“
For the life of me, I did not understand how he[Atticus] could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.
”
”
Harper Lee
“
Now I am not ordering you to go. If you are successful, you will strike a blow to the confederacy. If you are caught, you will be hanged. If not killed outright. Do you still want to go?" "Yes sir".
”
”
Phillip Urlevich (The Georgia Express: A Tale of the Civil War)
“
If they were determined to steal his train, he was equally determined to get it back
”
”
Phillip Urlevich (The Georgia Express: A Tale of the Civil War)
“
Let us catch those vile fiends, however since we cannot go forward, we will pursue them in reverse.
”
”
Phillip Urlevich (The Georgia Express: A Tale of the Civil War)
“
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)
“
Sir" said Mrs. Meade indignantly. "There are NO deserters in the Confederate army."
"I beg your pardon," said Rhett with mock humility. "I meant those thousands on furlough who FORGOT to rejoin their regiments and those who have been over their wounds for six months but who remain at home, going about their usual business or doing the spring plowing.
”
”
Margaret Mitchell
“
The locomotive appeared as a mammoth apparition that came bearing down on them and seemed to stop just a few feet away.
”
”
Phillip Urlevich (The Georgia Express: A Tale of the Civil War)
“
I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg.
- Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg.
”
”
Michael Shaara (The Killer Angels (The Civil War Trilogy, #2))
“
It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.
”
”
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
“
The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery. Yet when offered the command of the Union Army by Lincoln, Lee wrote, “I wish to live under no other government and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor.” When Virginia chose secession, he regretfully fulfilled his sense of honor to his home and led the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
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)
“
The Confederate Army’s fight against overwhelming odds, is one of the most glorious moments in Anglo-Saxon history.” —Sir Winston Churchill
”
”
Scott Bowden (Last Chance For Victory: Robert E. Lee And The Gettysburg Campaign)
“
I did not understand how he could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.
”
”
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
“
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)
“
For the life of me, I did not understand how he could sit there in cold blood and read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with a Confederate Army relic.
”
”
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird (To Kill a Mockingbird, #1))
“
Bella Swan: Jasper? Are you sure there's nothing I can do to help?
Jasper Hale: Well just your presence alone, your scent, will distract the newborns. Their hunting instinct will take over, and drive 'em crazy.
Bella Swan: Good, I'm glad.
[Jasper nods and begins to walk away]
Bella Swan: .
Bella Swan: Hey,
[Jasper turns around]
Bella Swan: how do you know so much about this?
Jasper Hale: I didn't have quite the same upbringing as my adopted siblings.
[Rolls up sleeves and shows Bella his arms, which have bite marks on them]
Jasper Hale: .
Bella Swan: [Hops off Jeep] Those bites are like mine.
Jasper Hale: Battle scars
[smiles]
Jasper Hale: . All the training the Confederate Army gave me was useless against the newborns, but still, I never lost a fight.
Bella Swan: Hey, this - this happened during the Civil War?
Jasper Hale: I was the youngest major in the Texas Calvary, all without having seen any real battle.
Bella Swan: Until...?
Jasper Hale: Till I met a certain immortal... Maria
”
”
David Slade
“
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)
“
He had bludgeoned the Southern will to resist the military strength of the United States. He had destroyed any realistic hope of ultimate Confederate success, and the people of the South realized that the Confederate armies could not protect them. The
”
”
James Lee McDonough (William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life)
“
IV. THE GENERAL STRIKE
How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.
”
”
W.E.B. Du Bois (Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880)
“
An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Many were like Amy Clarke, who enlisted so she could remain with her husband when he joined the Confederate Army. Amy continued to fight after he was killed, and she was wounded herself and taken prisoner.
”
”
Gail Collins (America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines)
“
Every one I talk to is in favor of putting negroes in the army and that immediately … I think slavery is now gone and what little there is left of it should be rendered as serviceable as possible.” For her part, Mary Chesnut lamented, “If we had only freed the negroes at first and put them in the army—that would have trumped [the Union’s] trick.
”
”
Jay Winik (April 1865: The Month That Saved America)
“
After the war, Fitz Lee served as governor of Virginia and became one of several former Confederate commanders to return to duty in the U.S. Army for the Spanish-American War.
”
”
Eric J. Wittenberg (Protecting the Flank at Gettysburg: The Battles for Brinkerhoff's Ridge and East Cavalry Field, July 2 -3, 1863)
“
Jem,” he said, “are you responsible for this?”
“Yes sir.”
“Why’d you do it?”
Jem said softly, “She said you lawed for niggers and trash.”
“You did this because she said that?”
Jem’s lips moved, but his, “Yes sir,” was inaudible.
“Son, I have no doubt that you’ve been annoyed by your contemporaries about me
lawing for niggers, as you say, but to do something like this to a sick old lady is
inexcusable. I strongly advise you to go down and have a talk with Mrs. Dubose,” said
Atticus. “Come straight home afterward.”
Jem did not move.
“Go on, I said.”
I followed Jem out of the livingroom. “Come back here,” Atticus said to me. I came
back.
Atticus picked up the Mobile Press and sat down in the rocking chair Jem had
vacated. For the life of me, I did not understand how he could sit there in cold blood and
read a newspaper when his only son stood an excellent chance of being murdered with
a Confederate Army relic. Of course Jem antagonized me sometimes until I could kill
him, but when it came down to it he was all I had. Atticus did not seem to realize this, or
if he did he didn’t care.
I hated him for that, but when you are in trouble you become easily tired: soon I was
hiding in his lap and his arms were around me.
“You’re mighty big to be rocked,” he said.
“You don’t care what happens to him,” I said. “You just send him on to get shot at
when all he was doin‘ was standin’ up for you.”
Atticus pushed my head under his chin. “It’s not time to worry yet,” he said.
”
”
Harper Lee
“
Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time. More than 90 percent of white Union soldiers and more than 80 percent of Confederate soldiers were literate, and most of them wrote frequent letters to families and friends... I am convinced that [their letters and diaries] bring us closer to the real thoughts and emotions of those men than any other kind of surviving evidence.
”
”
James M. McPherson (For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War)
“
The copperhead disreputable portion of the press magnified rebel successes, and belittled those of the Union army. It was, with a large following, an auxiliary to the Confederate army. The North would have been much stronger with a hundred thousand of these men in the Confederate ranks and the rest of their kind thoroughly subdued, as the Union sentiment was in the South, than we were as the battle was fought.
”
”
Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes)
“
The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.
”
”
James Webb (Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America)
“
It was from Granny's conversations, year after year, that the meager details of Grandpa's life came to me. When the Civil War broke out, he ran off from his master and groped his way through the Confederate lines to the North. He darkly boasted of having killed "mo'n mah fair share of those damn rebels" while en route to enlist in the Union Army. Militantly resentful of slavery, he joined the Union Army... Mustered out, he returned to the South and, during elections, guarded ballot boxes with his army rifle so that Negroes could vote. But when the Negro had been driven from political power, his spirit had been crushed. He was convinced that the war had not really ended, that it would start again.
”
”
Richard Wright (Black Boy)
“
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)
“
Sherman making a mockery of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s recent assertion, while visiting the Rebel army, that the Yankees would have to retreat from Georgia or starve, and predicting that the retreat would be “more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow.
”
”
James Lee McDonough (William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life)
“
Because of that final sentence, no Confederate soldier, from Lee on down, could ever be prosecuted for treason; in effect, this was a general amnesty. There could never be a proscription list to poison the peace with the spirit of vengeance and hatred. Grant had ruled it out.
”
”
Bruce Catton (Grant Takes Command 1863-1865)
“
His decision to break off, however, left the critical ground between South Mountain and Hagerstown firmly in Confederate hands, meaning that Lee’s army would be able to concentrate there. In this, Kilpatrick inexplicably cost the Army of the Potomac the initiative that it never could regain.
”
”
Eric J. Wittenberg (One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, July 4–14, 1863)
“
In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected their plans. They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropriate term, since the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology, beautiful but terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over the ancient battlefields choosing those who would be slain. In this case, Adolf Hitler was to be slain. Ironically enough, Admiral Canaris, before his fall, had sold the Fuehrer the idea of Valkyrie, dressing it up as a plan for the Home Army to take over the security of Berlin and the other large cities in case of a revolt of the millions of foreign laborers toiling in these centers. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.
”
”
William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
“
There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past.
”
”
Bruce Catton
“
There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past. - Bruce Catton
”
”
Bruce Catton
“
failed to mention that the land upon which Angola is built had once been the plantation of Isaac Franklin, a man whose business, Franklin and Armfield, became one of the largest slave-trading firms in the United States. The plantation produced 3,100 bales of cotton a year, a yield higher than most other plantations in the South. He failed to mention that Samuel Lawrence James, who purchased the plantation from Franklin’s widow, was a former major in the Confederate Army. James agreed to a twenty-one-year lease with the state to purchase access to all of the state’s prisoners as long as he was able to keep all of the profits. James subsequently subcontracted the prisoners to labor camps, where—as Roger had told us—they worked on levees and railroads in horrific conditions. A prisoner under James’s lease had a greater chance of dying than an enslaved person did.
”
”
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
“
Criticism of Davis was neither new nor unusual, for his Confederacy was by no means a monolithic state. Secession had been imposed upon many loyal Unionists in the South, devoted patriots who, though subdued, remained hostile to the Rebel government; Union conventions had been held in the Confederacy during the war, and thousands of Southerners served in Union armies out of conviction that slavery and secession were twin evils. Many more thousands deserted the Confederate army to spend most of the war at home or in hiding. The more numerous poor whites and small farmers, who owned no slaves and worked their own lands, usually despised the few wealthy planters who controlled the slave system and the political apparatus as well. North Carolina’s Governor Zebulon Vance, in his forthright fashion, had put this issue to Jefferson Davis himself in terms that had become a rallying cry: “It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.
”
”
Burke Davis (Burke Davis on the Civil War: The Long Surrender, Sherman's March, To Appomattox, and They Called Him Stonewall)
“
I thought myself better adapted to command in the field; and Mississippi had given me the position which I preferred to any other—the highest rank in her army. It was, therefore, that I afterward said, in an address delivered in the Capitol, before the Legislature of the State, with reference to my election to the Presidency of the Confederacy, that the duty to which I was thus called was temporary, and that I expected soon to be with the Army of Mississippi again.
”
”
Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
“
Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine, who so valiantly defended Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, was in command of the Union troops assembled in formation to observe and accept the stacking of arms. In deference to the officers of Lee’s army, Chamberlain lowered his sword in an officer’s salute as each ranking member of his former enemy passed by. Leading the parade of surrender were the surviving members of the Stonewall Brigade. Appendix
”
”
Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
“
Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. “It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their drums marked Staunton, Va.,” one said. “They wore the grey, with a black and brass helmet. There were several companies of Virginia and Southern troops.”148 Contingents of black veterans were liberally represented among the sixty thousand soldiers, supplemented by eighteen thousand veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic.
”
”
Ron Chernow (Grant)
“
Ironically, one concession Davis did make concerned the explosive question of turning slaves into Confederate soldiers. After dismissing as “too controversial” the entreaty by General Patrick Cleburne that slaves be armed and enlisted to fight for the South, Davis finally embraced the notion very late in the game. The Confederate Congress began debating the issue in the early months of 1865, creating a star-burst of vituperation in Richmond. The bombastic old General How-ell Cobb of Georgia roared, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong!” Davis rebuked him this way: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, ‘Died of a Theory.’ ” In the end, less than a month before Lee’s surrender, the Confederate Congress approved a bill providing for the partial emancipation and enlistment of slaves in the Confederate armies. The lawyer in Cleburne might have found the debate interesting had he lived to see it, which he did not. He was slain leading his division during Hood’s charge on Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864.
”
”
Winston Groom (Vicksburg, 1863)
“
Nashville was a prize. Johnston had left in a hurry, abandoning huge quantities of supplies — half a million pounds of bacon, much bread and flour, and bales of new tents, the latter greatly welcomed by the Federals, who had left their own tents far behind them. The Federals were having their first experience in occupying a Confederate capital, and they found numerous timid citizens who were ready to turn their coats and cuddle up to the invaders: dignified gentlemen who called on generals to explain that they personally had always been Union men, to identify leading Rebels in the community, to tell where Confederate supplies had been hidden, and in general to make themselves useful.
”
”
Bruce Catton (This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War)
“
Robert E. Lee had done his duty and, however heartbroken, was prepared to do his duty still. Having devoted himself to winning the war, until the bitter end, he was now beginning the transition to an equally fervent commitment, reuniting the two halves of the divided country. As he slowly rode back to his camp, some fifteen minutes away, advance soldiers began to shout, “General, are we surrendered?” Lee struggled for words to express his sense of despair and came up short; he was speechless. But soon, two solid walls of men began to line the road, and when he came into view, they began to cheer wildly. At the sound and the sight, tears started to roll in the general’s eyes, and his men, too, began to weep.
”
”
Jay Winik (April 1865: The Month That Saved America)
“
In the morning we shed our blue sheep’s clothing. Our border shirts came out of satchels and onto our backs. We preferred this means of dress for it was more flatout and honest. The shirts were large with pistol pockets, and usually colored red or dun. Many had been embroidered with ornate stitching by loving women some were blessed enough to have. Mine was plain, but well broken in. I can think of no more chilling a sight than that of myself all astride my big bay horse with six or eight pistols dangling from my saddle, my rebel locks aloft on the breeze and a whoopish yell on my lips. When my awful costume was multiplied by that of my comrades, we stopped feint hearts just by our mode of dread stylishness.
”
”
Daniel Woodrell (Woe to Live On)
“
There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.
”
”
Adam Serwer (The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America)
“
Isn't this grand? Here I am, a nobody from a nowhere town in North Carolina, and now I've seen Richmond and Washington City both. Who'd've figured I'd travel so far? Must be close to two hundred miles down to Rivington."
Caudell nodded. The army had expanded his life. Before the war, outside of a couple of trips to Raleigh, he'd spent his whole life inside Nash County. Now he'd been in several different states and even though recalling it still came hard sometimes-a for eign country: the United States.
Whether in a foreign country or not, Washington was still the source of traditions he held dear, as London once might have been to an early Carolina colonist. ...The ordinary folk of Washington City did better at taking their occupiers in stride. Their principal complaint against the rebels was that they had too little money, and that in Confederate currency. Lee had issued an order that made the locals take Southern money in exchange for goods and services, but he could not
”
”
Harry Turtledove (The Guns of the South)
“
The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
“
Before they came in Lee had a couple of adventures. He first clashed with a sergeant of a Mississippi regiment who wandered over the wet field. Lee called out sharply: "What are you doing here, sir, away from your command?"
"That's none of your business," the ragged soldier said.
"You are a straggler, sire, and deserve the severest punishment."
The sergeant shouted in rage, "It is a lie, sir. I only left my regiment a few minutes ago to hunt me a pair of shoes. I went through all the fight yesterday, and that's more than you can say; for where were you yesterday when General Stuart wanted your cavalry to charge the Yankees after we put 'em to running? You were lying back in the pine thickets and couldn't be found; but today, when there's no danger, you come out and charge other men with straggling."
Lee laughed and rode off. Behind him an officer baited the sergeant, who thought he had been talking with a "cowardly Virginia cavalryman".
"No, sir, that was General Lee."
"Ho-o-what? General Lee, you say?"
"Yes."
"Scissors to grind, I'm a goner." The sergeant tore out of sight along the muddy road.
”
”
Burke Davis (Gray Fox: Robert E. Lee and the Civil War (Classics of War))
“
The profilers’ plan to coax me out of the woods resembled a comedy skit. During their search of my Cane Creek trailer, the feds had found dozens of books on the Civil War. And interviews with my friends confirmed that I was a bona fide Civil War buff. The profilers looked at all this Civil War “stimuli” and concluded that my hiding in the mountains was a form of role-playing. Starring in my own Civil War fantasy, I was a lone rebel fighting for the Lost Cause, and the task force was a Yankee army out to capture me. To talk On August 16, the task force pulled out of the woods while Bo and his rebels went in. They had to look the part, so the FBI profilers dressed them in white hats with the word “REBEL” stenciled in red letters across the front; and around their neck each rebel wore a Confederate flag bandanna.me into surrendering, they needed some of my rebel comrades to convince me that
the war was over and it was time to lay down my arms. Colonel Gritz and his crew were assigned the role of my rebel comrades. They were there to “rescue” me from the Yankee horde.
Bo’s band of rebels pitched camp down in Tusquitee, north of the town of Hayesville. Beginning at Bob Allison Campground – the place where I’d abandoned Nordmann’s truck – they worked their way west into the Tusquitee Mountains. They walked the trails, blowing whistles and yelling “Eric, we’re here with Bo Gritz to save you.” They searched for a week.
I lost it when I heard on the radio that the profilers had dressed Gritz’s clowns in “REBEL” hats and Confederate flag bandannas. I laughed so hard I think I broke a rib.
”
”
Eric Rudolph (Between the Lines of Drift: The Memoirs of a Militant)
“
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)
“
Just out of interest, not for the piece, what was the story of the little dark picture?” Theodore paused. “Well, it was the night before an engagement. In Virginia. Our Union boys were in their trenches, and the Confederates in theirs, not more than a couple of stone’s throw away. It was quite silent. The moonlight, as you saw, was falling on the scene. There must’ve been all ages, I suppose, between those trenches. Men well into middle years. And plenty who were little more than boys. There were women in the camp, too, of course. Wives, and others. “I supposed they would soon fall asleep. But then, over in the Confederate trenches, some fellow started singing ‘Dixie.’ And soon they were all joining in, right along the line. So they sang ‘Dixie’ at us for a while, then stopped. “Well, sure enough, our boys weren’t going to let it go at that. So a group of ’em started up ‘John Brown’s Body.’ And in no time the whole of our trenches were giving them that. Fine voices too, I may say. “And when they’d done, there was another silence. Then over in the Confederate trench, we heard a single voice. A young fellow by the sound of it. And he started singing a psalm. The twenty-third psalm it was. I’ll never forget that. “As you know, in the South, with the shape-note singing, every congregation is well practiced in the singing of psalms. So again, all along the line, they joined in. Kind of soft. Sweet and low. And maybe it was the moonlight, but I have to say it was the most beautiful sound I ever heard. “But I’d forgotten that many of our boys were accustomed to singing the psalms too. When you consider the profanities you hear spoken every day in camp, you might forget that; but it is so. And to my surprise, our boys began to sing with them. And in a short while, all along the lines, those two armies sang together, free for a moment of their circumstances, as if they were a single congregation of brothers in the moonlight. And then they sang another psalm, and then the twenty-third again. And after that, there was silence, for the rest of the night. “During which time, I took that photograph. “The next morning there was a battle. And before noon, Mr. Slim, I regret to say, there was scarcely a man from either of those trenches left. They had killed each other. Dead, sir, almost every one.” And, caught unawares, Theodore Keller suddenly stopped speaking, and was not able to continue for a minute or two.
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Edward Rutherfurd (New York)
“
Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at Dover, the other at Barbara Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy's called Wart—long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might—to have ended it— to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent.
Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength with strength—in his battles against the Gaelic confederation—only to find that two wrongs did not make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil —to put down the individual might of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done so—until, in the course of time, the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.
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T.H. White (The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-5))
“
Without even being aware that he was abandoning his original strategy, Grant developed a new plan for simultaneous massive attacks on the Confederate heartland by all the Union armies.
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David Herbert Donald (Lincoln)
“
Some of those encounters appear in the multivolume War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (commonly known as the Official Records), and many others appear in the Freedom series of document collections edited by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project.
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Chandra Manning (Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War)
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was impossible not to be humbled and moved by the tradition those men represented, the service and sacrifice that had helped forge a nation, defeat fascism, and halt the march of totalitarianism. Just as it was necessary to recall that Lee had led a Confederate Army intent on preserving slavery and Grant had overseen the slaughter of Indian tribes; that MacArthur had defied Truman’s orders in Korea to disastrous effect and Westmoreland had helped orchestrate an escalation in Vietnam that would scar a generation. Glory and tragedy, courage and stupidity—one set of truths didn’t negate the other. For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
“
Of the 52 Confederate generals who had crossed the Potomac in the past three weeks, no less than 17 — barely under one third — had become casualties in the past three days. Five were killed outright or mortally wounded... When the lost was lengthened by 18 colonels either killed or captured, many of them officers of high promise, slated for early promotion, it was obvious that the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered a loss in leadership from which it might never recover. A British observer was of this opinion. He lauded the offensive prowess of Lee's soldiers, who had marched out as proudly as if on parade in their eagerness to come to grips with their opponents on the ridge across the way; "But they will never do it again," he predicted. And he told why. He had been with the army since Fredericksburg, ticking off the illustrious dead from Stonewall Jackson down, and now on the heels of Gettysburg he asked a rhetorical question of his Confederate friends: "Don't you see your system feeds upon itself? You cannot fill the places of these men. Your troops do wonders, but every time at a cost you cannot afford." (pp. 577-578).
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Shelby Foote (The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian)
“
Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day?
The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865.
When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals.
The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles.
But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork.
As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck.
The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies.
According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year.
Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune.
Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage.
Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate.
You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup.
Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year.
Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth.
So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.
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James Hilton-Cowboy
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In making soldiers...we first teach men how to stand straight and to look right and left, then to march, etc., and, finally, by gradual discipline, they are brought to move with the precision of machinery.' So, the government, he [Longstreet] concluded, ought to accomplish the great end of Reconstruction 'by gradual steps.' -- from Interview with the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1874.
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Elizabeth Varon (Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South)
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...both sides, in the civil war, committed mistake when they put engineer officers at the head of large armies.... -- JAMES LONGSTREET (referring to George McClellan and Robert E. Lee), Interview with the Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1871.
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Elizabeth Varon (Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South)
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...the power of battle is in generalship more than in the number of soldiers. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (1876)
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Elizabeth Varon (Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South)
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One third of free colored families in New Orleans owned slaves and 3,000 “free persons of color” joined the Confederate army during the Civil War. Charleston, another exception, had many slave-owning “free persons of color” from the British West Indies and Santo Domingo. (5 p.161) By
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Dean Kalahar (The Best of Thomas Sowell)
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And in this connection I’d like to evoke W. E. B. Du Bois and chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction, which defined the consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation as a general strike. He uses the vocabulary of the labor movement. And as a matter of fact, chapter 4, “The General Strike,” is described in the following manner: “How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the Black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.
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Angela Y. Davis (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement)
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Edwin Stanton made a point of shutting off inquiry into the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren affair. At war’s end he called on Francis Lieber, keeper of the captured Confederate archives, for the papers found on Dahlgren’s body. On December 1, 1865, these papers were delivered to Stanton at the War Department . . . and never seen again.
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Stephen W. Sears (Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac)
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when her master’s son returned and ordered the slaves to destroy the cotton lest it fall into the hands of the Union Army, they refused to cooperate. “Why for we burn de cotton?” they asked. “Where we get money then for buy clo’ and shoes and salt?” Rather than burn the cotton, the slaves took turns guarding it, “the women keeping watch and the men ready to defend it when the watchers gave the alarm.” In some instances, however, slaves who resisted removal were shot down, even burned to death in the cotton houses. On Edisto Island, where a Confederate raiding party had tried to remove some blacks, “the women fought so violently when they were taking off the men,” a white Charlestonian wrote, “that they were obliged to shoot some of them.”18
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Leon F. Litwack (Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery)
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The Makhnovist movement rose up as a result of the Brest-Litovsk agreement in which the Bolsheviks ceded Ukraine to Austrian and German Imperialism. But like the rest of the old Russian empire Ukraine was in the throes of a social revolution as the peasantry was seizing the land. The Ukrainian Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) saw in this situation an opportunity to build under anarchist leadership a military force that might carry forward the revolution and expel the foreign imperialists. And that is precisely what they did before they were crushed by the Bolshevik Red Army.
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Christopher Day (The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project (Kasama Essays for Discussion))
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For a State or union of States to attack with military force another State, is to make war. By the Constitution, the power to make war is given solely to Congress. "Congress shall have power to declare war," says the Constitution. 171 And, again, "to raise and support armies." 172 Thus, under a perverted use of language, the Executive at Washington did that which he undeniably had no power to do, under a faithful observance of the Constitution
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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General (then Colonel) Early, commanding a brigade, informed me of some wounded who required attention; one, Colonel Gardner, was, he said, at a house not far from where we were. I rode to see him, found him in severe pain, and from the twitching, visible and frequent, seemed to be threatened with tetanus. A man sat beside him whose uniform was that of the enemy; but he was gentle, and appeared to be solicitously attentive. He said that he had no morphine, and did not know where to get any. I found in a short time a surgeon who went with me to Colonel Gardner, having the articles necessary in the case. Before leaving Colonel Gardner, he told me that the man who was attending to him might, without hindrance, have retreated with his comrades, but had kindly remained with him, and he therefore asked my protection for the man. I took the name and the State of the supposed good Samaritan, and at army headquarters directed that he should not be treated as a prisoner. The sequel will be told hereafter.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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To Brigadier-General G. T. Beauregard, "Commanding Provisional Army, C. S. A." "Montgomery, April 11th. "General Beauregard, Charleston. "We do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter, if Major Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that, in the mean time, he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter. You are thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable. (Signed) "L. P. Walker, Secretary of War.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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The levy of so large an army could only mean war; but the power to declare war did not reside in the President—it was delegated to the Congress only.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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To be prepared for self-defense, I called Congress together at Montgomery on April 29th, and, in the message of that date, thus spoke of the proclamation of the President of the United States: "Apparently contradictory as are the terms of this singular document, one point is unmistakably evident. The President of the United States calls for an army of seventy-five thousand men, whose first service is to be the capture of our forts. It is a plain declaration of war, which I am not at liberty to disregard, because of my knowledge that, under the Constitution of the United States, the President is usurping a power granted exclusively to Congress.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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Much of our success was due to the much-abused institution of African servitude, for it enabled the white men to go into the army, and leave the cultivation of their fields and the care of their flocks, as well as of their wives and children, to those who, in the language of the Constitution, were "held to service or labor.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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On the same day (March 6, 1861) was enacted the law for the establishment and organization of the Army of the Confederate States of America, this being in contradistinction to the provisional army, which was to be composed of troops tendered by the States, as in the first act, and volunteers received, as in the second act, to constitute a provisional army.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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It is a noteworthy fact that the three highest officers in rank, and whose fame stands unchallenged either for efficiency or zeal, were all so indifferent to any question of personal interest, that they had received their appointment before they were aware it was to be conferred. Each brought from the Army of the United States an enviable reputation, such as would have secured to him, had he chosen to remain in it, after the war commenced, any position his ambition could have coveted.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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These officers were—first, Samuel Cooper, a native of New York, a graduate of the United States Military Academy in 1815, and who served continuously in the army until March 7, 1861, with such distinction as secured to him the appointment of Adjutant-General of the United States Army. Second, Albert Sidney Johnston, a native of Kentucky, a graduate of the United States Military Academy in 1826, served conspicuously in the army until 1834, then served in the army of the Republic of Texas, and then in the United States Volunteers in the war with Mexico. Subsequently he reëntered the United States Army, and for meritorious conduct attained the rank of brevet brigadier-general. After the secession of Texas, his adopted State, he resigned his commission in the United States Army, May 3, 1861, and traveled by land from California to Richmond to offer his services to the Confederacy. Third, Robert E. Lee, a native of Virginia, a graduate of the United States Military Academy in 1829,
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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The President of the United States, in his message of July 4, 1861, to the Federal Congress convened in extra session, said: "It is thus seen that the assault upon and reduction of Fort Sumter was in no sense a matter of self-defense on the part of the assailants. They well knew that the garrison in the fort could by no possibility commit aggression upon them. They knew—they were expressly notified—that the giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison was all which would on that occasion be attempted, unless themselves, by resisting so much, should provoke more." Mr. Lincoln well knew that, if the brave men of the garrison were hungry, they had only him and his trusted advisers to thank for it. They had been kept for months in a place where they ought not to have been, contrary to the judgment of the General-in-Chief of his army, contrary to the counsels of the wisest statesmen in his confidence, and the protests of the commander of the garrison.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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Two days had elapsed between the surrender of Fort Sumter and the proclamation of President Lincoln calling for seventy-five thousand militia as before stated. Two other days elapsed, and Virginia passed her ordinance of secession, and two days thereafter the citizens of Baltimore resisted the passage of troops through that city on their way to make war upon the Southern States. Thus rapidly did the current of events bear us onward from peace to the desolating war which was soon to ensue. The manly effort of the unorganized, unarmed citizens of Baltimore to resist the progress of armies for the invasion of her Southern sisters, was worthy of the fair fame of Maryland; becoming the descendants of the men who so gallantly fought for the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of the States.
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
“
such a moment, and in a scene right out of Delacroix, it might have seemed to William as though everyone were signing up and marching off, but it was not so. Of the 776,829 names called up in the three national drafts of 1863 and 1864, only 46,347 men were held for military service, or about one out of sixteen. At Harvard the percentage was higher. During the war, 1,311 Harvard men enlisted in the Union army and navy; they were decimated: 138, or 10.5 percent, were killed or died in the war. It was far worse for the 250 Harvard men who enlisted in the Confederate army and navy. Of them 64, or an appalling 25 percent, died or were killed in the war. Even
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Robert D. Richardson Jr. (William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism)
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For its part, the retreating Confederate army killed and enslaved free black men, women, and children, carrying its captives back south. It was literally an army of enslavement.
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Manisha Sinha (The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920)
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Probably the biggest laugh of all that rainy night was at the expense of Private T.C. Green of the Second Regiment. Before the battle Green had been outspoken in the number of Federals he intended killing, and at day's end went through the camp recounting how many of the enemy he had shot before something went wrong with his gun. When a messmate examined the weapon, he found that the gun had not been fired at all, but was full of unexploded charges. In his excitement Green had gone through the motions of loading and firing, but had omitted some essentials, such as changing caps and pulling the trigger, and hence had done absolutely no harm to the enemy.
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James I. Robertson Jr. (The Stonewall Brigade)
“
The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).
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Evgeny Dobrenko (The White Guard)
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Gettysburg is still considered the most famous battle of the war. Why? At Gettysburg, the tide turned. Up until then, the South had been winning. After Gettysburg, the Confederates were no longer sure their army was unbeatable. And after two years of losing battles, the Northern forces gained pride and confidence. They believed the war was theirs to win. And they were right. Gettysburg was a prosperous market town of 2,400 people. A network of ten roads extended out from town like the spokes of a wheel. Until July 1863, Gettysburg was not well known like other cities in Pennsylvania such as Philadelphia or Harrisburg.
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Jim O'Connor (What Was the Battle of Gettysburg? (What Was?))
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The struggle of the Union and Confederate economies to supply and support their armies thus became a reflection of the prewar antagonism between liberal democracy and slavery. The free-labor ideology of the Republican Party, with its confidence that a “harmony of interests” naturally existed between capital and labor, found convenient expression in Stanton’s decision to step back from drastic economic interventions and allow Northern capitalism to lay its own golden eggs for the war effort. The Confederacy, insensibly obeying the logic of an authoritarian labor system, conscripted, confiscated, and imposed state-ordered controls. And within that logic lay many of the seeds of the Confederacy’s destruction.
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Allen C. Guelzo (Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction)
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Confederacy. Mountainous Rabun County, Georgia, was “almost a unit against secession,” and secret Union societies flourished in the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas, from which 8,000 men eventually joined the federal army.25 Discontent developed more slowly outside the mountains, with their cohesive communities of intense local loyalties, where slaves comprised only a tiny fraction of the population. It was not simply devotion to the Union, but the impact of the war and the consequences of Confederate policies, that awakened peace sentiment and social conflict. In
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Eric Foner (Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877)
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By 1864 Wall Streeters had spies in the Confederate high command and could learn southern battle plans before colonels in the Army of Virginia did.
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Mike Wallace (Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898)
“
The fact remains that women and children were left vulnerable to sickness and disease, manipulative slaveholders, and even apathetic Union officers during the Civil War. While historians interpreted the enlistment of black soldiers as an illustration of the patriotic commitment of former slaves to take on the Confederate enemy and to dismantle the institution of slavery, this depiction overlooks the disastrous and fatal effects on the women and children left behind.36 The enlistment of black men in the Union army as soldiers and laborers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for instance, left more than 10,000 women and children without the means to survive.
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Jim Downs (Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction)
“
Thus, the day ended in a tactical stalemate, with the Union suffering nearly 12,500 casualties (including over 2,000 dead) and the Confederates suffering over 10,000 casualties (including over 1,500 dead). Nearly 1/4th of the Army of the Potomac had been injured, captured or killed, and the same could be said for nearly 1/3rd of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. It was the deadliest and bloodiest day in American history. On
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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The Union men at Front Royal were the 1st Maryland. Jackson also had a regiment of 1st Maryland (Confederate). Maryland was a border state, and like all border states, it had regiments in both armies. This was the case with the Southern states as well. When the war broke out, loyalists from all across the South formed their own Union regiments. These were often quickly crushed, or had to flee to the North and fight far from their home territories.
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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Before leaving, Jackson assembled his brigade to bid them this farewell: “Officers and Soldiers of the First Brigade: I am not here to make a speech, but simply to say farewell. I first met you at Harper’s Ferry, in the commencement of this war, and I cannot take leave of you without giving expression to my admiration for your conduct from that day to this, whether on the march, the bivouac, the tented field, or the bloody plains of Manassas, when you gained the well deserved reputation of having decided the fate of that battle. “Throughout the broad extent of country over which you have marched, by your respect for the rights and property of citizens you have shown that you were soldiers, not only to defend, but able and willing to both defend and protect. You have already gained a brilliant and deservedly high reputation throughout the army and the whole Confederacy, and I trust in the future, by your own deeds on the field, and by the assistance of the same kind Providence who has heretofore favored our cause, you will gain more victories, and add additional luster to the reputation you now enjoy. “You have already gained a proud position in the future history of this, our second war of independence. I shall look with great anxiety to your future movements, and I trust that whenever I shall hear of the 1st Brigade on the field of battle it will be of still nobler deeds achieved and a higher reputation won. “In the Army of the Shenandoah you were the First Brigade, in the Army of the Potomac you were the First Brigade, in the 2d Corps of this army you are the First Brigade; you are First Brigade in the affections of your general, and I hope by your future deeds and bearing you will be handed down to posterity as the First Brigade in this, our second war of independence. Farewell!”[21] As it turned out, this moving speech was premature in its deliverance, because just one month later, after witnessing the deplorable troops over who he was to command, Jackson called for his old brigade to reinforce him in the Valley. An
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
“
With the Confederate army divided and Pope’s army between them, Pope was now positioned to prevent them from linking up by blocking the Thoroughfare Gap. Ultimately he opted not to, later claiming that when he saw smoke from the flames shooting near Manassas, he figured he had Jackson in trouble and could annihilate the Confederates before Longstreet reunited with them. In fact, those flames were coming from his own supplies, after Jackson’s men began torching what they couldn’t carry.
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
“
Jackson, on the other hand, would be reinforced with several regiments, bringing his total force to 18,500. Robert E. Lee wrote to tell him, “Your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in this army as well as in the country.” He added that the reinforcements were so he could crush the Union armies in the Shenandoah, unaware at this point they were in the process of being recalled. Jackson was to leave the Valley and support the Confederate center above Richmond by cutting Union communications. Jackson
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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After the Battle of Winchester, Jackson allowed his men two days of rest and prayer, while his quartermasters tallied the spoils left behind by the Yankees. Although Jackson drove his men hard, he could sense they were at their limit; their failure to pursue Banks’ broken army was proof of it. While he was eager to get on with the fight, he needed men capable of fighting. He
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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For reasons that are still unclear, Union troops in camp at Frederick came across a copy of Special Order 191, wrapped up among three cigars. The order contained Lee’s entire marching plans for Maryland, making it clear that the Army of Northern Virginia had been divided into multiple parts, which, if faced by overpowering strength, could be entirely defeated in detail and bagged separately before they could regather into one fighting force. The “Lost Order” quickly made its way to General McClellan, who took several hours to debate whether or not it was intentional misinformation or actually real. McClellan is usually faulted for not acting quickly enough on these orders,
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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Still wanting to go to Richmond, the young woman, having just turned 18 years old, convinced a Union officer whom she called “Lieutenant H.” to escort her and her cousin Alice south across enemy lines. They stopped to rest in Winchester, where a Confederate sympathizer approached Boyd with two packages of letters and asked her, “Miss Boyd, will you take these letters and send them through the lines to the Confederate army? This package is of great importance: the other is trifling in comparison. This also, is a very important paper: try to send it carefully and safely to Jackson, or some other responsible Confederate officer. Do you understand?" Boyd agreed and hid the important group of papers in her maid’s clothing, keeping the letters in a basket she herself was carrying. Then, for reasons known only to herself, she wrote "Kindness of Lieutenant H." on the back of the package. She kept the most important note on her person but persuaded the hapless lieutenant to carry a small folded paper,
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Charles River Editors (Belle Boyd: The Controversial Life and Legacy of the Civil War’s Most Famous Spy)
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This was crazy. Celeste had merely said her relatives would love to have her stay with them, they had plenty of room. She hadn’t said that they could have housed a large portion of the Confederate army. Well, she’d stay one night and if things didn’t work out, she’d seen an inn in the little town they’d just driven through. It at least had a coat of paint.
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Shelley Noble (Stargazey Point)
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Zac was twenty-three when he died. He was a Captain in the Confederate army until he was shot by a Union soldier. Captain Zachary Degaud. That was one hundred and forty seven years ago, in 1865. It was cold comfort that the civil war had ended shortly thereafter. Actually, it was like a punch in the face. Today was his one hundred and seventieth birthday and he sat at the bar, in a dive posing as a respectable restaurant in the small southern town of Ashburton, Louisiana. The hole in the swamp where he was born a puny human being. But, the sun was shining, the liquor flowing and he was undead. Another binge drinking vampire, with an unremarkable story in the midst of the murky swampland of the South. Edward, Louis, Armand, Lestat. If these vampires existed, he hadn't met them. “Happy birthday, brother.” A man slapped him on the shoulder and sat on the neighboring
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Nicole R. Taylor (The Witch Hunter (Witch Hunter Saga #1))
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Quite often, people inaccurately comment about the villains of the South and the heroes of the North. Such statements cause bitter debates. Thus, it is important to recognize the good and the bad from both the Confederate and Union armies. The fact is, the war stripped many men of their inhibitions and their immoral behaviors detrimentally affected all fellow Americans.
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Trevor P. Wardlaw (Sires and Sons: The Story of Hubbard's Regiment)
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Captain Joseph Frye
One of the nicest parks in present day downtown Tampa, Florida, is the Cotanchobee Fort Brooke Park. The 5-acre park, which lies between the Tampa Bay Times Forum (Amalie Arena) and the mouth of the Hillsborough River at the Garrison Channel, is used for many weddings and special events such as the dragon boat races and the duck race. Few people give thought to the historic significance of the location, or to Captain Joseph Frye, considered Tampa’s first native son, who was born there on June 14, 1826.
Going to sea was a tradition in the Frye family, starting with his paternal great-grandfather Samuel Frye from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, who was the master of the sloop Humbird. As a young man, Joseph attended the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the second class in 1847. Starting as an Ensign, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy until the Civil War, at which time he resigned and took a commission as a Lieutenant in the Confederate Navy.
The Ten Years’ War, also known as “the Great War,” which started in 1868 became the first of three wars of Cuban Independence. In October 1873, following the defeat of the Confederacy and five years into the Cuban revolution, Frye became Captain of a side-wheeler, the S/S Virginius. His mission was to take guns and ammunition, as well as approximately 300 Cuban rebels to Cuba, with the intent of fighting the Spanish army for Cuban Independence. Unfortunately, the mission failed when the ship was intercepted by the Spanish warship Tornado.
Captain Frye and his crew were taken to Santiago de Cuba and given a hasty trial and before a British warship Commander, hearing of the incident, could intervene, they were sentenced to death. After thanking the members of his crew for their service, Captain Frye and fifty-three members of his crew were put to death by firing squad, and were then decapitated and trampled upon by the Spanish soldiers. However, the British Commander Sir Lambton Lorraine of HMS Niobe did manage to save the lives of a few of the remaining crewmembers and rebels.
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Hank Bracker
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After the battle ended and the Union army was in rapid retreat, Beauregard stated sardonically that had Richmond dispatched adequate supplies to the Confederate armies, he would have been able to pursue the Union army all the way to Washington, implying that Davis had short-changed his troops and cost the Confederates an even greater victory. In his official report, which made its way into the newspapers, Beauregard suggested that Davis had prevented the pursuit and destruction of McDowell's army, as well as the potential capture of Washington D.C. itself. This only added to the animosity Davis already felt toward the celebrity-seeking general, and it would eventually lead to Beauregard being sidelined during the middle of the war.
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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Civil War generals began the war employing tactics from the Napoleonic Era, which saw Napoleon dominate the European continent and win crushing victories against large armies. However, the weapons available in 1861 were far more accurate than they had been 50 years earlier. In particular, new rifled barrels created common infantry weapons with deadly accuracy of up to 100 yards, at a time when generals were still leading massed infantry charges with fixed bayonets and attempting to march their men close enough to engage in hand-to-hand combat.
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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Jackson, since the inception of the brigade, stressed the importance of using the bayonet in battle as the majority of the C.S.A. Army had very short-ranged and grossly inaccurate muskets and balls, while the Union Army had the luxury of rifled bullets and gun barrels. Because of this, the defensive army, primarily the Confederates, had to hold fire until the enemy was close enough to be affected by the short-range muskets. This left the defenders in a safer position as the attackers were usually marching across an open field in an attempt to advance on the defenders.
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)
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As the Confederates were preparing, a Union army called the Army of Northeastern Virginia (not to be confused with Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia) was being assembled under the command of 42 year old Irvin McDowell, who was promoted to brigadier general in the regular army on May 14, 1861, despite the fact he had never commanded soldiers in battle. McDowell got the spot as a result of politics, thanks to the influence of his friend and mentor Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary.
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Charles River Editors (The Stonewall Brigade: The History of the Most Famous Confederate Combat Unit of the Civil War)