"The Rebel army is now the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac"
-- Joseph Hooker spoke these pompous words shortly before he was soundly defeated by Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville
"Pray excuse me. I cannot take it"
-- These words were Jefferson Davis' last, spoken in response to his wife's attempt to give him medicine shortly before he died on December 6, 1889, at age 81
"Hello, Massa; bottom rail on top dis time"
-- A black Union soldier spoke these words to a Confederate prisoner he recognized--his former master
"Send for a clergyman, I wish to be baptised. I have been basely murdered."
-- General William Nelson, commander of the Union Army of Kentucky, made this final request after being fatally shot by a fellow officer, General Jefferson C. Davis, during an argument in Louisville in 1862.
"Our Southern brethren have done grievously, they have rebelled and 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, defender of Fort Sumter in April of 1861, gave this assessment of the situation between North and South.
"Slavery was undoubtedly the immediate fomenting cause of the woeful American conflict. It was the great political factor around which the passions of the sections had long been gathered --the tallest pine in the the political forest around whose top the fiercest lightnings were to blaze and whose trunk was destined to be shivered in the earthquake shocks of war. But slavery was far from being the sole cause of the prolonged conflict. Neither it's destruction on the one hand,nor its defense on the other, was the energizing force that held the contending armies to four years of bloody work. I apprehend that if all living union soldiers were summoned to the witness-stand, everyone of them would testify that it was the preservation of the American Union and not the destruction of Southern slavery that induced him to volunteer at the call of his Country. As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps 80% of her armies were neither slave holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed then the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its begining to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the union." --General John B. Gordon