William C. Davis > Quotes

“Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid “uninteresting men,” wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he “would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self.”212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that “my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“Notwithstanding our boastful assertions to the world, for nearly a century, that our government was based on the consent of the people, it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed. - Robert E. Lee”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“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.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“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.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“I trust that our merciful God, our only help & refuge, will not desert us in this our hour of need, but will deliver us by His almighty hand, that the whole world may recognize His power & all hearts be lifted up in adoration & praise of His unbounded loving kindness,” he said. “We must however submit to His almighty will, whatever that may be.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee -- The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged

“This was a people's war. All the people had a stake in it. All the people had an obligation to put their hearts and wealth and blood into it. All would find their futures indelibly shaped by it.”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee--The War They Fought, The Peace They Forged

“the safest course seemed to be to stay within the sources of their own time, written at the moment by those who knew the men and witnessed their acts, and as much as possible to use the directly contemporary writings of the men themselves”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee -- The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged

“the splendid future of an Independent South.” “Stimulate domestic manufacturing & local commerce,” said Davis. Thus Charleston and New Orleans would vie with Boston and New York as commercial centers. Though Davis was only reiterating his oft-expressed wish for economic”
― William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour

“by spring 1862 it became universal throughout Confederate regiments for the soldiers to elect their leaders from colonel down to sergeants, the very imposition of military democracy that would lead some to bemoan the demagoguery and wire-pulling with the men in order to seek election.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“This is the secret of our strength and national vitality,” he went on. Significantly, DeBow spoke of Southerners as a “nationality.” Nations were ruined by a diversity of interests pulling them apart, he said, and in the case of the North by too much immigration from inferior north European peoples such as Poles, Russians, shanty Irish, and especially Germans, who instead of assimilating into the population and being elevated by it, rather remained apart in their own ethnic communities and thus dragged down the whole.21Somehow, he failed to grasp that by his own logic the African root stock of Southern slaves would be superior to the whites’ balmier Mediterranean origins.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“But the most interesting of all slave maladies was what Cartwright chose to call “drapetomania,” the disease that made blacks want to run away from slavery.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“A poor man might count for very little, but he was still free and white, which at least made him better than a free black or a slave, and in a society deeply dominated by class and caste, that was something worth fighting for.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“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.”
― William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy

“It was one more reason for Rhett to conclude that if the Confederacy was to be saved from Davis and his ilk, it was up to him to do it in the Permanent Constitution. Unlike Davis, Rhett always preferred to strike the first blow, and though over the years he had lost almost all his political battles, he still believed that initiative meant advantage.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Significantly, in a movement that all declared to be predicated on the sovereignty of the states, the one area in which now and again in the future they would deny state sovereignty would be slavery. To theold Union they had said that Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not state rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Grant himself.14 “Hereafter,” he resolved, “I intend to be careful not to give them any news worth publishing.”15”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee -- The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged

“he recognized slavery as a vital element of social morale, for even the lowliest white still could stand with pride knowing that he was the superior of a black. Slavery gave poor whites a social status nowhere else enjoyed by the peasantry, and as proof he argued that some of the most ardent supporters of slavery were whites too poor themselves to own slaves.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“The whole scene so reeked of penny romance that it bordered on the ludicrous . . . It was all really happening, but more like fiction come to life, a Waverly novel gone mad. Years later, Mark Twain would only half in jest propose that the American Civil War was to be blamed on Sir Walter Scott, that the people of the South had somehow persuaded themselves that the mythical era of gallant knights and fair damsels of Ivanhoe had come to life in Dixie.”
― William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War

“Consequently, as an admonition to all, he named this youngest boy States Rights Gist.”
― William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy

“87The Confederacy had become virtually a welfare state ahead of its time, and yet again the antithesis of the hands-off government ethic upon which so much of Southern political and social ideology lay based.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“They did retain the prohibition on the African slave trade, not from any opposition to slavery but simply as sound business policy. The South no longer needed it, and introduction of new slaves from abroad served only to act on supply and demand by reducing the value of those already there.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“59Southern society and politics had always been fueled in large degree by personality and temperament as much as policy”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Before long the impetus for prohibition spread to all of the states, and even without martial law their legislatures began to pass laws prohibiting distillation for any purposes other than medicinal use.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“26They might not be able to inflame poor non-slaveholding whites to secession and possible war to protect the planter’s investment in slaves, but an appeal to fears of racial amalgamation cut across class lines.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“The lesson offered by the breakdown of determination and morale on the Confederate home front was that democracy might be strong, but not strong enough to survive in the face of a sustained inability to keep peace and protect life and property.Protection proved to be the defining element in individual and community morale among the civil population. They would suffer hardship and scarcity, starvation and dislocation, and even the deaths of their sons and brothers, but in a culture that for generations had been accustomed to the maintenance of civil order by national, state, or local authorities, such a breakdown was near fatal. In the end, the greatest internal enemy of Confederate democracy was fear.112”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Reflecting from the vantage of more than a century, we can see today how trapped the leaders of the South felt in 1860. That the snare was only partially genuine, and partially in their imaginations and fears, made it no less real to them at the time. They had to act on the basis of what they knew and believed, and the fact that subsequent events and detached dispassionate study reveal that some of their belief was chimerical does not signify.”
― William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy

“Thanks to inaccurate reports of the number of men paroled in the two surrenders, he concluded that Lee and Johnston had yielded less than 40,000. “Is there not something remarkable in these numbers?” he asked. “Is there not something that both the Yankees and our own people have strangely overlooked? Where is Lee’s real army? Where is Johnston’s army? Not surrendered, by at least eighty thousand good men as ever shouldered a musket.” Rationalizing that the two generals had surrendered only some state militia and a lot of officers to fool the Yankees, he concluded that there must be up to 100,000 unparoled Confederate soldiers somewhere in the East and that they “will yet be heard from in this war.”
― William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America

“Adherence to Joseph E. Johnston would be Jefferson Davis’ greatest mistake of 1862-1863 and one of his greatest of the war.”
― William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy

“Cerro Gordo,”
― William C. Davis, Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee -- The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged