Quotes from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Not married until 33, Abraham Lincoln said, "A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that cannot hurt me.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“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.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies." Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“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.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward." Jefferson Davis's future wife describing him at first meeting.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land, but that something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this land, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Whatever shortcomings they might develop under pressure (Grant’s, for instance, was said to be whiskey; hearing which, the President was supposed to have asked what brand he drank, intending to send a barrel each to all his other generals)”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“The politicians were in full bay, particularly those of his own party who had been urging, without success, his support of antislavery legislation which he feared would lose him the border states, held to the Union so far by his promise that no such laws would be passed. It also seemed to these Republicans that entirely too many Democrats were seated in high places, specifically in the cabinet and the army; and now their anger was increased by apprehension. About to open their campaigns for reëlection in November, they had counted on battlefield victories to increase their prospects for victory at the polls. Instead, the main eastern army, under the Democrat McClellan—“McNapoleon,” they called him—had held back, as if on purpose, and then retreated to the James, complaining within hearing of the voters that the Administration was to blame. Privately, many of the Jacobins agreed with the charge, though for different reasons, the main one being that Lincoln, irresolute by nature, had surrounded himself with weak-spined members of the opposition party. Fessenden of Maine put it plainest: “The simple truth is, there was never such a shambling half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government since the world began.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“For my part I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapacity of the people to govern themselves.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“alone producing over sixty percent more manufactured goods than the whole Confederacy,”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion, that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take by war—teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.” In”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

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