General Pickett Quotes

Do you even know how to use one?' he asked. "The sharp part at the bad guys?' 'That's the general idea.

What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?" 'Gettysburg,' Quentin said. 'You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

Perhaps none other than George Pickett himself put it best. When asked (certainly ad nauseam) why Pickett’s Charge had failed, Pickett is said to have tersely replied, “I've always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.

On April 1, 1865, in Virginia, Pickett was defending an intersection known as Five Forks, six miles south of the Appomattox River and a good bit closer to the Southside Railroad, the last remaining supply line to Richmond. While thirty thousand Union troops led by Little Phil Sheridan approached from the southeast, Pickett’s twelve thousand, spread two miles wide behind fences and in ditches, braced to meet them. Pickett’s supreme commander, Robert E. Lee, was headquartered ten miles away, near Petersburg. Should Pickett fall to Sheridan, Lee would be forced from Petersburg, the Federals would capture Richmond, and the Confederate cause would be lost. Someone mentioned shad. The spring spawning run was in full penetration of the continent. The fish were in the rivers. Tom Rosser, another Confederate general, had caught some, and on the morning of April 1st ordered them baked for his midday dinner, near Hatcher’s Run, several miles from Five Forks. He invited Pickett and Major General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, to join him. Pickett readily accepted, and rode off from his battle station with Lee. The historian Shelby Foote continues the narrative (“The Civil War,” vol. 3, p. 870): “Neither told any subordinate where he was going or why, perhaps to keep from dividing the succulent fish too many ways; with the result that when the attack exploded—damped from their hearing, as it was, by a heavy stand of pines along Hatcher’s Run—no one knew where to find them. Pickett only made it back to his division after half its members had been shot or captured, a sad last act for a man who gave his name to the most famous charge in a war whose end was hastened by his threehour absence at a shad bake.

Forrest spat, “Bah. We don’t need it. This world doesn’t need another nation of steel and soot. We showed that magic defeats metal. Grant learned that lesson from Vicksburg to Lexington and everywhere in between.” That Johnston could not dispute—not that he would have even if he could. Most of the nation believed the War of Secession was won at Pickett’s Blaze in Pennsylvania. Few in the Confederate heartland from Virginia to Alabama truly appreciated how General Forrest had driven the Union forces back hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the banks of the Ohio River, leaving a string of charred corpses in his wake. But at least in the eyes of the Invisible Knights, Forrest was the true hero of the country.

His rise was meteoric. He started the war in the summer of 1861 as a second lieutenant; by July 3, 1863, just two years later, he was a freshly minted twenty-three-year-old brigadier general at the last, climactic day of the Battle of Gettysburg. As Confederate general George Pickett mounted his famous charge against the Union forces, a lesser-known confrontation occurred on the other side of the battlefield.

placing her because of the way she said “my boys” as the heart and soul of the school, the Woman Who Knew Everybody And Everything. He always felt blessed when he met up with such women because they were generally the key to unlocking the secret doors to an institution.

The din of artillery and musketry was deafening at this time, and I did not hear the words that passed between the two generals. But my eyes were upon Hancock’s striking figure - I thought him the most striking man I ever saw on horseback, and magnificent in the flush and excitement of battle - when he uttered an exclamation and I saw that he was reeling in the saddle. 2