The Civil War (documentary) Season 1 quotes

We are scattered - stunned. The remnant of heart left alive in us is filled with brotherly hate. Whose fault? Everybody blamed [by] somebody else. Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battlefield escape.

You, white people, are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are, at best, only his stepchildren. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, indifferent. But measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined. Taking him all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.

America has no north, no south, no east, no west. The sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains. The compass just points up and down. And we can laugh now at the absurd notion of there being a north or a south. We are one and undivided.

Robert E. Lee swore renewed allegiance to the United States, and by so doing persuaded thousands of his former Soldiers to do the same.

For he will smile, and give you with unflinching courtesy, prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders, photographs, kindness, valor and advice, and do it with such grace and gentleness, that you will know you have the whole of him penned down, mapped out. Easy to understand. And so you have. All things except the heart. The heart he kept a secret to the end, from all the picklocks of biographers.

Unable now to eat or speak, he sat on the front porch in the afternoon laboring over his manuscript. He finished it on July 16 and died one week later. Grant's memoirs sold half a million copies and restored his family's fortune.

Who won the war? The Union Army obviously won the war, in the sense that they were the army left standing and holding their weapons when it was all over. So the soldiers who fought in the Union Army, the generals who directed it, the President who led the country during it, won the war. If we're not talking just about the series of battles that finished up with the surrender at Appomattox, but talking instead about the struggle to make something higher and better out of the country, then the question gets more complicated. The slaves won the war and they lost the war. Because they won freedom, that is the removal of slavery. But they did not win freedom, as they understood freedom.

I suppose that slavery is merely the horrible statutory expression of a deeper, of a deeper rift between people based on race. And that is what we struggle still to heal. And I think the significance of Lincoln's life, and his victory, was that we will never again enshrine these concepts into law. But now let's see what we can do to erase them from the hearts and minds of people.

The Civil War is not only the central event of American history, but it's a central event in large ways for the world itself. If we believe today in the 20th century, as surely we must, that popular government is the way to go, it is the way to the emancipation of the human spirit; then the Civil War established the fact that a popular government could survive, that it could overcome an internal secession movement that could destroy it. So the war becomes, in essence, it becomes a testament for the liberation of the human spirit for all time.

Reliving the war in words, he began to wish he could relive it in fact. And he came to believe that he and his fellow soldiers, gray and blue, might one day be able to do just that, if not here on Earth, then afterwards in Valhalla. [...] And again to hastily don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the long roll summons to battle. Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day. And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers. And all will say Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?