11 Quotes by Jay Winik

Most civil wars, in fact, end quite badly, and history is rife with lessons that how wars end is every bit as crucial as why they start and how they are waged.

Lincoln dumped his bland second-in-command, Hannibal Hamlin, for Johnson,

One black man, overcome by emotion, dropped to his knees, prompting the president to conduct a curbside colloquium on the meaning of emancipation. “Don’t kneel to me,” said the president. “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.

At Lincoln’s second inaugural, a drunken Johnson, who had had one too many whiskeys that morning, plunged into a long, rambling, incoherent discourse, shouting about his humble origins and lecturing the assembled dignitaries from the Supreme Court and the diplomatic corps (“With all your fine feathers and gew-gaws”) that they were merely “creatures of the people.” Then, as he took his oath, Johnson visibly and audibly slobbered upon the Bible.

Freeing negroes seems to be the latest Confederate government craze … [but] if we are to lose our negroes we would as soon see Sherman free them as the Confederate government,” insisted one Southern woman. “Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves,

Every one I talk to is in favor of putting negroes in the army and that immediately … I think slavery is now gone and what little there is left of it should be rendered as serviceable as possible.” For her part, Mary Chesnut lamented, “If we had only freed the negroes at first and put them in the army—that would have trumped [the Union’s] trick.

In a thousand little ways, it seemed as though Grant was fated to fight this civil war. In battle, what galled Grant most was indecision. Once, an aide asked if he thought he was always right. “No!” Grant ripped back. “I am not, but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out and can do the other thing. But not to decide… may rum everything.

but now it was no longer simply enough to ambush and gun down the enemy. They had to be mutilated and, just as often, scalped. When that was no longer enough, the dead were stripped and castrated. In time, even that was insufficient. Then the victims were beheaded. And even that wasn’t enough. So ears were cut off, faces were hacked, bodies were grossly mangled. Soon,

To be sure, late that afternoon, Union soldiers drifted into the Confederate camp, and soon knots of blue- and gray-clad men dotted the hills around Appomattox Court House; bullets were indeed replaced by backslaps, the rebel yell with a hearty Southern drawl, war fervor with the first hints of war nostalgia, unbridled hatred with nascent relief, and, by the next day, West Point mini-reunions were even breaking out at the McLean farmhouse. But