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Quote by Bruce Catton

“Reflecting on this order, which lays out a job of work and breathes the very spirit of unhurried calm, one is conscious of that queer feeling of exasperation which, even at this distance, McClellan's acts occasionally inspire. With everything in the world at stake, both for the country and for McClellan personally, why couldn't the man have taken fire just once?”

Quote by Bruce Catton

Work

Mr. Lincoln's Army

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Author

Bruce Catton
Bruce Catton

Bruce Catton was an American historian renowned for his works on the American Civil War. His writing style, marked by clarity and narrative power, made complex historical events understandable to a broad audience. Catton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1953 for his book 'The Civil War: A Narrative'. more

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“In the midst of a grueling all-night march on October 6, the men of the 10th Indiana demonstrated that they had not lost their high spirits. They were taking a brief midnight break, many of them sleeping where they had stopped on either side of the road, when "General" Charles Gilbert came riding through with his staff and demanded that the exhausted troops form up and salute him properly. Colonel William Kise told Gilbert that after marching day and night for a week, "he would not hold dress parade at midnight for any d-d fool living'; the only salute the men offered was to jeer and apply their bayonets to the hindquarters of the horses of Gilbert and his staff, who continued down the road rather more promptly than they had come.”

“The army had fought hard and endured much, it had pride and self-pity at the same time, and it was developing its own legend, which - like the profound emotional attachment which it had for its commanding general - would always set it apart from the other Union armies. It was acquiring what can only be called a sort of dogged pessimism, a fatalistic readiness to expect the worst, as if it sensed that its best efforts would be wasted but was not thereby made disheartened; and now as for months to come it would have to keep step with its rival, the Army of Northern Virginia.”

“Meade was more careful and calculating of the odds than Grant . . . and, too, he had the benefit of two years' experience fighting against Robert E. Lee. He took the tactical initiative by translating Emory Upton's feat at Rappahannock bridgehead back in November to seek a similar success against the Spotsylvania salient, as ordered by Grant for May 10. Upton's planning was timely, but not enough time was allotted to position a proper support fire; a day's delay might have awarded a victory to Upton's innovation. It was much the same for the hurried May 12 offensive - there was no time to plan a deliberate exploitation of whatever break might be made in the Confederate lines. This was a very large army with an entrenched high command, and Meade struggled to move it at Grant's arbitrary pace. On May18 (as John Gibbon pointed out the enemy was read, waiting, even anxious for the Yankees to attack, and Grant impatiently ordered this forlorn hope anyway.”

“Complaint was made, then and since, that Meade failed to coordinate his attacks, that he was not up to managing these offensive operations. But Cold Harbor was a stark demonstration that by 1864, whether coordinated or not, no frontal assault on the entrenched Army of Northern Virginia could possibly succeed. And at Cold Harbor Meade recognized that fact before Grant did.”

“Mead had not been invited to the surrender at the McLean house, but he determined to meet his opposite number before the armies parted. On April 10 he rode through the now-peaceful lines to meet his engineer corps comrade from the old army. "What are you doing with all that gray in your bead!" Lee exclaimed. "That you have a great deal to do with!" Meade replied.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sherman making a mockery of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s recent assertion, while visiting the Rebel army, that the Yankees would have to retreat from Georgia or starve, and predicting that the retreat would be “more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow.”