The Civil War Quotes

“The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative

“Burnside left even sooner, hard on the heels of a violent argument with Meade, an exchange of recriminations which a staff observer said “went far toward confirming one’s belief in the wealth and flexibility of the English language as a medium of personal dispute.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“Andrew Johnson. He had been lying rather low since the inauguration, yet he showed this evening that he had lost none of his talent for invective on short notice.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“Other trophies included a bundle of captured flags, which he sent to City Point that evening by a special messenger. Lincoln was delighted. “Here is something material,” he said as he unfurled the shot-torn rebel colors; “something I can see, feel, and understand. This means victory. This is victory.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“Aboard a Chesapeake Bay steamer, not long after his surrender, the general heard a fellow passenger insisting that the South had been “conquered but not subdued.” Asked in what command he had served, the bellicose young man — one of those stalwarts later classified as “invisible in war and invincible in peace” — replied that, unfortunately, circumstances had made it impossible for him to be in the army. “Well, sir, I was,” Johnston told him. “You may not be subdued, but I am.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“been illogically arrived at; it had not; but the logic, such as it was, was based insubstantially on hope.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“severing Sherman’s life line he would provoke him into rashness or oblige him to retreat.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“the indestructibility of the army pack mule. Falling from a height of thirty feet, one of these creatures—watched in amazement by a regiment of troopers whose colonel recorded the incident in his memoirs—“turned a somersault, struck an abutment, disappeared under water, came up, and swam ashore without disturbing his pack.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“These were the red hours of the conflict, hours no man who survived them would forget, even in his sleep, forever after. Fighting thus at arm’s length across that parapet, they were caught up in a waking nightmare, although they were mercifully spared the knowledge, at the outset, that it was to last for another sixteen unrelenting hours.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“when corps commanders started toppling, alive one minute and dead the next, struck down as if by a bolt of blue-sky lightning, who was safe? All down the line, from brigadiers to privates, spirits were heavy with intimations of mortality.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“Grant was as usual a good deal more intent on what he had in mind to do to the enemy than he was on what the enemy might or might not do to him.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

“What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” R. M. T. Hunter wanted to know.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox