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c154929
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"On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor."
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leadership
encouragement
american-civil-war-biography
confederate-army
robert-e-lee
dignity
confederate-states-of-america
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Shelby Foote |
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94af456
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Grant was forty-two and Lee fifty-seven, Grant at the peak of health and energy, while Lee feared his weakening body and lagging faculties. Each was defending his notion of home. Grant by now was the most popular man in the Union, arguably more so even than Lincoln. Lee was easily the most important man in the Confederacy, his popularity and influence, had he chosen to use it, far outstripping Davis's. Unquestionably, they were at this moment the preeminent military figures in America, and arguably the world.
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american-civil-war-biography
confederate-army
robert-e-lee
union-army
confederate-states-of-america
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William C. Davis |
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6d07022
|
The mythology serves purposes darker than sentiment, nothing more so than the currently popular, and arrantly nonsensical, assertion that Lee freed his inherited slaves in 1862 before the war was over, while Grant kept his until the Thirteenth Amendment freed them in 1865. The subtext is transparent. If Southerner Lee freed his slaves while Northerner Grant kept his, then secession and the war that followed can hardly have had anything to do with slavery and must instead have been over the tariff or state rights, or some other handy pretext invented to cloak slavery's pivotal role.
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slavery
confederate
slavery-in-the-united-states
american-civil-war-biography
robert-e-lee
confederate-states-of-america
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William C. Davis |
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eef3327
|
for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.
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confederate-states-of-america
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Shelby Foote |
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f266474
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Our Country is Gone, our cause is lost
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confederate-states-of-america
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Sam R. Watkins |
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725ff47
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For pure patriotism, however, the Gists of South Carolina stood above the rest. Their father had been an ardent patriot during the Revolution, in consequence of which he named his first son Independence Gist. Independence without some sort of restraint being close to anarchy, however, the father tempered his zeal by naming the second son Constitution Gist. But in 1831 when his third son arrived, it was already evident that Independence and Constitution were not enough. The liberties for which he fought still stood endangered by radicals in Washington. Consequently, as an admonition to all, he named this youngest boy States Rights Gist.
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confederate
american-civil-war-biography
confederate-states-of-america
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William C. Davis |