Quotes from William C. Davis

Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid "uninteresting men," wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he "would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self."212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that "my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts.

Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity.

Notwithstanding our boastful assertions to the world, for nearly a century, that our government was based on the consent of the people, it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed. - Robert E. Lee

I trust that our merciful God, our only help & refuge, will not desert us in this our hour of need, but will deliver us by His almighty hand, that the whole world may recognize His power & all hearts be lifted up in adoration & praise of His unbounded loving kindness," he said. "We must however submit to His almighty will, whatever that may be.

This was a people's war. All the people had a stake in it. All the people had an obligation to put their hearts and wealth and blood into it. All would find their futures indelibly shaped by it.

These well-to-do were many of the same men who so enthusiastically supported secession at the outset—the ones who so confidently blustered that independence would be so quick and easy that they would eat all the flesh of those killed in any war, and drink all the blood spilled. Now in mid-1864 still "those that brought the war on is at home & our boys are fighting for there property

The whole scene so reeked of penny romance that it bordered on the ludicrous . . . It was all really happening, but more like fiction come to life, a Waverly novel gone mad. Years later, Mark Twain would only half in jest propose that the American Civil War was to be blamed on Sir Walter Scott, that the people of the South had somehow persuaded themselves that the mythical era of gallant knights and fair damsels of Ivanhoe had come to life in Dixie.

Granted, he found little to say for the Plains Indians, an uninteresting race in need of humanization, made hideous by nature. He assumed everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, and expected they would have to be killed, since violence was "the only corrective they understand.

Adherence to Joseph E. Johnston would be Jefferson Davis' greatest mistake of 1862-1863 and one of his greatest of the war.

Reflecting from the vantage of more than a century, we can see today how trapped the leaders of the South felt in 1860. That the snare was only partially genuine, and partially in their imaginations and fears, made it no less real to them at the time. They had to act on the basis of what they knew and believed, and the fact that subsequent events and detached dispassionate study reveal that some of their belief was chimerical does not signify.

Before long the impetus for prohibition spread to all of the states, and even without martial law their legislatures began to pass laws prohibiting distillation for any purposes other than medicinal use.

But the most interesting of all slave maladies was what Cartwright chose to call "drapetomania," the disease that made blacks want to run away from slavery.

Grant himself.14 "Hereafter," he resolved, "I intend to be careful not to give them any news worth publishing."15

by spring 1862 it became universal throughout Confederate regiments for the soldiers to elect their leaders from colonel down to sergeants, the very imposition of military democracy that would lead some to bemoan the demagoguery and wire-pulling with the men in order to seek election.

They did retain the prohibition on the African slave trade, not from any opposition to slavery but simply as sound business policy. The South no longer needed it, and introduction of new slaves from abroad served only to act on supply and demand by reducing the value of those already there.

Consequently, as an admonition to all, he named this youngest boy States Rights Gist.

the safest course seemed to be to stay within the sources of their own time, written at the moment by those who knew the men and witnessed their acts, and as much as possible to use the directly contemporary writings of the men themselves

the splendid future of an Independent South." "Stimulate domestic manufacturing & local commerce," said Davis. Thus Charleston and New Orleans would vie with Boston and New York as commercial centers. Though Davis was only reiterating his oft-expressed wish for economic

Out of any conflict, the losers create more myths than the winners. It is hardly a surprise. After all, winners have little to explain to themselves. They won. For the loser, however, coping with defeat, dealing with it personally and explaining it to others, places enormous strains on the ego, self-respect, and sense of self-worth of the defeated.

26They might not be able to inflame poor non-slaveholding whites to secession and possible war to protect the planter's investment in slaves, but an appeal to fears of racial amalgamation cut across class lines.

A poor man might count for very little, but he was still free and white, which at least made him better than a free black or a slave, and in a society deeply dominated by class and caste, that was something worth fighting for.

South Carolina wanted to be certain that no misguided egalitarianism led to an excess of democracy. After all, that was partially what they were seceding from.

87The Confederacy had become virtually a welfare state ahead of its time, and yet again the antithesis of the hands-off government ethic upon which so much of Southern political and social ideology lay based.

he recognized slavery as a vital element of social morale, for even the lowliest white still could stand with pride knowing that he was the superior of a black. Slavery gave poor whites a social status nowhere else enjoyed by the peasantry, and as proof he argued that some of the most ardent supporters of slavery were whites too poor themselves to own slaves.