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Quote by Brian Steel Wills

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The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

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Brian Steel Wills

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“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.”

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“a gang of unpredictable ruffians by day who turned to enthralling storytellers after dark. "I would sometimes join them, and listen for a great part of the night to some of the finest fairy tales and most romantic legends it has ever been my fortune to hear.”

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“Before long the meeting at headquarters got down to a serious discussion of how General Bragg was to be dealt with, and Howard suddenly realized that he had never attended a strategy conference like this one: matters were not handled so informally in the Army of the Potomac. Grant and Thomas and Sherman simply talked things out, putting a whole campaign in review—Sherman bubbling with ideas, as always, Thomas full of solid facts about the roads and mountains and rivers where they would have to fight, Grant listening to both men and now and then putting in an observation of his own. Howard, who was not especially fanciful, felt that it was almost like being in a courtroom: Thomas was the learned judge, Sherman the brilliant advocate, and Grant was the jury whose verdict would settle everything.”

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“The Battle of Atlanta was an unusually confusing engagement for those who fought in it , with assaults coming from unexpected directions and the fortunes of battle changing directions from one moment to the next. Arkansas troops, pinned down in front of the Sixteenth Iowa's works, came in and surrendered, but before they could be moved to the rear other Confederate troops appeared from that very direction; the Iowans tried to put their prisoners between this new threat and themselves, but the Arkansans became belligerent and began to take up arms again. There was a period of total confusion; in the press an Iowa soldier asked an Arkansas which side was surrendering, and the Rebel answered with a laugh: "I'll be damned if I know". In the end it was the Sixteenth Iowa that went off in captivity.”

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“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”

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“Appomattox was not preordained. There were no established rules or well-worn script. If anything, retribution had been the larger and longer precedent. So, if these moments teemed with hope—and they did—it was largely due to two men, who rose to the occasion, to Grant’s and Lee’s respective actions: one general, magnanimous in victory, the other, gracious and equally dignified in defeat, the two of them, for their own reasons and in their own ways, fervently interested in beginning the process to bind up the wounds of the last four years. And yes, if, paradoxically, these were among Lee’s finest hours, and they were, so, too, were they Grant’s greatest moments.”

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“The next day, it was still raining when Lee issued his final order to his troops, known simply as General Orders Number 9. After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them. But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen. By the terms of the agreement officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extended to you His blessing and protection. With an increasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous considerations for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell. For generations, General Orders Number 9 would be recited in the South with the same pride as the Gettysburg Address was learned in the North. It is marked less by its soaring prose—the language is in fact rather prosaic—but by what it does say, bringing his men affectionate words of closure, and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t say. Nowhere does it exhort his men to continue the struggle; nowhere does it challenge the legitimacy of the Union government that had forced their surrender; nowhere does it fan the flames of discontent. In fact, Lee pointedly struck out a draft paragraph that could have been construed to do just that.”

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“The unquenchable guerilla warfare this officer had been hinting at was perhaps the one thing that would have ruined America forever. It was precisely what Federal soldiers like Grant and Sherman dreaded most - the long, slow-burning, formless uprising that goes on and on after the field armies have been broken up, with desperate men using violence to provoke more violence, harassing the victor and their own people with a sullen fury no dragoons can quite put down. The Civil War was not going to end that way (although it was natural to suppose that it might, because civil wars often do end so) and the conquered South was not going to become another Ireland or Poland, with generation after generation learning hatred and the arts of back-ally fighting. General Lee ruled it out, not only because he was General Lee but also because he had never seen this war as the kind of struggle that could go on that way. He understood the cause he served with complete clarity. His South had meant neither revolution nor rebellion; it simply desired to detach itself and live in its own chosen part of an unchanging past, and Mr. Davis had defined it perfectly when he said that all his people wanted was to be let alone. Borne up by that desire, the Confederacy had endured four years of war, and it was breaking up now because this potential for inspiring the human spirit had been exhausted. With unlimited confidence the Confederacy had fought an unlimited war for a strictly limited end. To go on fighting from the woods and the lanes and the swamps might indeed plague the Yankees and inflict a deep wound beyond healing, but one thing on earth it could not do was give the South a chance to be left alone with what used to be.”

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