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Shelby Foote

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Famous Shelby Foote Quotes

“A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice. The stunned champ cried while inspecting the machine, "There's a man in there!"Lincoln's good news, he confided from the heights of leadership, was that there was in fact a man in there.”

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Book:The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
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“They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them, “the man who freed the slaves.” He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic-which he was-but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not.”

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Book:The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
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“He could do little. Brandy might help, he thought, but when he poured some into the hurt man’s mouth it ran back out again. Presently a colonel, Johnston’s chief of staff, came hurrying into the ravine. But he could do nothing either. He knelt down facing the general. “Johnston, do you know me? Johnston, do you know me?” he kept asking, over and over, nudging the general’s shoulder as he spoke. But Johnston did not know him. Johnston was dead.”

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Book:The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
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“I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was: forty thousand men—they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen just two weeks before—out on their first march in the crazy weather of early April, going from Mississippi into Tennessee where the Union army was camped between two creeks with its back to a river, inviting destruction.”

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Book:Shiloh
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“That was when General Johnston rode up. He came right past where I was standing, a fine big man on a bay stallion. He had on a broad-brim hat and a cape and thigh boots with gold spurs that twinkled like sparks of fire. I watched him ride by, his mustache flaring out from his mouth and his eyes set deep under his forehead. He was certainly the handsomest man I ever saw, bar none; he made the other officers on his staff look small.”

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Book:Shiloh
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“However, in an attempt to rouse the dejected spirits of the troops, he directed that a ration of whiskey be issued to all ranks. Somehow the barrels were brought up in the night and the distribution made next morning. The result, in several cases - for the officers poured liberally and the stuff went into empty stomachs - were spectacular. For example, rival regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts promptly decided the time had come for them to settle a long-term feud, and when a Maine outfit stepped in to try and stop the scuffle, the result was the biggest three-sided fist fight in the history of the world.”

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Book:The Civil War, Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian
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