Confederate Military Leaders

"It is man's highest interest not to violate, or attempt to violate, the rules which Infinite Wisdom has laid down. The means by which men are to attain great elevation may be classed in three divisions — physical, mental, and moral. Whatever relates to health, belongs to the first; whatever relates to the improvement of the mind, belongs to the second. The formation of good manners and virtuous habits constitutes the third."

"A man is known by the company he keeps."

"Good-breeding, or true politeness, is the art of showing men by external signs the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by good company. It must be acquired by practice and not by books."

"Be kind, condescending, and affable. Any one who has anything to say to a fellow-being, to say it with kind feelings and sincere desire to please; and this, whenever it is done, will atone for much awkwardness in the manner of expression."

"Good-breeding is opposed to selfishness, vanity, or pride. Never weary your company by talking too long or too frequently."

"Always look people in the face when addressing them, and generally when they address you."

"Never engross the whole conversation to yourself. Say as little of yourself and friends as possible."

"Make it a rule never to accuse without due consideration any body or association of men."

"There stands Jackson like a stone wall — rally round the Virginians!"

"In the ranks and among the officers there had been heavy losses at Bull Run, the most grievous of which was that of General Bee whose claim to fame, aside from his bravery, comes from his rallying cry to his men during the battle: "There stands Jackson like a stone wall..." And from then on, it was as though Jackson had shed his rightful name of Thomas Johnathan to become forever "Stonewall"."

"Lee, of course, was Lee. A South which had respected him, then come to adore him, now worshiped him. He was a man who grew in stature even as the cause for which he fought became less prosperous. The intensely religious Stonewall Jackson cared little for the glamor and trappings of war but believed in its righteousness with a fierceness that almost frightened those who did not know him. Comparatively, Lee was a gentle man with a mind that could not help seeing both sides of all controversies. Jackson first had to "see the right," then hell's fury could not deter him. Different as these two men were, they got along well, and each had great respect for the other. And when Lee was to hear of the wound to Jackson that later proved fatal, he wrote: "You have lost your left arm, but I have lost my right.""

"Stonewall Jackson was an intensely religious man. Once when arms were not forthcoming from Ordnance, Jackson suggested that greater trust was needed in God, whereupon an irreligious soldier proclaimed that there were more prayers in Jackson's camp than muskets. When Lee congratulated him on the course of events at Chancellorsville, Jackson replied, "The General is very kind, but the praise belongs to God." There were those who remembered him as a stern disciplinarian, a driving drill master. But all respected him as a military leader and as a man. Wearing a battered old flat-topped forage hat that everybody knew, he would bring new heart to those who, upon seeing him, would shout to their fellows over the din of battle, "Here comes Old Jack!""

"As for Lee, long afterward in speaking of Gettysburg, he is reported to have remarked that he thought he could have carried the day if Stonewall Jackson had been at his side."

"Jackson fought for the constitutional rights of the South, and any one who imagines he fought for slavery knows nothing of Jackson."

"It cannot well be denied that Jackson possessed every single attribute which makes for success in war. Morally and physically he was absolutely fearless. He accepted responsibility with the same equanimity that he faced the bullets of the enemy. He permitted no obstacle to turn him aside from his appointed path, and in seizing an opportunity or in following up a victory he was the very incarnation of untiring energy. … A supreme activity, both of brain and body, was a prominent characteristic of his military life. His idea of strategy was to secure the initiative, however inferior his force; to create opportunities and to utilise them; to waste no time, and to give the enemy no rest. ...That he felt to the full the fascination of war's tremendous game we can hardly doubt. Not only did he derive, as all true soldiers must, an intense intellectual pleasure from handling his troops in battle so as to outwit and defeat his adversary, but from the day he first smelt powder in Mexico until he led that astonishing charge through the dark depths of the Wilderness his spirits never rose higher than when danger and death were rife about him. With all his gentleness there was much of the old Berserker about Stonewall Jackson, not indeed the lust for blood, but the longing to do doughtily and die bravely, as best becomes a man. His nature was essentially aggressive. He was never more to be feared than when he was retreating, and where others thought only of strong defensive positions he looked persistently for the opportunity to attack."

"In early 1861, Professor Thomas Jonathan Jackson was an unhappy, unpopular professor of artillery, optics, mathematics and astronomy at the Virginia Military Institute. Remarried after the death of his first wife, the deeply religious Jackson believed in predestination: Everything that happened to him was intended to happen. Conversely, one of his frequently stated maxims was, "You can be whatever you will." Guided by these two contradictory ideas, he became a fearless commander. If the Civil War had not happened, Jackson likely would have passed the rest of his life as a teacher, spending his spare time boning up on unfamiliar subjects, practicing his lectures, and spending time with his daughter. Instead, he was thrust into leadership positions. The Civil War changed his life forever, and his death changed the course of the war."

"At the First Battle of Bull Run, three months after the opening of the war, Confederate troops were fleeing until Jackson took the field and not only stopped the retreat but ordered an attack. When he raised his left hand, it was shot through. He tied it up with a handkerchief and kept fighting. Soon the Union forces retreated, overrunning the spectators in carriages who had come out from Washington to "watch the war." Supposedly, General Barnard Bee pointed out Jackson and cried, "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians." Thus Jackson acquired his nickname. After Bull Run, "Stonewall" Jackson was assigned to defend the Valley of Virginia, the "breadbasket of the Confederacy," a task he performed so brilliantly that military strategists still study his campaigns with awe. A strict disciplinarian, he drove his men almost to the breaking point, but after each battle he said prayers of thanksgiving and always reminded them that God was with them. In fact, Jackson's tactics were so effective that some military historians think that if the war had been fought only in Virginia, the Confederacy could have won. However, events elsewhere turned the tide. Jackson's part in the war lasted less than two years."

"According to legend, Jackson's final words were, "Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees." Then he died peacefully. When Jackson's body was taken through Richmond, accompanied by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, thousands turned out to mourn. General Lee called Jackson the world's best executive officer and said, "Jackson lost his left arm, but in him I have lost my right." In two years Jackson went from being a colonel teaching at a small military school to being a general known and revered throughout the Confederacy. He is the best-known Civil War commander, after Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee."

"You are better off than I am, for while you have lost your left, I have lost my right arm."

"Jackson neither apologized for nor spoke in favor of the practice of slavery. He probably opposed the institution. Yet in his mind the Creator had sanctioned slavery, and man had no moral right to challenge its existence. The good Christian slaveholder was one who treated his servants fairly and humanely at all times."

"Returning home on leave following my second year at West Point, I called on a great-uncle who had joined the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen and had fought in a number of major Civil War battles, including Gettysburg, and had been with Robert E. Lee at Appamatox. My Uncle White was the younger brother of my grandfather. He hated Yankees and Republicans, not necessarily in that order, and talked derisively about both. When I visited, he was seated in a wheel chair, in grudging acquiescence to the infirmities of age. Tobacco juice decorated his shirt and stains around a spittoon on the floor testified to the inaccuracy of his aim. Flies buzzed through screenless windows. "What are you doing with yourself, son?" Uncle White asked. I answered the old veteran with trepidation. "I'm going to that same school that Grant and Sherman went to, the Military Academy at West Point, New York." Uncle White was silent for what seemed like a long time. "That's all right, son," he said at last. "Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there too.""

"Madam, don't bring up your sons to detest the United States government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities, and make your sons Americans."

"Lee was the last of the great old-fashioned generals."

"Returning home on leave following my second year at West Point, I called on a great-uncle who had joined the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen and had fought in a number of major Civil War battles, including Gettysburg, and had been with Robert E. Lee at Appamatox. My Uncle White was the younger brother of my grandfather. He hated Yankees and Republicans, not necessarily in that order, and talked derisively about both. When I visited, he was seated in a wheel chair, in grudging acquiescence to the infirmities of age. Tobacco juice decorated his shirt and stains around a spittoon on the floor testified to the inaccuracy of his aim. Flies buzzed through screenless windows. "What are you doing with yourself, son?" Uncle White asked. I answered the old veteran with trepidation. "I'm going to that same school that Grant and Sherman went to, the Military Academy at West Point, New York." Uncle White was silent for what seemed like a long time. "That's all right, son," he said at last. "Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there too.""

"This week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"

"I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they'd never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state. It would be better to see Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood on the mountain, although it probably would have been difficult to get those two men to ride together. Maybe Braxton Bragg would have been a better pick, but no one calls him the hero of Chickamauga. Yet Bragg, Johnston, and Hood all attempted to defend Georgia, and they are ignored on Stone Mountain. So is Joe Wheeler, whose cavalry feasted off Georgians in 1864. So is John B. Gordon, wartime hero and postwar Klansman. Given Stone Mountain's history, Klansman Gordon would have been a good choice."

"Once we understand that the flags in question are those of an army, we can have a more intelligent discussion about what those armies did, such as the fact that the Army of Northern Virginia was under orders to capture and send south supposed escaped slaves during that army's invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863./ That is a question of correctly understanding that since the adoption of the US Constitution in 1787 with the 3/5 and Fugitive Slave tenets, all Commissioned US officers, in swearing to uphold the constitution, swore to uphold the institution, via these tenets, regardless of personal sentiments, including all future Northern officers. William T. Sherman wrote his brother of this from Florida in 1842."

"In 1864, black Union troops were involved in operations against Lee's army outside Richmond and Petersburg, and some of them are taken prisoner. Lee puts them to work on Confederate entrenchments that are in Union free-fire zones. When Grant gets wind of this, he threatens to put Confederate prisoners to work on Union entrenchments under Confederate fire unless Lee pulls out. So Grant was willing to embrace an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth retaliation policy based upon Confederate treatment of black prisoners. For Grant, it was the color of the uniform, not the skin, that mattered... The Lee myth. Lee being above slavery, Lee being in fact anti-slavery, is essential to the neo-Confederate argument that it's not about race, it's not about slavery. They've done a very good job of covering up Robert E. Lee's actual positions on this... In pre-war correspondence, Lee castigated the abolitionists for their political activity, and he never showed any qualms about the social order that he would later defend with arms. He also had a few slaves that he inherited as part of a will agreement, with provisions to emancipate those slaves. But in fact, he dragged his heels in complying with the terms of that will. And he never gave a second thought to the fact that his beloved Arlington mansion was run by slave labor."

"Although Lee was an enthusiastic and hardworking officer, his promotions in the Army came slowly. Sometimes he may have been discouraged, but he never gave up. His work as an Army engineer was outstanding, but it was in the Mexican War that he distinguished himself in combat. His commander, General Winfield Scott, praised him highly. His reputation as a soldier grew with the years. Just after Lincoln's call for troops, he was offered command of the Union Army. This was the highest goal that any American officer could reach, but Robert E. Lee refused to accept it. Lee's conscience would not permit him to bear arms against his native state. He resigned from the United States Army. Lee's loyalty to the Union was great, but his loyalty to Virginia was greater. He did not want to fight against the United States, but if duty required him to defend his native state, he was determined to do so. When Virginia chose him as the commander of her forces, he accepted the offer on April 23, 1861, and threw all his talents into her defense. Robert E. Lee represented the best of Virginia's traditions and ideals."

"There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace."

"Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free; he fought for the preservation of slavery; his army kidnapped free black people at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for black Americans. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”"

"As a retired U.S. Army soldier and as a historian, I consider the issue simple. My former hero, Robert E. Lee, committed treason to preserve slavery. After the Civil War, former Confederates, their children, and their grandchildren created a series of myths and lies to hide the essential truth and sustain a racial hierarchy dedicated to white political power reinforced by violence. But for decades, I believed the Confederates and Lee were romantic warriors of a doomed but noble cause. As a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, I believe that American history demands, at least from me, a reckoning."

"One of the foundations of the Lost Cause myth was the near deification of Robert E. Lee as the perfect example of an educated Christian gentleman. A Marble Man without sin. Much of my life led me to glorify Robert E. Lee and Confederate soldiers. My first book, my first movie, my hometown, my college, even the U.S. Army and West Point honored Lee and his cause. I hope this book exposes the lies I grew up believing and why it took so long for me to see the evidence, the facts, that I now see so clearly. Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U.S. territory, violently. Together, they formed a new "Confederacy," in contravention of the U.S. Constitution. Then West Point graduates like Robert E. Lee resigned their commissions, abrogating an oath sworn to God to defend the United States. During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible: to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever."

"Lee is the greatest military genius in America, myself not excepted."

"So it was in the civil war. Farragut's father was born in Spain and Sheridan's father in Ireland; Sherman and Thomas were of English and Custer of German descent; and Grant came of a long line of American ancestors whose original home had been Scotland. But the Admiral was not a Spanish-American; and the Generals were not Scotch-Americans or Irish-Americans or English-Americans or German-Americans. They were all Americans and nothing else. This was just as true of Lee and of Stonewall Jackson and of Beauregard."

"I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee. All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general. But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that. We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."

"That old man had my division slaughtered at Gettysburg."

"We were immediately taken before General Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away. We frankly told him that we considered ourselves free. He then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget. He then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mister Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by General Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty. We were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us. Accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered. General Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed. Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, General Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done. * The evidence consisting against this account includes the testimony in 1863 in the Boston Liberator in Lee's defense, in addition that Amanda Parks, sister of one of the two accompanying escaped slaves with Norris tried to visit Lee in Washington in 1866, and failing to meet him at his hotel, later wrote him. Her letter has not survived but the General's response has and the nature of the content, combined with her attempted voluntary meeting with the man who would have whipped her brother, throws a considerable doubt upon the Norris account."

"They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee—and what a leader! Fifty-five years old, tall, handsome, with graying hair and deep, expressive brown eyes which could convey with a glance a stronger reproof than any other general’s oath-laden castigation; kind at heart and courteous even to those who failed him, he inspired and deserved confidence. No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller. And, what a horse!"

"Theodore Roosevelt, certainly a serious student of history and able to see both sides, being a Northerner with a Southern mother, said Robert E. Lee was our greatest American. Winston Churchill, even more adept at history, said the same. So, too, did Eisenhower. In a 1954 speech to the Boy Scouts of America, President Eisenhower cited Lee as one of his heroes."

"Had he been the Northern general, Lee- like George Washington, a Southerner presiding over a Northern country- would have been in a unique position to bridge the gap between the two sides and unify a war-torn nation. Worshipped by his men, he exuded calm leadership. Nominated for U.S. President in 1868, he would have made a far better president than his wartime opponent, Ulysses Grant. As it turned out, the bitterness of the defeated Southerners because of Grant's and Sherman's slash-and-burn methods resonated for a full century- a long time for America."

"Whereas Grant and Sherman had no compunctions about laying waste to farms and doing harm to civilians standing in their way, Lee did. "It is well that war is so terrible," he said, "lest we grow too fond of it." As his armies advanced northward and captured farms, he instructed his soldiers that whatever food they took from the farmers, they pay for it. He, not Grant, won the moral advantage recognized by history."

"Lee's problem, wrote the British military historian Sir Liddell Hart, was that he always went on the attack. A wiser course might have been to combine defensive strategy with defensive tactics, "to lure the Union armies into attacking under disadvantageous conditions." He was a general who "would rather lose the war than his dignity." Sure enough, he lost the war and preserved his dignity so well that he has gone down in history a martyr, our most overrated general."

"No general surpassed him in audacity and aggressiveness. If McClellan took no risks, Lee perhaps took too many. He preferred the bold offensive, seeking in true Napoleonic fashion to destroy, not merely defeat, the enemy army. Dedicated to winning a battle of annihilation, he sometimes imprudently continued attacking beyond any reasonable prospect of success. Lee also needed to broaden his view of the war. Exhibiting a narrow parochialism, he believed Virginia was the most important war zone. He underestimated the problems Confederate commanders faced in the western and trans-Mississippi theaters and the significance of those theaters for southern survival. Yet Lee served the South well. Although costing the Confederacy dearly, his victories against great odds buoyed Confederate morale and depressed the North. Furthermore, Lee's emphasis on his native state was not entirely emotional. Richmond, the South's primary industrial center, acquired great symbolic value, and the Virginia countryside furnished men, mounts, food, and other logistical assets."

"The strategically insignificant Battle of Seven Pines had momentous consequences. Johnston was badly wounded, and on June 1 Davis appointed Lee to replace him. Nothing in the new commander's Civil War experience foretold the fame he would achieve leading the Army of Northern Virginia to destruction, and to immortality in military annals. Like Grant at Belmont, Lee began on an unpromising note. He was sent to oust the Federals from western Virginia; his strategy miscarried, and troops derisively called him "Granny Lee" and "Evacuating Lee". While commanding the southern Atlantic coast, he earned another unflattering nickname, "the King of Spades," by ordering his men to dig entrenchments. No nicknames have been less apt, because Lee's early wartime activities concealed his true character."

"Lee at Gettysburg who decided to attack, attack, attack, even though he knew that it was going to result in thousands of deaths. He made that decision because he thought it necessary in order to win that battle. And in turn perhaps to win the war, to accomplish his objectives. It's not quite so crude as 'the end justifies the means', but I think that all of these extremely difficult decisions, which in the context of a war do mean life and death for tens of thousands of people or destruction of property and the ruin of lives, were made on the grounds of absolute necessity in a crisis situation, not only a war but in some respects a revolutionary situation. The same kinds of things I suppose could be applied to any of the great revolutions in history, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and so on."

"General Lee directs me to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 25th inst: and to say that he much regrets the unwillingness of owners to permit their slaves to enter the service. If the state authorities can do nothing to get those negroes who are willing to join the army, but whose masters refuse their consent, there is no authority to do it at all. What benefit they expect their negroes to be to them, if the enemy occupies the country, it is impossible to say. He hopes you will endeavor to get the assistance of citizens who favor the measure, and bring every influence you can to bear. When a negro is willing, and his master objects, there would be less objection to compulsion, if the state has the authority. It is however of primary importance that the negroes should know that the service is voluntary on their part. As to the name of the troops, the general thinks you cannot do better than consult the men themselves. His only objection to calling them colored troops was that the enemy had selected that designation for theirs. But this has no weight against the choice of the troops and he recommends that they be called colored or if they prefer, they can be called simply Confederate troops or volunteers. Everything should be done to impress them with the responsibility and character of their position, and while of course due respect and subordination should be exacted, they should be so treated as to feel that their obligations are those of any other soldier and their rights and privileges dependent in law & order as obligations upon others as upon theirselves. Harshness and contemptuous or offensive language or conduct to them must be forbidden and they should be made to forget as soon as possible that they were regarded as menials. You will readily understand however how to conciliate their good will & elevate the tone and character of the men…."

"I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand."

"This noble man died 'a prisoner of war on parole'. His application for 'amnesty' was never granted, or even noticed, and the commonest privileges of citizenship which are accorded to the most ignorant negro were denied to this king of men."

"He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbour without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward."