The Civil War (documentary)

"McClellan had plenty of reserves waiting outside Sharpsburg, but he never used them. Lee, outnumbered 3-to-1, braced for a new attack all the next day. It never came. On the 18th, Lee and his army slipped back across the Potomac. McClellan could claim a victory, but he could have won the War. Lee’s invasion had been halted, he had suffered terrible losses, but his army had not been destroyed."

"You do have a big problem when you have units that are from states and counties and even towns. And one of those regiments can get in a tight spot in a particular battle, like in the cornfield at Sharpsburg. And the news may be that there are no more young men in that town. They're all dead."

"The dead of the battlefield come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the lists in the morning with paper at breakfast, but dismiss this recollection with a coffee. Mr. Matthew Brady has done something to bring to us the terrible reality and carelessness of the war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them at our doorstep, he has done something very like it."

"It was no longer a question of the Union as it was, that was to be reestablished. It was the Union as it should be, that is to say, washed clean from its original sin. We were no longer merely the Soldiers of a political controversy, we were now the missionaries of a great work of redemption, the armed liberators of millions. The war was ennobled, the object was higher."

"The triumph of the Confederacy would be a victory of the powers of evil, which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirit of friends, all over the civilized world. The American Civil War is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs."

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for Union. The world will not forget that we say this. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth."

"I lose patience with the argument that because of someone's time, that his limitations are therefore excusable, or even praiseworthy. It is not true that it was impossible in that time and place to look any higher. Think of Wendell Phillips, who, commenting on Abraham Lincoln's proposal to colonize black people out of the country, was sarcastic. He said, ‘colonize the blacks? A man might as well colonize his own hands, or when the robber is in his house, he might as well colonize his revolver.’"

"It was suicide. They came forward, one man said, as though they were breasting a storm of rain and sleet. Faces and bodies half turned to the storm, shoulders shrugged. The Irish Brigade got within twenty-five paces of the wall. The men of the 24th Georgia who shot them down were Irish too."

"They still thought that to mass their fire they had to mass their men. So they lined up and marched up toward an entrenched line and got blown away."

"More credit for valor is given to Confederate Soldiers. They were supposed to have more élan and dash. Actually, I know of no braver men in either army than the Union troops at Fredericksburg, which is a serious defeat. But to keep charging that wall at the foot of Marye's Heights after all the failures they been in, and they were all failures, is a singular instance of valor."

"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."

"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'."

"On the second day of fierce fighting, Rosecrans committed a fatal mistake, ordering his troops to close a gap in the Union line that wasn't there. In the process, he opened up a real one; and Longstreet's Confederates stormed through. The Union forces broke and ran."

"The Civil War was fought in ten thousand places. At Big Bend, Big Sandy, and the Big Sunflower River. From Bunker Hill, West Virginia and Blue Springs, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois to Golgotha Church, Georgia, and Christianburg, Kentucky. At Citrus Point on the Cimarron River and along Cowskin Bottom. At Pebbly Run and La Glorieta Pass. And Gettysburg."

"He spoke just 269 words. He started off by reminding his audience that just 87 years had passed since the founding of the nation, and then he went on to embolden the Union cause with some of the most stirring words ever spoken."

"While Grant conferred with Meade, members of his staff described Grant’s triumphs in the West. Veterans of the Army of the Potomac were not impressed. "That may be," one said, "But Grant never met Bobby Lee.""

"In 1861, Lee refused command of the northern army and followed his state out of the Union, not because he approved of slavery or secession, but because he believed his first duty was to Virginia."

"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!'"