The Civil War (documentary) quotes

In the summer of 1863 a Union warship hunting a Confederate commerce raider off Yokohama attacked a Japanese fleet for harassing the colony of Westerners there. The United States won its first naval battle against the Empire of Japan. But the Confederates got away.

Stand firm you boys from Maine. For not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibilities for freedom and justice, for God and humanity, as are now placed upon you.

General Longstreet, I think, had a good reason to worry about attacking the Union position at Gettysburg. After all it was his corps at Fredericksburg that mowed down the Union troops in front of the stonewall. He could realize what the rifled musket could do, held in the hands of determined troops.

Lee, by the summer of 1863, had come to believe that he was invincible, and so was the Army of Northern Virginia. The record would almost invite that when you see how they had pummeled one Union General after another, and defeated, or at least fought to a draw the Army of the Potomac almost on every battle up to that point. And Lee really did think that if he asked his boys to do something, they would do it, that they would do anything. He had come by Gettysburg then to believe in his invincibility and that of his men. And it was his doom.

Probably his finest hour was after the repulse of Pickett's Charge. He walked out into the field, met the men retreating, and said "It is all my fault."

Pickett was horrified. When told to rally his Division for a possible Union counterattack, Pickett answered, "General Lee, I have no division now." Pickett never forgave Lee. Years later he said, "That old man had my division slaughtered."

William Faulkner, in Intruder in the Dust, says that for every Southern boy, it’s always in his reach to imagine it being 1:00 on an early July day in 1863. The guns are laid. The troops are lined up. The flags are already out of their cases and ready to be unfurled. But it hasn’t happened yet. And he can go back to the time before the war was going to be lost. And he can always have that moment for himself.

The streets grew quiet when news of Gettysburg reached Clarksville, Tennessee. The 14th Tennessee regiment had left town two years before with 960 men. When the Battle of Gettysburg began, only 365 remained. ‘‘‘By the end of the first day there were 60 men left. By the end of the battle, there were only 3.

If this war developed some of the most brutal, bestial, and devilish qualities lurking in the human race, it has also shown us how much of the angel there is in the best of men and women.

Sally Tomkins of Richmond and a staff of only six nursed 1,333 wounded men in her private hospital, and kept all but 73 of them alive; a record unmatched by any other Civil War hospital, North or South.

The Confederacy was cut in two. The Mississippi had become a Union highway. “The father of waters,” Lincoln said, “again goes unvexed to the sea.”

We have lost the Mississippi, and our nation is divided, and there’s not enough left to fight for.

The Fourth of July would not be celebrated in Vicksburg again for 81 years.

No group was more outraged than the immigrant Irish of New York, who feared the Blacks, who competed for the lowest-paying jobs, and for whose freedom they did not wish to fight. Democratic politicians fanned their anger.

Once a black Union Soldier spotted his former owner among a group of Confederate prisoners. 'Hello massa' he said, 'bottom rail on top this time'.