observer noted that McClellan had a particular faculty for "realizing hallucinations."

We talk of the irrepressible conflict and practically give the lie to our talk. We wage war against slaveholding rebels and yet protect and augment the motive, which has moved the slaveholders to rebellion. We strike at the effect and leave the cause unharmed. Fire will not burn it out of us. Water cannot wash it out of us—that this war with the slaveholders can never be brought to a desirable termination until slavery, the guilty cause of all our national troubles, has been totally and forever abolished.

He would have a man shot at the drop of a hat, and he would drop it himself.

He who does not see the hand of God in this is blind, sir, blind.

I have been reading so much about the Yankees, I was very anxious to see them. The whites would tell their colored people not to go to the Yankees, for they would harness them to carts and make them pull the carts around in place of horses. I asked Grandmother one day if this was true. She replied, "Certainly not!," that the white people did not want slaves to go over to the Yankees and told them these things to frighten them. I wanted to see those wonderful Yankees so much, as I heard my parents say that the Yankees was going to set all the slaves free.

His name might be audacity! He will take more chances and take them quicker than any other General in this country, north or south.

All but one of the battles of the Seven Days were Union victories, yet McClellan treated them as defeats, continuing to back down until he reached the safety of federal gunboats at Harrison’s Landing on the James River. Union officers urged a counterattack. Lee had lost 20,000 men. McClellan refused. One officer suggested his commander was motivated either by "cowardice or treason".

In just one week, Lee had completely unnerved the Union general, and demonstrated for the first time the strengths that would make him a legend. Surprise, audacity, and an eerie ability to read his opponents mind. In just seven days, McClellan had been totally out-generalled.