Pbs Shows

"I did only what my duty demanded. I could have taken no other course without dishonor."

"The man who stood before us...was the realized King Arthur. The soul that looked out of his eyes was as honest and fearless as when it first looked out on life. One saw the character as clear as crystal, without complication, and the heart as tender as that of ideal womanhood."

"A Union girl watching Lee ride past her Pennsylvania home said, "I wish he were ours." Early in the War, he was ridiculed as "The King of Spades" because of his fondness for entrenching and "Granny Lee" because of his gray hair and strict ways. But after he drove McClellan off the Peninsula, stopped Pope at Second Manassas, demolished Burnside at Fredericksburg and destroyed Hooker at Chancellorsville, all despite overwhelming odds, he won the unshakable confidence of Jefferson Davis, and the unqualified love of his officers and men."

"That man Grant will fight us everyday and every hour until the end of the war."

"Never before in my lifetime did I ever see such a scene as was enacted when Lee pronounced these words. A yell rent the air which must've been heard for miles around. A courier riding by my side with tears coursing down his cheeks exclaimed 'I would charge hell itself for that old man!'"

"Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander who now faced Sherman, was heartily disliked by President Jefferson Davis, but he was very nearly worshipped by his men. "I do not believe there was a soldier in his army but would gladly have died for him. With him, everything was his soldiers. He would feed his soldiers if the country starved. Sam Watkins." Outgunned, outsupplied and outnumbered 2 to 1, Joseph Johnston could only hope to slow Sherman’s advance and perhaps lure him into making the kind of doomed frontal attack that would help swing the election against Lincoln."

"In the first years of the war, battle was bloody but sporadic. From now on it would be waged without a break. From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, it would not stop for thirty days. It was, one Soldier wrote, 'Living night and day in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.'"

"Petersburg is a magnificent sloop to the durability of men, on both sides. It was just a rehearsal for World War I, trench warfare. And they stood up very well to it. But the Soldiers always did in that war; its to us almost an incredible bravery, considering the casualties."

"June 23, 1864. The demand down here for killing purposes is far ahead of the supply. Thank God however for the consolation that when the last man is killed, the war will be over. This war you know differs from previous wars in having no object to fight for. It can't be finished until all the men on either the one side or the other are killed. Both sides are trying to do that as fast as they can because it would be a pity to spin this affair out for two or three years longer."

"Sherman will never go to hell. He'll flank the devil and make heaven in spite of the guards."

"In less than six months, from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor to Petersburg, Grant had nearly destroyed his Army."

"July 4th 1864. The Glorious fourth has come again and we have had quite a celebration, with guns firing shot and shell into Petersburg to remind them of the day. This day makes four Fourth of Julys I have passed in the Army. The first at Camp Clark, the second at Harrison's Landing, the third at Gettysburg, and today at Petersburg."

"A man who would stay on an ironclad from choice is a candidate for the insane asylum."

"I had a good time in Washington. Lager beer and a horse and buggy, and in the evening, horizontal refreshment! Or, in plainer words, riding a Dutch gal. Had a good time generally, I tell you."

"Women who come before the public are in a bad box now. ... All manner of things, they say, come over the border under the huge hoops now worn, so they are ruthlessly torn off. Not legs but arms are looked for under hoops, and, sad to say, found."

"The news came like a flash of lightning, staggering and blinding everyone. Farewell old fella, we privates loved ya because you made us love ourselves."

"Every evening for a month during the Siege, a Georgia sharpshooter played his cornet so beautifully, that men on both sides stopped to listen."

"To avenge Sherman’s victories in Georgia, six Confederate agents slipped into New York City, armed with phosphorous, intent upon burning down the City's most fashionable hotels. They managed to light 10 fires and set P.T. Barnum's museum ablaze. Firemen put everything out. All but one of the Confederates got away. "The people of the North can't be rolling in wealth and comfort," the captured man said before he was hanged, "while we in the South are bearing all the hardship and privations.""

"I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back. [...] I think that if there had been more Southern successes, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."

"Dear Nat, I think well of the President. He has a face like a Hoosier Michelangelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut crisscross lines, and its doughnut complexion. I do not dwell on the supposed failures of his government. He has shown an almost supernatural tact in keeping the ship afloat at all. I more and more rely upon his idiomatic western genius."

"Not the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington, nor Charleston, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor all the combined can save the enemy from constant and exhaustive drain of blood and treasure, which must continue, until he shall discover that no peace is attainable unless based on the recognition of our indefeasible rights."

"If it hadn’t begun before, the Lost Cause was born with his words. As Davis spoke at Richmond, his audience could hear Grant’s guns at Petersburg, just 20 miles away. More and more, it was becoming a Confederacy of the mind."

"Lincoln now issued a proclamation, making the last Thursday in November a national day of Thanksgiving. In the trenches of Petersburg, 120,000 turkey and chicken dinners were served to Grant's huge Army. Only yards away, the Confederates had no feast, but held their fire all day in respect of the Union holiday."

"On the night of November 25th [1864], at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar opened. Three brothers had starring roles: Edwin, Junius and John Wilkes Booth. At one point in Shakespeare’s play, Cassius speaks of the assassination of Caesar: "How many ages hence shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over, in states unborn and accents yet unknown?""

"By the spring of 1864 Union dead completely filled the military cemeteries of Washington and Alexandria. Secretary of War Stanton ordered the Quartermaster General, Montgomery Meigs to choose a new site. Meigs was a Georgian who had served under Lee in the peacetime army, but he had developed an intense hatred for all his fellow Southerners who fought against the Union he still served. Without hesitation he picked the grounds of Robert E. Lee's home of Arlington for the new Army cemetery. [...] Now the men Grant was sending to fight Robert E. Lee were being buried in Lee's own front yard. And that yard became Arlington National Cemetery: the Union's most hallowed ground."

"We believed that it was most desirable that the north should win. We believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluble. We, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed those who stood against us held just as sacred convictions that were the opposite of ours. And we respected them, as every man with a heart must respect those who give all for their beliefs."

"He saw from the very beginning how hard a war it was going to be. And when he said how hard a war it was going to be, he was retired under suspicion of insanity; and then brought back when they decided maybe he wasn't so crazy after all."

"We were willing to go anywhere, or to follow anyone who would lead us. We were anxious to flee, fight, or fortify. I have never seen an army so confused and demoralized. The whole thing seemed to be tottering and trembling."

"Sherman’s men were still harsher in South Carolina than they had been in Georgia. "Here is where treason began," a private said, "and by God, this is where it shall end.""

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still must be said: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strike on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

"I never saw him [Abraham Lincoln] again. Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other."

"The conduct of the Southern people appears many times to be truely noble, as exemplified for instance in the defense of Petersburg. Old men with silver locks lay dead in the trenches side by side with mere boys of thirteen or fourteen. It almost makes one sorry to have to fight against people who show such devotion for their homes and their country."

"The few men who still carried their muskets had hardly the appearance of soldiers. Their clothes all tattered and covered with mud, their eyes sunken and lusterless. Yet still they were waiting for Gen. Lee to tell them where they were to face the valiant fight."

"The country be damned, there is no country, there has been no country, for a year or more. You are the country to these men."

"They knew each other. Grant remembered Lee very well. Lee didn't quite remember Grant. That was understandable from the time that they were acquainted, back in the early days. But I think it was the sensitivity that the two men had, for each other, and for the moment. Grant not wanting to get to the point too quickly. Lee bringing him up shortly to the point of why they're together. Lee, dressed in his last good uniform. Grant apologizing that he was rushing from the field and didn't have time to change. The scribe being unable to hold the pen steady and having it taken by another Soldier. That, from Lee's point of view, awful moment, and from Grant's point of view, glorious moment, and yet for the two of them, a sad and quiet moment. And Lee taking his leave, and doffing his hat from Traveler, and riding back to his troops after securing those reasonable terms. It was the beginning of the unification of the country."

"If one army drank the joy of victory, and the other the bitter draught of defeat, it was a joy moderated by the recollection of the cost at which it had been purchased, and a defeat mollified by the consciousness of many triumphs. If the victor could recall a Malvern Hill, an Antietam, a Gettysburg, a Five Forks, the vanquished could recall a Manassas, a Fredericksburg, a Chancellorsville, a Cold Harbor."

"A crowd of soldiers waited in front of Lee’s tent. "Boys," he told them, "I have done the best I could for you. Go home now, and if you make as good citizens as you have soldiers, you will do well, and I shall always be proud of you. Good-bye, and God bless you all." He turned and disappeared into his tent."

"My shoes are gone. My clothes are gone. I’m weary, sick, and hungry. My family have all been killed or scattered. I have suffered all this for my country. I love my country, but if this war is ever over, I’ll be damned if I ever love another country."

"You may forgive us," a surrendering Rebel officer [Henry A. Wise] told Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain after the ceremony at Appomattox, "but we won’t be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts, which you little dream of. We hate you, sir."

"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?"

"Jessica Brown Findlay - Lady Sybil Crawley (Seasons 1, 2 and 3)"