Civil War Quotes

Frederick Douglass

In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky-her grand old woods-her fertile fields-her beautiful rivers-her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains.

But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong; When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten; That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.

I stand before you today a thief and a robber. I stole this head, this body, these limbs, and ran off with them.

John Brown's zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.

The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery.

Viewing the man from the genuine abolishionist ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed cold, tardy, weak and unequal to the task. But, viewing him from the sentiments of his people, which as a statesman he was bound to respect, then his actions were swift, bold, radical and decisive.

Taking the man in the whole, balancing the tremendous magnitude of the situation, and the necessary means to ends, Infinite Wisdom has rarely sent a man into the world more perfectly suited to his mission than Abraham Lincoln.

William Lloyd Garrison

In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon.

William Howard Russell

Little did I conceive of the greatness of the defeat (at Bull Run), the magnitude of the disaster which it had entailed upon the United States. So short-lived has been the American Union, that men who saw it rise may live to see it fall.

Walt Whitman

I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.

A Union soldier

Gen. Grant habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall and was about to do it.

Gideon Welles

(After the death of Abraham Lincoln...)

On the Avenue in front of the White House were several hundred colored people, mostly women and children, weeping and wailing their loss. This crowd did not diminish through the whole of that cold, wet day; they seemed not to know what was to by their fate since their great benefactor was dead, and though strong and brave men wept when I met them, the hopeless grief of those poor colored people affected me more than almost anything else.

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