Quotes from Stephen W. Sears

Harvey Hill expressed no regrets for his mulishness and no sympathy for what Lee was seeking to accomplish. "Genl. Lee is venturing upon a very hazardous movement," he told his wife; "and one that must be fruitless, if not disastrous.

G. W. Smith had failed Robert E. Lee's test for command in battle, and from that verdict there was no appeal.

Confederates in Jackson's column reported seeing a Yankee balloon—it was the Eagle—and assumed that if they could see it, it could see them. Yet such were conditions aloft that not a single report reached General Hooker that day from the aeronautical corps that an enemy column was marching to the south and west of Chancellorsville.

the essential fault lay with the Confederacy's failure to have produced a single good map of the approaches to its own capital.

Only the English created a new England, settled not by subjects of the Crown resolved to live beyond the seas, but by pioneers and builders in a land of new promise.

Certainly that thought did not enter into McClellan's calculations. He continued thinking only in terms of how much he might salvage from defeat.

While he correctly judged General McClellan to be defensive-minded, it did not occur to him that General McClellan would give up so easily: that after a single battle—which the Federals won—he would decide to abandon his campaign, cut his losses, and run for safety.

Malvern Hill was clearly a battle General Lee did not intend to be fought the way it was fought, and it demonstrated once again his lack of effective control over his lieutenants

Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory took a different view. "The Great McClelland the young Napoleon," Mallory told his wife, "now like a whipped cur lies on the banks of the James River crouched under his Gun Boats.

to the icy roads and the pockets of resistance which

I prefer Lee to Johnston," he explained. To his mind, General Lee was "too cautious & weak under grave responsibility . . . wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility & is likely to be timid & irresolute in action.

Even as McClellan conferred with his superiors, sounds of renewed battle came from the direction of Chantilly, a country estate a few miles north of Centreville and on the flank of Pope's army.

Henry Halleck was a pedant and a military bureaucrat, but he was not an easy man to fool,

The fact of the matter is that George G. Meade, unexpectedly and against the odds, thoroughly outgeneraled Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg.18

George McClellan's conviction that he was forever outnumbered was the one constant of his military character.

Wise, seeing that his well was ruined, made the best of a bad bargain. He arranged to take over the job for a dollar a body, and before the day was out had filled his well, sealed it, and earned himself sixty dollars.

Joe Johnston was not a general noted for his attention to detail, and Seven Pines would demonstrate how careless he could be.