290 Quotes About Civil-war

For [Beth] Davis, Fitzgerald's [Louisiana] story carried another, broader message for Americans. 'If veterans could come together so soon after the War and forgive and forget, then surely we can overcome our differences,' she said. 'Old wounds were healed here, old barriers overcome. Seems like we should be able to do the same.

America’s current economic decline must be halted, or else one day the crime that is rampant in the streets of New York and Washington, D.C. may develop into low intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines, and run completely out of control

He was excited by the war fever and pleased that Scarlett had made so good a match, and who was he to stand in the way of young love when there was a war? Ellen, distracted, finally gave in as other mothers throughout the South were doing. Their leisured world had been turned topsy-turvy, and their pleadings, prayers and advice availed nothing against the powerful forces sweeping them along.

Robert E. Lee is America's great tragic hero, in the classical use of the term, doomed by a fatal flaw in one of his cardinal virtues, loyalty. He was a marvelously gifted soldier and an ardently devoted patriot, yet he defended the most unacceptable of American causes, secession and slavery, and he suffered the most un-American of experiences, defeat.

Was it laziness or incompetence that Times reporters hadn’t by then participated in left-activist group-phone calls about bolt cutters, gasoline cans and matches? (I know a conservative journalist who listened in on such calls.) And what is the theory of these journalistic geniuses? — That mobs of looters, in city after city, were summoned out of the night by political apathy?

...abandoning the city to the predations of warriors on both sides who seemed content to flatten it in order to possess it.

Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.

And so that generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society-the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal.

There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past. - Bruce Catton