Quotes

Austere and humorless, Davis did not suffer fools gladly. He lacked Lincoln’s ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument.

The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 taxed almost everything but the air northerners breathed. It imposed sin taxes on liquor, tobacco, and. playing cards; luxury taxes on carriages, yachts, billiard tables, jewelry, and other expensive items; taxes on patent medicines and newspaper advertisements; license taxes on almost every conceivable profession or service except the clergy; stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies, and a tax on the dividends or interest they paid to investors; value-added taxes on manufactured goods and processed meats; an inheritance tax; and an income tax. The law also created a Bureau of Internal Revenue, which remained a permanent part of the federal government even though most of these taxes (including the income tax) expired several years after the end of the war. The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.

Disease was a greater threat to the health of Civil War soldiers than enemy weapons. This had been true of every army in history. Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of disease for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one”and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one. Only by twentieth century standards was Civil War disease mortality high. Nevertheless, despite improvement over previous wars in this respect, disease was a crippling factor in Civil War military operations.

“You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness,” Lincoln wrote [General McClellan] on October 13. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing?” McClellan had argued that his men could not march twenty miles a day and fight without full stomachs and new shoes. Yet the rebels marched and fought with little food and no shoes.

As the two armies bedded down a few hundred yards from each other, their bands commenced a musical battle as prelude to the real thing next day. Northern musicians blared out “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia,” and were answered across the way by “Dixie” and “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” One band finally swung into the sentimental strains of “Home Sweet Home”; others picked it up and soon thousands of Yanks and Rebs who tomorrow would kill each other were singing the familiar words together.

This sense of Butternut identity with the South and hostility to the Northeast gave rise to talk among western Democrats of a “Northwest Confederacy” that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission. However bizarre such a scheme appears in retrospect, it commanded much rhetorical support during the war. “The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way,” warned Vallandigham in January 1863. “If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate or profitable to your purse, will continue it . . . [be prepared for] eternal divorce between the West and the East.”

While 100 percent of the congressional Republicans supported the draft bill, 88 percent of the Democrats voted against it. Scarcely any other issue except emancipation evoked such clearcut partisan division. Indeed, Democrats linked these two issues in their condemnation of the draft as an unconstitutional means to achieve the unconstitutional end of freeing the slaves. A democratic convention in the Midwest pledged that “we will not render support to the present Administration in its wicked Abolition crusade [and] we will resist to the death all attempts to draft any of our citizens into the army.” Democratic newspapers hammered at the theme that the draft would force white working men to fight for the freedom of blacks who would come north and take away their jobs.

Although civilians were going hungry in Mississippi, Grant was confident that his soldiers would not. A powerful army on the move could seize supplies that penniless women and children could not afford to buy. For the next two weeks the Yankee soldiers lived well on hams, poultry, vegetables, milk and honey as they stripped bare the plantations in their path. Some of these midwestern farm boys proved to be expert foragers. When an irate planter rode up on a mule and complained to a division commander that plundering troops had robbed him of everything he owned, the general looked him in the eye and said: “Well, those men didn’t belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn’t have left you that mule.”

“Amnesty, sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE and that or extermination we will have. You may ’emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves, if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked and every Southern city in flames.” – Jefferson Davis, letter to Abraham Lincoln.

Clement Vallandigham’s story is wild. He was exiled by Lincoln for speaking out against the war, ran for governor of Ohio from exile in Canada, and then accidentally shot himself five years after the war ended while using a pistol in a courtroom demonstration.