Jubal Early Quotes

Lee made small greetings to the others, saw the sour expression of Jubal Early, Ewell’s division commander,

A rump group of rebel soldiers formed a colony west of Vera Cruz called Carlota, which soon burgeoned into a community of five thousand people. Among southern generals flocking to sanctuary in Mexico were Jubal Early, Edmund Kirby Smith, Sterling Price, J. B. Magruder, and Joseph Shelby as well as governors of three southern states and members of the Confederate cabinet. With Maximilian’s connivance, these refugees began to advertise in southern newspapers that cheap land and labor were plentiful in Mexico.

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.

My friends,” he began with good cheer, “how do you like this way of coming back into the Union?” He went on to explain that he and his fellow soldiers had felt the need of a summer outing, “and thought we would take it at the North.” They might be conquerors, he said—“this part of Pennsylvania is ours today; we’ve got it, we hold it, we can destroy it, or do what we please with it”—but they were also Christian gentlemen and would act accordingly. “You are quite welcome to remain here and to make yourselves entirely at home—so long as you behave yourselves pleasantly and agreeably as you are doing now. Are we not a fine set of fellows?” With his honeyed words he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, only to be interrupted by a querulous, impatient Jubal Early. Old Jube forced his way through the onlookers to confront Extra Billy and snarled, “General Smith, what the devil are you about? Stopping the head of this column in this cursed town!” Not the least taken aback, Extra Billy replied, “Having a little fun, General, which is good for all of us, and at the same time teaching these people something that will be good for them and won’t do us any harm.

No former Confederate did more to shape Lost Cause writings in the late nineteenth century than did Jubal A. Early.

They saw themselves as champions of the Lost Cause--the creed, dominant among Southern whites, that proclaimed that the Confederate cause was righteous and would be vindicated; that Reconstruction was a travesty; and that the racial caste system must persist. [Jubal] Early and his ilk positioned Lee as the symbolic embodiment of the Lost Cause, and they worked relentlessly to immortalize him as a saintly, faultless, marble man/