It was tough. There were little things. They made regular 25-mile marches. I made two or three 25-mile marches in the army and I was broken down for days after it. They made them frequently, and when you were issued a pair of shoes in the northern army, they weren’t left foot and right foot, they were the same foot. You wore them into being a left-foot shoe or a right-foot shoe. And when you imagine making 25-mile marches with inferior footwear, let alone barefoot, the way many Confederates were, it’s unbelievable the way they could function. ibid. Men at War essay
It’s my belief that the war in the West is at least as important as the one in the East ... The Union victory at Fort Donelson, for example, lost all of Kentucky for the Confederacy, and most of Tennessee. It saw the emergence of Grant and Bedford Forrest. It was when the northern juggernaut began to roll, and the battle of Shiloh was an attempt to stop it, a desperate attempt to stop it that failed. Shiloh was the first big battle – the first great bloody battle ... The generals didn’t know their jobs, the soldiers didn’t know their jobs. It was just pure determination to stand and fight and not retreat. ibid.
More credit is given to Confederate soldiers: they’re supposed to have had more elan and dash. Actually I know of no braver men in either army than the Union troops at Fredericksburg, which was a serious Union defeat. But to keep charging that wall at the foot of Marye’s Heights after all the failures there’d been is a singular instance of valor. It was different from southern elan. It was a steadiness under fire, a continuing to press the point. ibid.
These men seem larger than life in what they could endure, especially if you know anything about the medical attention they got. It was so crude, the lack of anaesthetics, all those things. It’s almost unbelievable that men could perform over a period of four years. Anybody could go out and perform some afternoon. These men kept it up year after year. ibid.
Things began to close in on the South more and more. There was scarcely a family that hadn’t lost someone. There was disruption of society. The blockade was working. They couldn’t get very simple things like needles to sew, very simple things. And the discouragement began to settle in more and more with the realization that they were not going to win that war ... The political leaders did everything they could, especially Jefferson Davis, to assure them that this was a second American revolution ... But the realization came more and more that victory was not going to come. And especially that they were not going to get foreign recognition, without which we wouldn’t have won the first revolution ... A realization came that defeat was foreordained. Mary Chesnut, for instance, said, ‘It’s like a Greek tragedy, where you know what the outcome was going to be. We’re living a Greek tragedy.’ ibid.
I can tell you who lost it – the South lost the war. But I’m not sure anybody won that war. It’s a tragedy ... On the face of it, the North won the war. But the bill for winning it was huge in human values, not to mention human lives. ibid.
The Civil War was really one of those watershed things. There was a huge chasm between the beginning and the end of the war. The nation had come face-to-face with a dreadful tragedy ... And yet that’s what made us a nation. Before the war, people had a theoretical notion of having a country, but when the war was over, on both sides they knew they had a country. They’d been there. They had walked its hills and tramped its roads ... They knew the effort that they had expended and their dead friends had expended to preserve it. It did that. The war made their country an actuality. ibid.
The last romantic and first modern war. Shelby Foote
North was only a direction indicated by a compass – if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was only the brooding desolation. Shelby Foote
Any understanding of this nation has to be based – and I mean really based – on an understanding of the Civil War. Shelby Foote
The answer a southerner would give you as to why are you fighting if you were a northerner, he would say, I’m fighting cause you’re down here. Shelby Foote
Southerners would have told you they were fighting for self-government. They believed the gathering of power in Washington was against them. When they entered into that Federation they certainly would never have entered into it if it hadn’t believed it to be possible to get out. Shelby Foote
We think that we are a wholly superior people. If we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are we would not have fought that war. Shelby Foote
The Civil War brings everything into a sharper focus with heightened color. Anytime you want to study human behavior, it is well to study the Civil War, because in that you study human behavior under terrific pressure and heat. So that men show what they are for good or bad more readily than in ordinary times. Shelby Foote
The American Civil War – April to April, Sumter to Appomattox, 1861 to 1865 – pervades the national conscience ... It makes a great story. I know of none since the Iliad that rivals it either in drama or in pathos. Shelby Foote, foreword to The Blue and the Gray
Any Deep South boy, anyhow, and probably all Southern boys have been familiar with the Civil War as a sort of thing in their conscience going back. I honestly believe that it’s in all our subconscious. This country was into its adolescence at the time of the Civil War. It really was; it hadn’t formulated itself really as an adult nation, and the Civil War did that. Like all traumatic experiences that you might have had in your adolescence, it stays with you the rest of your life, certainly in your subconscious, most likely in your conscience, too. I think that the Civil War had the nature of that kind of experience for the country. Anybody who’s looked into it at all realizes that it truly is the outstanding event in American history insofar as making us what we are. The kind of country we are emerged from the Civil War, not from the Revolution. The Revolution provided us with a constitution; it broke us loose from England; it made us free. But the Civil War really defined us. It said what we were going to be, and it said what we’re not going to be. It drifted away from the Southern, mostly Virginia, influence up into the New England and Middle Western influence, and we became that kind of nation instead of the other kind of nation. Shelby Foote
The Civil War, there’s a great compromise, as it’s called. It consists of Southerners admitting freely that it’s probably best that the Union wasn’t divided, and the North admits rather freely that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is a great compromise and we live with that and that works for us. We are now able to look at the war with some coolness, which we couldn't do before now, and, incidentally, I very much doubt whether a history such as mine could have been written much before 100 years had elapsed. It took all that time for things to cool down. Shelby Foote
The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places ... More than 3,000,000 Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2% of the population, died in it. American homes became headquarters. American churches and schoolhouses sheltered the dying. And huge foraging armies swept across American farms and burned American towns. Americans slaughtered one another wholesale here in America in their own cornfields and peach orchards. Ken Burns, The Civil War: The Cause, PBS 1990
The Civil War began at 4:30 a.m. on 12th April 1861. ibid.
The odds against a southern victory were long: there were nearly twenty-one million people in the north, just nine million in the Confederacy and four million of them were slaves. ibid.
The trickle of runaways coming into northern lines now swelled to a flood. ibid.
With Lincoln, McClellan and his staff devised a three-pronged attack on the Confederacy. ibid.
The Willard Hotel in Washington DC: The poet Julia Ward Howe awoke from a spectacular dream. That day she had heard a New England regiment singing on parade, and had fallen asleep with the song John Brown’s Body ringing in her head. Now in the dark she got up and scribbled out the words with a pencil stub. She sold her poem to Atlantic Monthly for $4. It became the anthem of the Union: ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’. Ken Burns, The Civil War: A Very Bloody Affair
There were more than 100,000 soldiers in the Union Army who were not yet fifteen years old. ibid.
The ground, Grant said, was so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing in any direction, stepping on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground. ibid.
The armies that U S Grant and George McClellan led were the best equipped in history. The productive capacity and technical ingenuity of the North were now focused on weapons. ibid.
Nearly half the southerners eligible for the new draft failed to sign up. ibid.
When Union forces took parts of the South Carolina coast, plantation owners fled leaving behind empty houses and ten thousand slaves. Ken Burns, The Civil War: Forever Free
On the morning of July 22nd 1862 the President called a Cabinet meeting. What he said took everyone by surprise: after long thought, he told them, he had decided to emancipate the slaves. ibid.
The brilliant southern victories of Spring and Summer brought Lee’s army international renown. ibid.
All day long in hastily constructed field hospitals Clara Barton tended the wounded. She worked so close to the fighting that a bullet went through her sleeve and killed the man she was treating. ibid.
It had been the bloodiest day in American history. The Union lost 2,108 dead, another 10,293 wounded or missing: double the casualties of D-Day 82 years later. ibid.
In 1863 Confederate General Stonewall Jackson would become a terror to the Union Army and a legend north and south. Ken Burns, The Civil War: Simply Murder
That night Chamberlain and his men scraped out shallow graves for the dead. As they worked, the Northern Lights began to dance in the winter sky. ibid.
The Union had lost 12,600 men. The South had lost 5,300 men. But many of them were only missing, gone home for Christmas. ibid.
Coffee was the preferred drink of both armies. ibid.