Patriotic Gore Quotes

“There is nothing about Lee that is at all picturesque, but his dignity and distinction are impressive, and this memoir helps us better to understand the reasons for his lasting prestige in the North as well as the South — why a New Englander who had served in the Union army like the younger Charles Francis Adams should have wanted to have a statue of him in Washington. The point is that Lee belongs, as does no other public figure of his generation, to the Roman phase of the Republic; he prolongs it in a curious way which, irrelevant and anachronistic though his activities to a Northerner may seem to be, cannot fail to bring some sympathetic response that derives from the experience of the Revolution. The Lees had been among the prime workers in our operations against the British and the founding of the United States. Robert’s father, “Light-Horse”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“had taken place just before Grant’s visit, and Wilhelm was unable to receive him. “Here is an old man,” says Bismarck, — “one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world — and yet they must try and shoot him!”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“true that Grant appears in two quite different lights in his capacity as a soldier and in his capacity as — what should one say? One cannot call him a politician, for Grant hated politicians and had not the least aptitude for politics. Nor can one possibly call him a statesman. Whenever, as President, he did anything wise, it had the look of a happy accident. In the field, as commanding general, he could be patient, far-seeing, considerate, adroit at handling complicated situations. But in Washington he had no idea of what it meant to be President of the United States; he did not even, it soon appeared, understand constitutional government.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“Whitman believed himself, at the time when Drum-Taps was published, that it was so far the best thing he had written. It certainly contained the best poetry that was written during the war on the subject”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“If the Northerners were acting the Will of God, the Southerners were rescuing a hallowed ideal of gallantry, aristocratic freedom, fine manners and luxurious living from the materialism and vulgarity of the mercantile Northern society.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“the war left a lasting trauma, and resulted in, not an apocalypse, but, on the one hand, a rather gross period of industrial and commercial development and, on the other, a severe disillusionment for the idealists who had been hoping for something better, these are matters about which we in the North have rarely thought and even less often spoken. We have, in general, accepted the epic that Lincoln directed and lived and wrote. Since it was brought to an end by his death the moment after the war was won, we are able to dissociate him entirely from the ignominies and errors of the Reconstruction and to believe he would have handled its problems better.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“Should the war not have earlier been brought to an end? Could it not, in fact, have been prevented? Should Fort Sumter have been relieved? Would it not have been a good deal less disastrous if the South had been allowed to secede? All these questions have been debated; and yet — except, of course, in the South — the ordinary American does not often ask them.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“Now, aside from this self-confident ambition, what kind of man was Lincoln? There has undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe;”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“There is, in fact, in Uncle Tom, as well as in its successor Dred, a whole drama of manners and morals and intellectual points of view which corresponds somewhat to the kind of thing that was then being done by Dickens, and was soon to be continued by Zola, for the relations of the social classes, and which anticipates such later studies of two sharply contrasting peoples uncomfortably involved with one another as the John Bull’s Other Island of Bernard Shaw or E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“The North’s determination to preserve the Union was simply the form that the power drive now took. The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century; it has continued to be strong in this; and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks. The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

“The celebration of current battles by poets who have not taken part in them has produced some of the emptiest verse that exists.”
― Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War