Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Gone With the Wind 1939 - Andrew Jackson - Nathan Bedford Forrest - William Tecumseh Sherman - Robert E Lee - Shelby Foote - Ken Burns TV - Jefferson Davis - Stonewall Jackson - Earl Russell - Lord Palmerston - Abraham Lincoln - Phillip Shaw Pauadan - Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain - Ned Spencer - Barbara Fields - Newspaper article - The London Times - Mary Chesnut - Walt Whitman - Elisha Hunt Rhodes - Eric Foner - William Gladstone - Frederick Douglass - Horace Green - Stephen B Oates - George McClellan - Barnard Elliott Bee - George Templeton Strong - Henry Jarvis Raymond - Ethel Lynn Beers - Private Frank Wilkerson - Oliver Wendell Holmes - Harry Hammond - Mary Lincoln - Washington Roebling - Stephen Foster - Herman Melville - Joseph McDill - Jennie McCreary - Ulysses S Grant - Joseph E Brown - Nell Irvin Painter - Lieutenant Frank Haskell - Lincoln @ Gettysburg - Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner? TV - Ken Burns’ The Civil War TV - Ric Burns’ Death and the Civil War TV - America: The Story of the US TV - Michael Portillo TV - Blood and Glory: The Civil War in Colour TV - Ancient Aliens TV - Unsolved History: Gettysburg: Pickett’s Charge TV - History’s Ultimate Spies TV - In Search of History: The Civil War Draft Riots TV - Lucy Worsley TV - Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War TV -
Eleven southern states formed the Confederacy ... It was the new medium of photography that produced the most compelling images of the Civil War. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America 1/3, BBC 2011
There isn’t going to be any war. Gone with the Wind 1939 starring Clark Gable & Vivien Leigh & Leslie Howard & Olivia de Haviland & Thomas Mitchell & Barbara Mitchell & Evelyn Keyes & Ann Rutherford & George Reeves & Fred Crane & Hattie McDaniel & Alicia Rhett et al, director Victor Fleming, Scarlett
The war makes the most peculiar widows. ibid. Rhett to Scarlett
I feel in the depths of my soul that it is the highest, most sacred, and most irreversible part of my obligation to preserve the union of these states, although it may cost me my life. Andrew Jackson
War means fighting, and fighting means killing. Nathan Bedford Forrest
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell. William Tecumseh Sherman
I intend to make Georgia howl. William Tecumseh Sherman
You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it ... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth – right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. William Tecumseh Sherman, to Professor David F Boyd, cited Shelby Foote, The Civil War
If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place. I know thousands and millions of good people who at simple notice would come to North Alabama and accept the elegant houses and plantations there ... Three years ago by a little reflection and patience they could have had a hundred years of peace and prosperity, but they preferred war; very well. Last year they could have saved their slaves, but now it is too late.
... A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence. William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to Major R M Sawyer 31st January 1864
I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting – its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. William Tecumseh Sherman, letter May 1865
We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war. William Tecumseh Sherman
My aim was to whip the rebels. To humble their pride, to follow them to the innermost recesses and to make them fear and dread us. War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it’ll be over. William Tecumseh Sherman
It is enough to make the whole world start at the awful amount of death and destruction that now stalks abroad. I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair. A kind of morning dash. And it may be well that we become hardened. The worst of the war is not yet begun. William Tecumseh Sherman
I think I understand the purpose of the South properly, and that the best way to deal with them is to meet them fair and square on any issue. We must fight them. Cut into them, not talk to them, and pursue till they cry, Enough! War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want. William Tecumseh Sherman
I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of. And I am willing to sacrifice everything but honour for its preservation. Robert E Lee
It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it. Robert E Lee
I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them. Robert E Lee
The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things ... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. Shelby Foote, The Civil War narrative
They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them ‘the man who freed the slaves’. He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic – which he was – but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not. ibid. vol I
Strategically the South would fight a defensive war, and to her accordingly would proceed all the advantages of the defensive: advantages which had been increasing in ratio to the improvements in modern weapons. A study of the map would show additional difficulties for the North, particularly in the theater lying between the two capitals, where the rivers ran east and west across the line of march, presenting a series of obstacles to the invader. In the West it would be otherwise ... Against this stern demand, southern soldiers would fight in defense of their homes, with all the fervour and desperation accompanying such a position. ibid.
Whatever truth there might once have been in the Confederate claim that Southerners made better soldiers, or anyhow started from a better scratch because they came directly from life in the open and were familiar with the use of firearms, applied no longer. After six months of army drill, a factory hand was indistinguishable from a farmer. Individually, the Northerners knew, they were at least as tough as any men the South could bring against them, and probably as a whole they were better drilled – except of course the cavalry, since admittedly it took longer to learn to fork a horse in style. McClellan’s men were aware of the changes he had wrought and they were proud of them. ibid.
In the Battle of Shiloh, Union losses were 1754 killed, 8408 wounded, 2885 captured: total, 13047. Confederate losses were 1723 killed, 8012 wounded, 959 missing: total, 10694. Of the 100,000 soldiers engaged in this first great bloody conflict of the war, approximately one out of every four who had gone in battle had been killed, wounded or captured. ibid.
Disaster (for the Confederacy) came in various forms this spring, and it moved to various tempos. In the West it came like fireworks, looming after a noisy rush and casting a lurid glow. Whole states, whole armies fell at once or had large segments broken off by the treat of the invader. Kentucky and Missouri, most of Tennessee, much of Arkansas, North Alabama and North Mississippi were lost in rapid succession, along with 30,000 fighting men, dead or in northern prison camps, and finally New Orleans, Memphis, and the fleets that had been built to hold the river that ran between them. That was how it reached the West. ibid.
As a professional soldier, in touch with every department of the army he commanded, Davis not only recognized the odds his country faced in its struggle for independence; he saw that they were lengthening with every passing month as the North’s tremendous potential was converted into actuality. In that sense, not only was time against him; even success was against him, for each northern reverse brought on a quickening of the tempo of conversion. And yet, paradoxically, it was time for which he was fighting. Time alone could bring into being, in the North, the discouragement which was the South’s chief hope for victory if foreign intervention failed to materialize, as now seemed likely. ibid.
There would be other Shilohs, other Sharpsburgs, other terrors. Men in their thousands now alive would presently be dead; homes so far untouched by sorrow would know tears; new widows and new orphans, some as yet unmarried or unborn, would be made – all, as Lincoln saw it, that the nation might continue and that men now in bondage might have freedom. In issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation he had made certain that there would be no peace except by conquest. ibid.