The Civil War (documentary) Season 1 quotes

In Texas, General John B Magruder captured a Union flotilla at Galveston. After the bombardment, Confederate Major A. M. Lee went aboard the badly hit USS Harriet Lane. There he found his son, a Federal Lieutenant, dying on the deck.

January 24, near Falmouth. Daylight showed a strange scene. Men, horses, artillery, pontoons, and wagons are stuck in the mud. Rebels put up a sign, says 'Burnside's stuck in the mud'. We can fight rebels, but not in the mud.

I wish you could hear Joshua give off a command and see him ride along the battalion on his white horse. He looked so splendidly. He told me last night that he never felt so well in his life.

What makes it strange is that I should have gained twelve pounds living on worms.

Those hateful gunboats. They look like they were from the lower regions. Now this is the second night that four of them have been anchored in the river opposite our house. [I] see the men crawling about on the boats like so many black snakes.

It was no uncommon occurrence for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee swimming with weevils after breaking up hardtack in it. But they were easily skimmed off and left no distinctive flavor behind.

In March 1863, John Mosby’s Confederate Rangers raided Fairfax Courthouse, Virginia, capturing two captains, 30 Privates, 58 horses and Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton. "For that I am sorry," Lincoln said when told of the capture, "for I can make Brigadier Generals, but I can’t make horses." General Mosby had made life miserable for Northern commanders throughout the War. No other Confederate officer was mentioned favorably as many times in Robert E. Lee’s dispatches as John Singleton Mosby.

The Confederacy has been done to death by politicians.

'I make no terms', Davis once said, 'I make no compromise.' He refused to unbend in public, or to curry favor with the press. Privately, he commuted nearly every death sentence for desertion that reached his desk, explaining that "The poorest use of a Soldier was to shoot him."

Davis may well have been the only Southerner who understood Southern Nationality, who understood what sacrifices had to be made if the Confederacy was ever going to gel as a nation. He kept saying, "I need the kind of powers that Lincoln got. I need the kind of resources that he got in the draft laws. I need to be able to suspend the writ of habeas corpus like he did." He would have said, "We can’t live by the dogmas of the quiet past any longer." He didn’t say that, but he acted that out. He said, "I have to be given the kinds—this Confederate government needs the kind of national authority—national power that the Union had in order to win." And they didn’t get it because States’ Rights helped kill the Confederacy.

General, I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac...I have heard in such a way as to believe it of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of this that I’ve given you command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.

The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until after the egg is laid.

Winfield Scott, Henry Halleck, Irving McDowell. George McClellan, John Pope, George McClellan again. Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker. Lincoln could not find the General he needed. He now knew that to win the war, the Southern armies had to be crushed. He had the men, but he needed a General with the will to use them.

The men knew they were cut loose from their base, knew they were gonna be dependent for their supplies on a very tenuous supply line. But Grant himself gave’em confidence. They believed Grant knew what he was doing, and one great encouragement to them believing that was quite often on the march, whether at night or in the daytime, they’d be moving along the road or over a bridge, and right beside the road would be Grant on his horse. A dust covered man on a dust covered horse, saying “move on, close up”. So they felt very much that he personally was in charge of their movement and it gave them that added confidence.

More than once during the Civil War, newspapers reported a strange phenomenon. From only a few miles away, a battle sometimes made no sound, despite the flash and smoke of cannon and the fact that more-distant observers could hear it clearly. These eerie silences were called acoustic shadows.