Gettysburg Quotes

“Dan Sickles belonged in a novel rather than an army. Corrupt and confident, he coruscated political charm, talked in the grandest of hotel manners, and oozed sleaze and dissimulation from every pore.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“The Cashtown area did not afford nearly enough of such space to support three of Hill’s divisions plus two of Longstreet’s. Hill”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“Of course, for many of the Civil War’s cultured despisers, the Union is old hat and liberal democracy the listless desert of history’s last—and very dull—man. Emancipation makes a better story for our times. But emancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other). Lincoln insisted that the Civil War was being fought by the United States in order to restore the constitutionally mandated union of those states, and the Gettysburg Address was his most eloquent declaration that the ultimate purpose of the war was the test it afforded of the practical viability of democracy. This was not because race, slavery, and emancipation were unimportant to Lincoln, but because the Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln’s best antislavery intentions.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“Wisconsin Volunteers: War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing, 1914),”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. …”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“they saw in democracy something more than opportunities for self-interest and self-aggrandizement,”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“all men are created equal.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“refusal to abide by the rules of democracy”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“proclaimed a predictably democratic unwillingness to be disagreed with, and used that unwillingness to pull down the entire house.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“Whatever moments he could spare from self-adornment were devoted to the neglect of his duties, and he was so little good as an officer that Longstreet had to assign staffers to Pickett to explain things “very fully; indeed sometimes stay with him to make sure he did not get astray.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“how ignorant he was; how childlike … He was simply beyond analysis; so simple”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“and if there was one thing George Pickett could be relied upon for, it was unreliability. Born”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

“This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement.”
― Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion