Quotes from Bruce Catton

General Lee ruled it out, not only because he was General Lee but also because he had never seen this war as the kind of struggle that could go on that way. He understood the cause he served with complete clarity. His South had meant neither revolution nor rebellion; it simply desired to detach itself and live in its own chosen part of an unchanging past, and Mr. Davis had defined it perfectly when he said that all his people wanted was to be let alone.

On the contrary, I thought he was rather lucky. He carried with him forever the visible sign that he had fought for his country and had been wounded in its service. Probably only a very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.

So had the eminent clergyman, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had told the world that a Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than a Bible, as far as Kansas was concerned.

Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the prosperity of the South and to that of the North as well; and, furthermore, it was nothing any Northerner need worry about. "It is an institution, too, that doesn't harm you, for we don't let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don't trouble you with that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the

The barn by the Roulette house was jammed with wounded men. Screams, prayers, and curses made it a horrible place, with hundreds of anguished men packed together on the straw begging the surgeons to attend to them—surgeons bare-armed and fearsomely streaked and spattered with blood, piles of severed arms and legs lying by the slippery operating tables, the uproar of the battle beating in through the thin walls.

the ruin of the South, by the emancipation of her slaves, is not like the ruin of any other people. It is not a mere loss of liberty Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but it is the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having."7

war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked.

such manner as shall seem most likely to conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of

I may be envied by ambitious persons, but I in turn envy the person who can transact his daily business and retire to a quiet home without a feeling of responsibility for the morrow.

It would slowly become evident that when they committed themselves at last to secession, not as a threat but as an accomplished fact armed for violence, the devoted men who wanted to preserve the Southern way of life had made a tactical error. The ultimate fate of their cause would be largely determined by what was done in Washington. Leaving Washington forever, they had fatally surrendered the initiative. Now their enemies would seize it.

He was trusted to the point of death by one hundred thousand fighting men, but he himself always had his lurking doubts.

The general was more easy, and today he had guests at the luncheon table. They may have been oddly chosen, all things considered. They came out of the past, when it had been possible for General Burnside to have friends in the army. It did not seem possible now. The weight of command made him suspect the motives of all around him.

And so that generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society—the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal. Because that element was lacking, the wisest man could be reasonable with only part of his mind; a certain area had to be given over to emotions which were all the more mad and overpowering because he shared them with everyone else.

Halleck wrathfully wrote to Sherman: "It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel and Lew Wallace, and yet it seems impossible to prevent it.

We are opposed to Negro equality. To prevent this we are willing to spare the last man, down to the point where women and children begin to suffer for food and clothing; when these begin to suffer and die, rather than see them equalized with an inferior race we will die with them.

What it really means is that the general must understand that he is not a free agent and cannot hope to become one. He has to work within the limitations imposed by the fact that he is working for a democracy, which means that at times he must modify or abandon the soundest military plan and make do with a second-best.

Yet in a sense the good chaplain was quite correct. He had put his finger on something which contained the germ of much history. Whether he was in fact commenting on an effect of the war or on a strange, elusive symptom of something which had actually helped to cause the war may be another matter. At the very least he had spotted something important, and he was justified in using exclamation points. He had seen one side of the war very clearly.

Negro slavery was specifically mentioned, and was given permanence; there never could be a law "denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves," and slavery was fully protected in territories then or later acquired.

And a wild, primitive madness seemed to descend on the men who fought in the cornfield: they went beyond the limits of sanity and endurance at times, Northerners and Southerners alike, until it seems that they tore at each other for the sheer sake of fighting. The

Sovereignty of the states was dying, North as well as South, and going with it was the ancient belief that the government which governs least is the government which governs best.

There is one thing I feel assured of; that is the confidence of every brave man of my command, and those who showed the white feather will do all in their power to attract attention from themselves. I had perhaps a dozen officers arrested for cowardice in the first day's fight. These men are necessarily my enemies.

himself came along the slope to rally

indicated. The redoubtable Confederate General

No man knows, when that Presidential grub gets to gnawing at him, just how deep it will get until he has tried it;