Shelby Foote Quotes
Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days.
Foote, Shelby. Interview by Academy of Achievement. Academy of Achievement, 19 June 1999.
Two days later Lee surrendered at Richmond, and the Civil War was over. On April 14, Lincoln was assassinated. He died the next day.
That is the way he was killed. The phrase, “We are bound to believe that, anyhow” indicates that Stuart really realized how futile the Southern war effort would be but loyalty and patriotism required him to suspend his rational belief structure.
The Virginia Campaign of May 1864 was clearly the beginning of the end of the war. This was clear at the time, not only to the military leaders of both sides, but also to the media and thence the general public in the North. At the beginning of the war the Army of the Potomac, the largest Union Army was commanded by McClellan whose concerns were with his own political career and not winning the war. He had an aversion to heavy fighting and did not see the war strategically as Lincoln, Grant and Sherman did: To cripple the capacity of the South to wage war. So the early history of the Army of the Potomac was a series of undecisive battles which were either standoffs or the Confederates won despite the much larger and better armed and equipped Union army. As soon as McClellan was replaced, things began to turn around and when Grant was selected for Command of all Union Troops, the Army of the Potomac performed much better, including taking Richmond, the Confederate Capital.
There were a number of world leaders who were not happy about the German Reunification. See Henry Kissinger {610355} for another.
Lincoln and the Union leaders were still hopeful of ending the rebellion and getting things back to a pre-war footing economically. At this point they were trying to preserve components of the Southern Economy at no small cost. As that hope was shown to be futile, the Total War strategy of Grant and Sherman prevailed to the satisfaction of men like Opdycke. That actually ended the war quickly, but the Southern Economy was devastated in the process.
1st Duke of Wellington
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he viewed himself primarily as a novelist, he is now best known for his The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
