American Civil War Biography Quotes

“Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid “uninteresting men,” wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he “would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self.”212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that “my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“Notwithstanding our boastful assertions to the world, for nearly a century, that our government was based on the consent of the people, it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed. - Robert E. Lee”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“Grant was forty-two and Lee fifty-seven, Grant at the peak of health and energy, while Lee feared his weakening body and lagging faculties. Each was defending his notion of home. Grant by now was the most popular man in the Union, arguably more so even than Lincoln. Lee was easily the most important man in the Confederacy, his popularity and influence, had he chosen to use it, far outstripping Davis’s. Unquestionably, they were at this moment the preeminent military figures in America, and arguably the world.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“The mythology serves purposes darker than sentiment, nothing more so than the currently popular, and arrantly nonsensical, assertion that Lee freed his inherited slaves in 1862 before the war was over, while Grant kept his until the Thirteenth Amendment freed them in 1865. The subtext is transparent. If Southerner Lee freed his slaves while Northerner Grant kept his, then secession and the war that followed can hardly have had anything to do with slavery and must instead have been over the tariff or state rights, or some other handy pretext invented to cloak slavery’s pivotal role.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“From the ranks of the Richmond militia across the square, a thin-shouldered infantryman glared at the hooded figure on the scaffold. The militiaman’s eyes were dark with excitement, as if he had quite lost himself in the spectacle. He was Private John Wilkes Booth.”
― Burke Davis, They Called Him Stonewall: A Life of Lieutenant General T. J. Jackson, CSA

“Among the eulogies raised to the departed general, the terse words of his friend Whitelaw Reid seemed to summarize most perceptively the mercurial Sherman: “He never acknowledged an error and never repeated it.”
― Burke Davis, Sherman's March

“His error was in going to Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’s party. At Banks’s party they probably had a little too much liquor. Afterward Grant was riding very, very rapidly; his horse shied when it saw an omnibus driving along the city streets.”
― Edwin C. Bearss, Fields of Honor: Pivotal Battles of the Civil War

“Nathan Bedford Forrest was no Old Testament warrior bent on illustrating God’s wrath through the indiscriminate slaughter of those opposed to him. Nor was he a backwoodsman run amuck in a civilized world, not understanding the rules of warfare or the strictures of human society. He was, both in the simplest and most complex ways, a soldier trying to win an engagement and willing to use nonlethal, as well as lethal, means to do so. His threat of “no quarter” was a device to win a given battle, and when Forrest found that it could achieve, or at least help to achieve, this goal at Murfreesboro, he clearly decided to use it again wherever he considered the method promising.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“For pure patriotism, however, the Gists of South Carolina stood above the rest. Their father had been an ardent patriot during the Revolution, in consequence of which he named his first son Independence Gist. Independence without some sort of restraint being close to anarchy, however, the father tempered his zeal by naming the second son Constitution Gist. But in 1831 when his third son arrived, it was already evident that Independence and Constitution were not enough. The liberties for which he fought still stood endangered by radicals in Washington. Consequently, as an admonition to all, he named this youngest boy States Rights Gist.”
― William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy

“To Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing and his men, the first sign of Hooker’s intention to abandon the Fredericksburg-Falmouth front came in the form of a telegram received at Second Corps headquarters on June 6, which directed that the soldiers of the corps have three days’ rations in their haversacks, and that all wagons be loaded with stores and the trains put in readiness for any order to move. The order, the telegram stated, “may possibly be given to move early tomorrow.”8”
― Kent Masterson Brown, Cushing of Gettysburg: The Story of a Union Artillery Commander