Quotes from James M. McPherson

Not only did Confederate soldiers fight better; they also fought for a noble cause, the cause of state's rights, constitutional liberty, and consent of the governed. Slavery had nothing to do with it.

We children were especially indignant at this affront," so her sister "snatched the Grant book away to hurl it into the woodshed as ignominious trash.

Halleck had defended Grant from criticism after Shiloh, he still had reservations about Grant and relegated him to the largely meaningless position of second in command.

long-legged Yankee lies and substitute approved books by Southern writers.

Opposition to emancipation became opposition to northern victory. Linking abolition and Union, Republicans managed to blunt the edge of Democratic racism in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York (where legislative elections were held in 1863).

or too marginal and obscure to escape the censure of UCV and UDC watchdogs.

A chastened Wilson wrote a letter of apology on the official stationery of the New Jersey executive mansion, expressing himself "very much mortified" by his mistake.

describing the Confederate army as a "dark, rebellious host.

the Southern soldier will go down in history dishonored.

Approaching White Oak Swamp from the north, he sent a crew to rebuild the bridge over the creek. When Union artillery and sharpshooters prevented this, Jackson lay down and took a nap.

Grant's reputation as a heavy drinker is based very little on evidence and a great deal on gossip, envy, and vengefulness.

mattered little to Rutherford's avid readers that this supposed Rhodes quotation was a total fabrication, or that every one of her "facts" and "truths" cited above was false.

Grant said that Shiloh convinced him that the rebellion could be crushed only by complete conquest

included the destruction of any property or other resources used to sustain Confederate armies as well as of those armies themselves.

Whigs and Republicans supported all kinds of "improvements" to promote economic growth and upward mobility—internal improvements" in the form of roads, canals, railroads, and the like; tariffs to protect American industry and labor from low-wage foreign competition; a centralized, rationalized banking system.

THE TIMING OF Lincoln's public letters turned out to be fortuitous

The romantic glorification of the Army of Northern Virginia by generations of Lost Cause writers has obscured this truth.

Hooker was a controversial choice, but he did everything right in his first three months of command and appeared to have vindicated Lincoln's decision until he stumbled at Chancellorsville.

The crisis of the 1860s represented a far greater threat to the survival of the United States than did World War I, World War II, Communism in the 1950s, or terrorism today. Yet compared with the draconian enforcement of espionage and sedition laws in World War I, the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the National Security State of our own time, the infringement of civil liberties from 1861 to 1865 seems mild indeed.

The president told the cabinet on June 28, according to Welles, that he had "observed in Hooker the same failings that were observed in McClellan after the battle of Antietam—a want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which could not, and ought not to be taken from other points.

Dred Scott decision that legalized slavery in all territories;

Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states seceded not to protect slavery but to vindicate state sovereignty.

a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans

Beard's view, slavery and emancipation were almost incidental to the real causes and consequences of the war. The sectional conflict arose from the contending economic interests of plantation agriculture and industrializing capitalism.