Who Said That?
1) “Our Southern Brethren have attacked their father’s house and their loyal brothers. They must be punished and brought back, but this necessity breaks my heart.”- Major Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Sumter.
2) “I have the honor to tender my services in view of my present age and length of service, I feel myself competent to command a regiment, if the President should see fit to in trust one to me.”- Ulysses S. Grant in a letter to U.S. Army adjutant general Lorenzo Thomas, May 24, 1861.
3) “Fire will not burn it out of us; water cannot wash it out of us, that this war with the slaveholders can never be brought to a desirable termination until slavery, the guilty cause of all our national troubles, has been totally and forever abolished.”- Frederick Douglass, in an editorial in the August 1861 Douglass Monthly.
4) “The sight of several stretchers, each with its desperately wounded occupant admonished me that I was there to work, not to wonder or weep; so I corked up my feelings, and returned to the path of duty, which was rather a hard road to travel just then.” – Excerpt from Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863).
5) “Our condition is horrible. Troops utterly disorganized and demoralized. Road almost impassable. No provisions and no forage.”- General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. April 8, 1862, during the Confederate retreat from the battlefield at Shiloh Church.
6) “If I could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”- Abraham Lincoln, in his reply of August 22, 1862, to newspaper publisher Horace Greeley.
7) “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.” Major General George B. McClellan, U.S.A., leading the Army of the Potomac in a slow and careful pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s army in Maryland, September 13, 1862.
8) “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the south, but we can make war so terrible, and make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” Major General William T. Sherman, U.S.A. in a report to U.S. Grant on Oct. 4, 1862.
9) “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”- Acclaimed Massachusetts orator Edward Everett, in a letter to Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 20, 1863.
10) “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”- Lt. General U.S. Grant U.S.A. in a dispatch to Washington, May 11, 1864.