Civil War Quotes

Newly-appointed Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant gave this order to General George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, upon Grant's arrival in Virginia in 1864.

Lee's army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.

Nathan Bedford Forrest routinely issued this warning to opposing forces and often received his desired result.

If you surrender you shall be treated as prisoners of war, but if I haveto storm your works you may expect no quarter.

Robert E. Lee repeatedly spoke this line to the survivors of Pickett's Charge as they stumbled back to Confederate lines.

All this has been my fault.

Infantry troops often uttered this sarcasm in criticism of the cavalry, who were said to fight so rarely that they seldom left casualties behind.

Whoever saw a dead cavalryman?

Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court privately delivered this opinion on charging captured Confederate officers with treason.

If you bring these leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion.

A Confederate survivor so described the Union dead at the Battle of Cold Harbor in 1864.

The dead covered more than five acres of ground about as thickly as they could be laid.

A Union officer who survived the Battle of Antietam gave this description of the destruction of a Confederate force posted in a cornfield there.

Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they stood in their ranks a few minutes before.

James Longstreet expressed his reservations about Pickett's Charge to a colleague as his troops moved forward to begin the infamous assault.

I do not want to make this charge. I do not see how it can succeed. I would not make it now but that General Lee has ordered it and expects it.

Abraham Lincoln offered Ulysses S. Grant this encouragement during the latter's grueling Siege of Petersburg in 1864-65.

Hold on with a bull-dog whip and chew and choke as much as possible.

Union General John Pope made this observation to his troops shortly before his sound defeat at the Battle of Second Manassas.

Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.

Jefferson Davis

If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

(Confederate surrender at Appomattox...)

...On they come, with the old swinging route step and swaying battle flags. In the van, the proud Confederate ensign. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood; men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper or vain-glorying, nor motion of man, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!

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