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CHAPTER 1
FACTS
Naming the War
From the firing upon Fort Sumter down to the present day, dozens of names — neutral, pro-Northern, and pro-Southern — have been assigned to the conflict of 1861 to 1865. While by no means comprehensive, the following list contains, in no particular order, the most popular among them.
The Civil War The War Between the States The War of the Rebellion The Confederate War The War for Southern Independence Mr. Lincoln's War The War of the North and South The Abolitionists' War The War of Northern Aggression The Lost Cause The Second American Revolution The Brothers' War The War of Southern Secession The Late Unpleasantness The War for the Union The War for States' Rights The War of the Sixties The Great Rebellion The Yankee Invasion The Slaveholders' Rebellion
Civil War Voices
"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on."
— Ulysses S. Grant
"It's just like shooting squirrels, only these squirrels have guns."
— A veteran Union soldier, instructing new recruits in musket drill.
"We talked the matter over and could have settled the war in thirty minutes had it been left to us."
— Alleged comment of a Confederate soldier after fraternizing with a Union soldier between the lines.
"Look at Jackson's brigade! It stands there like a stone wall!"
— General Barnard E. Bee of South Carolina, describing the performance of fellow Confederate Thomas J. Jackson and his men at the Battle of Bull Run.
"It's bad. It's damned bad."
— Abraham Lincoln, upon hearing of the Union army's defeat at First Bull Run.
"I have seen enough to convince me that this is no war for foreigners. It is our war, and let us cheerfully bear the burden ourselves. ... We, in the North, send our scum and filth to fight for a reality."
— William Thompson Lusk, 79th New York Infantry.
"I cannot spare this man. He fights!"
— President Abraham Lincoln, when asked to remove Grant from command.
"He lives by the New Testament and fights by the old."
— Historian Douglas S. Freeman's description of Thomas J. 'Stonewall" Jackson.
"Press on, press on, men."
— "Stonewall" Jackson's admonishment to his fabled "foot cavalry" on the march.
"I just ... got there first with the most men."
— Confederate cavalryman and general Nathan Bedford Forrest, explaining his success in battle.
"Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River."
— Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, prior to Shiloh, where he was mortally wounded.
"By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land."
— George B. McClellan in 1861, shortly after he assumed command of Union forces around Washington.
"It was not war — it was murder."
— Confederate General D.H. Hill, describing their defeat at the Battle of Malvern Hill.
"The Confederate commanders knew no more about the topography of the country than they did about Central Africa. Here was a limited district, the whole of it within a day's march of the city of Richmond, capital of Virginia and the Confederacy, almost the first spot on the continent occupied by the British race, the Chickahominy itself classic by legends of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas; and yet we were profoundly ignorant of the country, were without maps, sketches, or proper guides, and nearly as helpless as if we had been suddenly transferred to the banks of the Lualaba [Congo River]."
— Confederate General Richard Taylor, describing the Confederate high command's ignorance of the terrain during the Seven Days' Battles in 1862.
"I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies."
— Union General John Pope, addressing the Army of the Potomac after assuming command. Pope and the army were routed not long thereafter at Second Bull Run.
"Now, if McClellan doesn't want to use the army for awhile, I'd like to borrow it from him and see if I can't do something or other with it."
— Abraham Lincoln, 1862.
"Before this war is over, I intend to be a Major General or a corpse."
— Confederate Brigadier General Isaac Trimble, to Stonewall Jackson. Trimble attained the rank and survived the war, minus one leg he lost at Gettysburg.
"It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."
— Robert E. Lee, as he watched the slaughter of Union troops at Fredericksburg.
"General, get up — dress quick — you are a prisoner!"
— Confederate John S. Mosby to Brigadier General Edwin H. Stoughton, whom Mosby awoke with a slap to the rump during a March 1863 nighttime raid on his headquarters.
"The Rebel army is now the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac."
— Union General Joseph Hooker, shortly before his army's decisive defeat at Chancellorsville.
"Our regt has several recruits imported direct from 'Ould Ireland.' Some of them got into a fight and spent their first night in the guardhouse!"
— Private William Lamson, 20th Maine Infantry.
"All this has been my fault."
— Robert E. Lee, in the wake of the failure of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg.
"That old man ... had my division massacred at Gettysburg!"
— George Pickett, to fellow former Confederate officer John S. Mosby, shortly after they paid a postwar visit to Robert E. Lee.
"Well, it made you famous."
— Mosby's rejoinder to Pickett.
"If you don't have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we'll eat your mules up, sir."
— William T. Sherman, to an army quartermaster before moving his army from Chattanooga toward Atlanta.
"They woke us up before dawn and lined us up in the woods. We didn't get any breakfast. The Yankees fired too high. By night I was covered in green leaves the Yankee bullets had cut off the trees."
— Private Andrew Jackson Hughes, Co. E, 12th North Carolina Infantry, describing the Battle of the Wilderness to his young grandson.
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."
— Union General John Sedgwick, moments before a Confederate sniper killed him at Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864.
"I shall come out of this fight a live major general or a dead brigadier."
— Confederate Brigadier General Albert Perrin, on the eve of the Battle of Spotsylvania, where he was killed.
"Turn my face to the enemy."
— Union General James Clay Rice to his surgeon, after the latter amputated the mortally wounded Rice's leg at a Spotsylvania Court House field hospital.
"I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."
— Ulysses S. Grant, May 9, 1864, from Spotsylvania Court House.
"The dead covered more than five acres ... about as thickly as they could be laid."
— A veteran Confederate soldier, describing the carnage after the Battle of Cold Harbor.
"We have five times as many generals here as we want, but are greatly in need of privates. Anyone volunteering in that capacity will be thankfully received."
— Henry Halleck, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, as a Confederate force approached Washington D.C. in 1864.
"On the authority of Lord God Almighty, have you anything that outranks that?"
— "Mother" Mary Ann Ball Bickerdyke, Union army nurse, to a U.S. Army surgeon who questioned the authority upon which she acted.
"War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."
— Union General William Tecumseh Sherman
"I have been up to see the [CSA] Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving."
— General Robert E. Lee
"I saw at a glance where the feeling of England was. They hoped for our ruin! They are jealous of our power. They care neither for the South nor the North. They hate both."
— Cassius Clay, U.S. Minister to Russia.
'General, unless he offers us honorable terms, come back and let us fight it out!"
— Confederate General James Longstreet to Robert E. Lee, as Lee departed to discuss terms for surrender with Grant.
"Any man who is in favor of a further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum, and ought to be sent there immediately."
— Nathan Bedford Forrest, May 1865.
"I found afterward that 500 of my men were left dead and wounded on a line as straight as a dress parade."
— Brigadier General Alfred Iverson, CSA, describing the carnage of the Battle of Gettysburg's first day.
"My people are going to war. They are in dead earnest, believing it to be for liberty."
— Confederate officer E.P. Alexander on his reason for resigning from the U.S. Army.
"The Rebel bullet that can kill me has not yet been molded."
— Philip Kearny, a fighting Union one-armed general who was shot and killed at Chantilly, Virginia, in 1862.
"The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time; but the 'inexorable logic of events' will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery; and that it can never be effectually put down till one or the other of these vital forces is completely destroyed."
— Frederick Douglass, 1861.
"If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, 'Died of a theory.'"
— Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
"You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
— Confederate General Howell Cobb, a former U.S. Congressman, on Robert E. Lee's late- war proposal of enlisting slaves in the Confederate army.
"Strange as it may seem to you, but the more men I saw killed the more reckless I became."
— Union soldier Franklin H. Bailey in a letter to his parents.
"The first thing in the morning is drill, drill, a little more drill. Then drill, and lastly drill. Between drills we drill, and sometimes stop to eat a little and have a roll-call."
— Private Oliver Wilcox Norton, 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteers, in 1861.
"The great fact which we asserted from the first is now placed beyond reach of controversy. We said the North could never subdue the South, and the North has now proclaimed the same conclusion."
— The Times (London), September 14, 1864.
"The rebel position was unassailable; it was a perfect slaughter-pen, and column after column was broken against it. Our artillery did so little injury to the enemy that they were able to concentrate all their fire on the advancing columns of troops. Besides, an oblique flank fire swept us, so that whole regiments melted away before it."
— Lt. Daniel George Macnamara, 9th Massachusetts Volunteers, describing the carnage at Fredericksburg.
"But hardtack was not so bad an article of food, even when traversed by insects, as may be supposed. Eaten in the dark, no one could tell the difference between it and hardtack that was untenanted."
— John D. Billings, 10th Massachusetts Battery.
"The premonitions that men have before going into battle are very curious and interesting, particularly when they come true. We had on board the Powhatan a fine young seaman named Flannigan, who came from Philadelphia. On the night of the 14th of January he came to my room with a small box in his hand, and said to me, 'Mr. Evans, will you be kind enough to take charge of this box for me — it has some little trinkets in it — and give it to my sister in Philadelphia?' I asked him why he did not deliver it himself, to which he replied, 'I am going ashore with you to-morrow, and will be killed'."
— Ensign Robley D. Evans, US Navy. Seaman Flannigan was killed in the Federal attack on Fort Fisher, North Carolina.
"I spent most of this day with the Yankee wounded. They were in miserable condition. ... I heard their confessions, anointed some ... and aided in washing and dressing some (of their wounds).".
— Rev. James B. Sheeran, Chaplain, 14th Louisiana, CSA.
"The deaths yesterday (September 20, 1864) were twenty-nine. Air pure, location healthy, no epidemic. The men are being deliberately murdered by the surgeon, especially by the ignorance or the malice of the chief."
— A. M. Keiley, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, who kept the "Dooms-Day" Book (roster of Confederate POW's) at the Elmira (NY) prisoner of war camp.
"[His is] a utterly hopeless case. ... All you can do is to help him die easy."
— A Union surgeon to Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, a volunteer nurse in the Union Hospital at St. Louis.
"I used to belong to the Methodist church, but I fell away. Oh, send for a Methodist minister!"
— A dying Union soldier to Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, a volunteer nurse in the Union Hospital at St. Louis.
"No, but he found me!"
— Union General Samuel Davis Sturgis after his defeat at Battle of Brice's Crossroads on June 10, 1864, in reply to a woman who asked him, 'General, did you find General Forrest?"
"I have no command. They were all killed."
— Brigadier General Abraham Buford, after the Southern defeat at Tupelo, Mississippi.
"Let them go. They can take any thing they find, and do any thing they want, except take the chair I am sitting in."
— Col. Edward Hatch, USA, refusing the pleas of Mrs. Jacob Thompson to stop his men from looting her house, Memphis 1864.
"When daylight dawned on Franklin, Tenn., December 1, 1864, the scene was indescribable. About five thousand Confederates and two thousand Federals lay dead or wounded in and around the Federal breast-works. In many instances, Confederates and Federals lay across each other, and there was one case where a Confederate and a Federal were found dead in the ditch, the Confederate grasping the Federal's throat."
— Lt. James Dinkins, Company C, 18th Mississippi Infantry.
"It's hard to die here. I had hoped to die at home."
— Pvt. D. S. Birdsell, Company C, 16th Connecticut, who died at Andersonville prison.
"The only son of his mother and she was a widow."
— Inscription on the tombstone of Confederate Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr., killed in the Battle of South Mountain.
"Each of them [barns] was a field hospital; its floor covered with mutilated soldiers, and surgeons busy at the lantern-lighted operating tables. By the door of one of them was a ghastly pile of amputated arms and legs, and around each of them lay multitudes of wounded men, covering the ground by the acre, wrapped in their blankets and awaiting their turns under the knife. I was stopped hundreds of times by wounded men, sometimes accompanied by a comrade but often wandering alone, to be asked in faint tones the way to the hospital of their division, till the accumulated sense of the bloodshed and suffering of the day became absolutely appalling. It seemed to me as if every square yard of the ground, for many square miles, must have its blood stain."
— Lt. George Benedict, 12th Vermont, describing the night after the Battle of Antietam.
"Then write to my mother and father that I tried to do my duty."
— 16-year-old Private James Sullivan, Company K, 21st Massachusetts, after a surgeon told his sergeant, "He can't last five minutes."
"He said that he had called for help ... a prowling rascal had turned him over and taken his watch."
— Charles Walcott, 21st Massachusetts, describing his encounter with a mortally wounded Confederate officer the night after the battle of Antietam.
"Every man's pocket was turned inside out ... every one was robbed by the ghouls."
— Private J. Polk Racine, 5th Maryland Infantry [Federal], describing the robbing of battlefield dead.
"The Revolution (Civil War) is raging at all points while the folly, weakness, and criminality of our heads (leaders) is becoming more decidedly manifest. Abraham Lincoln has neither sense or principle. McClellan is a capital soldier but has no capacity to take political lead. The people are strong and willing but 'there is no king in Israel.' The man of the day has not yet come."
– Lt. Col. David Hunter Strother on September 24, 1862. Strother was on McClellan's staff during the Antietam Campaign.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The New Civil War Handbook"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Mark Hughes.
Excerpted by permission of Savas Beatie LLC.
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