The Civil War, Vol. 2 Quotes

“I desire to so conduct the affairs of this Administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be deep down inside of me.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“What’s the harm in letting him have his fling?” he remarked of one of the worst of these; “If he did not pitch into me, he would into some poor fellow he might hurt”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Now I lay me down to sleep In mud that’s many fathoms deep. If I’m not here when you awake Just hunt me up with an oyster rake”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“General Robert E Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg:

"It is well that war is so terrible, the gray-bearded general said. “We should grow too fond of it." (p. 37)”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“it would be a kind boon in an overruling Providence to sweep from the earth the soil, along with the people. Better to be a wilderness of waste, than a lasting monument of lost liberty.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“That ruin is beautiful,” he declared, and added: “But it is more than this, it is emblematic also.… Is it not in some respects an image of the human soul, once ruined by the fall, yet with gleams of beauty and energetic striving after strength, surrounded by dangers and watching, against its foes?”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“In war, as in love—indeed, as in all such areas of so-called human endeavor—expectation tended to outrun execution, particularly when the latter was given a head start in the race, and nowhere did this apply more lamentably, at any rate from the Richmond point of view, than in the wake of Chickamauga, probably the greatest and certainly the bloodiest of all the battles won by the South in its fight for the independence it believed to be its birthright.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Longstreet reached Catoosa Station the following afternoon, September 19, but found no guide waiting to take him to Bragg or give him news of the battle he could hear raging beyond the western screen of woods. When the horses came up on a later train, he had three of them saddled and set out with two members of his staff to find the headquarters of the Army of Tennessee. He was helped in this, so far as the general direction was concerned, by the rearward drift of the wounded, although none of these unfortunates seemed to know exactly where he could find their commander. Night fell and the three officers continued their ride by moonlight until they were halted by a challenge out of the darkness just ahead: “Who comes there?” “Friends,” they replied, promptly but with circumspection, and in the course of the parley that followed they asked the sentry to identify his unit. When he did so by giving the numbers of his brigade and division—Confederate outfits were invariably known by the names of their commanders—they knew they had blundered into the Union lines. “Let us ride down a little way to find a better crossing,” Old Peter said, disguising his southern accent, and the still-mounted trio withdrew, unfired on, to continue their search for Bragg. It was barely an hour before midnight when they found him—or, rather, found his camp; for he was asleep in his ambulance by then. He turned out for a brief conference, in the course of which he outlined, rather sketchily, what had happened up to now in his contest with Rosecrans, now approaching a climax here at Chickamauga, and passed on the orders already issued to the five corps commanders for a dawn attack next morning. Longstreet, though he had never seen the field by daylight, was informed that he would have charge of the left wing, which contained six of the army’s eleven divisions, including his own two fragmentary ones that had arrived today and yesterday from Virginia. For whatever it might be worth, Bragg also gave him what he later described as “a map showing prominent topographical features of the ground from the Chickamauga River to Mission Ridge, and beyond to the Lookout Mountain range.” Otherwise he was on his own, so far as information was concerned.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“On July 3, with Polk and Hardee safely across Sewanee Mountain and out of the unsprung trap Old Rosy had devised, Federal cavalry in heavy numbers forced the pass near Cowan, and as the rear-guard Confederate troopers fell back rapidly through the streets of the town a patriotic lady came out of her house and began reviling them for leaving her and her neighbors to the mercy of the Yankees. “You great big cowardly rascal!” she cried, singling out Forrest himself for attack, not because she recognized him (it presently was made clear that she did not) but simply because he happened to be handy; “why don’t you turn and fight like a man instead of running like a cur? I wish old Forrest was here. He’d make you fight!” Old Forrest, as she called him, did not pause for either an introduction or an explanation, though later he joined in the laughter at his expense, declaring that he would rather have faced an enemy battery than that one irate female.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“General R. E. Lee,
Commanding Army of Northern Virginia: Yours of the 8th instant has been received. I am glad to find that you concur so entirely with me as to the want of our country in this trying hour, and am happy to add that after the first depression consequent upon our disasters in the West, indications have appeared that our people will exhibit that fortitude which we agree in believing is alone needful to secure ultimate success. It well became Sidney Johnston, when overwhelmed by a senseless clamor, to admit the rule that success is the test of merit, and yet there has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings. I admit the propriety of your conclusions, that an officer who loses the confidence of his troops should have his position changed, whatever may be his ability; but when I read the sentence I was not at all prepared for the application you were about to make. Expressions of discontent in the public journals furnish but little evidence of the sentiment of an army.… But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to admit, with all their implications, the points which you present, where am I to find that new commander who is to possess the greater ability which you believe to be required? I do not doubt the readiness with which you would give way to one who could accomplish all that you have wished, and you will do me the justice to believe that if Providence should kindly offer such a person for our use, I would not hesitate to avail of his services. My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to discover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have but used to you the language of sober earnestness when I have impressed upon you the propriety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to danger, because I felt our country could not bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army or of the reflecting men in the country, is to demand of me an impossibility. It only remains for me to hope that you will take all possible care of yourself, that your health and strength may be entirely restored, and that the Lord will preserve you for the important duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our suffering country for the independence which we have engaged in war to maintain. As ever, very respectfully and truly yours, JEFFERSON DAVIS”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“I have seen and heard of expression of discontent in the public journals at the result of the expedition. I do not know how far this feeling extends in the army. My brother officers have been too kind to report it, and so far the troops have been too generous to exhibit it. It is fair, however, to suppose that it does exist, and success is so necessary to us that nothing should be risked to secure it. I therefore, in all sincerity, request Your Excellency to take measures to supply my place. I do this with the more earnestness because no one is more aware than myself of my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others? In addition I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength. I have not yet recovered from the attack I experienced the past spring. I am becoming more and more incapable of exertion, and am thus prevented from making the personal examinations and giving the personal supervision to the operations in the field which I feel to be necessary. I am so dull that in making use of the eyes of others I am frequently misled. Everything, therefore, points to the advantages to be derived from a new commander, and I the more anxiously urge the matter upon Your Excellency from my belief that a younger and abler man than myself can readily be obtained.… I have no complaints to make of anyone but myself. I have received nothing but kindness from those above me, and the most considerate attention from my comrades and companions at arms. To Your Excellency I am specially indebted for uniform kindness and consideration. You have done everything in your power to aid me in the work committed to my charge, without omitting anything to promote the general welfare. I pray that your efforts may at length be crowned with success, and that you may long live to enjoy the thanks of a grateful people. With sentiments of great esteem, I am very respectfully and truly yours,
R. E. LEE, General”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“I know how prone we are to censure,” Lee continued, “and how ready [we are] to blame others for the non-fulfillment of our expectations. This is unbecoming in a generous people, and I grieve to see its expression. The general remedy for want of success in a military commander is his removal. This is natural, and in many instances proper. For no matter what may be the ability of the officer, if he loses the confidence of his troops disaster must sooner or later ensue.” For all his basic agreement with the principle here expressed, Davis was by no means prepared for the application Lee made in the sentence that followed: “I have been prompted by these reflections more than once since my return from Pennsylvania to propose to Your Excellency the propriety of selecting another commander for this army.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“the virtue of the whole people.… Nothing is wanting,” he declared, “but that their fortitude should equal their bravery to insure the success of our cause. We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters. Our people have only to be true and united, to bear manfully the misfortunes incident to war, and all will come right in the end.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Misfortune often develops secret foes,” Davis had said in a letter written earlier that week to Lee, “and oftener still makes men complain. It is comfortable to hold someone responsible for one’s discomfort.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Davis told him, and went on to suggest that necessity be made a virtue and a source of strength.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“He began by expressing his gratitude to those “whom no partizan malice, or partizan hope, can make false to the nation’s life,” then passed at once, since peace seemed uppermost in men’s minds nowadays, to a discussion of “three conceivable ways” in which it could be brought about. First, by suppressing the rebellion; “This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed.” Second, by giving up the Union; “I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly.” Third, by negotiating some sort of armistice based on compromise with the Confederates; but “I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief.” After disposing thus, to his apparent satisfaction, of the possibility of achieving peace except by force of arms, he moved on to another matter which his opponents had lately been harping on as a source of dissatisfaction: Emancipation. “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the Proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes. I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do, as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“We are contending with an enemy who, as I understand, drives every able-bodied man he can reach into his ranks, very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter pen. No time is wasted, no argument is used. This produces an army … with a rapidity not to be matched on our side if we first waste time to re-experiment with the volunteer system.” His intention, he said in closing, was to be “just and constitutional, and yet practical, in performing the important duty with which I am charged, of maintaining the unity and free principles of our common country.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“If I tap that little bell,” he told a visitor, obviously relishing the notion, “I can send you to a place where you will never hear the dogs bark.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“When protests reached Lincoln he turned them aside with a medical analogy, pointing out that a limb must sometimes he amputated to save a life but that a life must never be given to save a limb; he felt, he said, “that measures, however unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“He seems to me to be fonder of details than of principles, of tithing the mint, anise, and cummin of patronage, and personal questions, than of the weightier matters of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post. It is not difficult to detect that this is the feeling of his cabinet. He has a kind of shrewdness and common sense, mother wit, and slipshod, low-leveled honesty, that made him a good Western jury lawyer. But he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is. Only the army can save us.” If there was”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“The 14th Tennessee, for example, had left Clarksville in 1861 with 960 men on its muster roll, and in the past two years, most of which time their homeland had been under Union occupation, they had fought on all the major battlefields of Virginia. When Archer took them across Willoughby Run on the opening day of Gettysburg they counted 365 bayonets; by sunset they were down to barely 60. These five dozen survivors, led by a captain on the third day, went forward with Fry against Cemetery Ridge, and there—where the low stone wall jogged west, then south, to form what was known thereafter as the angle—all but three of the remaining 60 fell. This was only one among the forty-odd regiments in the charge; there were others that suffered about as cruelly; but to those wives and sweethearts, parents and sisters and younger brothers who had remained at its point of origin, fifty miles down the Cumberland from Nashville, the news came hard. “Thus the band that once was the pride of Clarksville has fallen,” a citizen lamented, and he went on to explain something of what he and those around him felt. “A gloom rests over the city; the hopes and affections of the people were wrapped in the regiment.… Ah! what a terrible responsibility rests upon those who inaugurated this unholy war.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“recalling the strain of the long wait. “To the good soldier, about to go into action, I am sure the moments linger. Let us not dare say, that with him, either individually or collectively, it is that ‘mythical love of fighting,’ poetical but fabulous; but rather, that it is nervous anxiety to solve the great issue as speedily as possible, without stopping to count the cost. The Macbeth principle—’Twere well it were done quickly—holds quite as good in heroic action as in crime.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Tennessee sergeant from Fry’s brigade, walked forward to the edge of the woods, looked across the wide open valley at the bluecoats standing toylike in the distance on their ridge, and was so startled by the realization of what was about to be required of him that he spoke aloud, asking himself the question: “June Kimble, are you going to do your duty?” The answer, too, was audible. “I’ll do it, so help me God,” he told himself. He felt better then. The dread passed from him, he said later. When he returned to his company, friends asked him how it looked out there, and Kimble replied: “Boys, if we have to go it will be hot for us, and we will have to do our best.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“the men of these two outfits fought as if the outcome of the battle, and with it the war, depended on their valor: as indeed perhaps it did, since whoever had possession of this craggy height on the Union left would dominate the whole fishhook position. “The blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks,” Oates said later. Losses were especially heavy among Federals of rank. O’Rorke, who was barely twenty-three and an officer of much promise, having been top man in the West Point class of ’61, was killed along with more than two dozen of his men in the first blast of musketry that greeted his arrival.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“the men of these two outfits fought as if the outcome of the battle, and with it the war, depended on their valor: as indeed perhaps it did, since whoever had possession of this craggy height on the Union left would dominate the whole fishhook position. “The blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks,” Oates said later.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“In defensive warfare he was perfect,” he wrote years later. “When the hunt was up, his combativeness was overruling.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Fortuity itself, as the deadly game unfolded move by move, appeared to conform to a pattern of hard luck; so much so, indeed, that in time men would say of Lee, as Jael had said of Sisera after she drove the tent peg into his temple, that the stars in their courses had fought against him.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar on theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“the remarkable tact of never spoiling any mysterious and vague notions which [might] be entertained in the minds of the privates as to the qualities of the commander-in-chief. He confines himself to saying and doing as little as possible before his men.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

“I have too many family controversies (so to speak) already on my hands to voluntarily, or so long as I can avoid it, take up another. You are now doing well—well for the country, and well for yourself—much better than you could possibly be if engaged in open war with General Halleck. Allow me to beg that for your sake, for my sake, and for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.” So it was: McClernand already had his answer before he filed his latest appeal. Lincoln would not interfere. The army was Grant’s, and would remain Grant’s, to do with as he saw fit in accomplishing what Lincoln called “the better work.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian