Stephen W. Sears > Quotes

“My friends,” he began with good cheer, “how do you like this way of coming back into the Union?” He went on to explain that he and his fellow soldiers had felt the need of a summer outing, “and thought we would take it at the North.” They might be conquerors, he said—“this part of Pennsylvania is ours today; we’ve got it, we hold it, we can destroy it, or do what we please with it”—but they were also Christian gentlemen and would act accordingly. “You are quite welcome to remain here and to make yourselves entirely at home—so long as you behave yourselves pleasantly and agreeably as you are doing now. Are we not a fine set of fellows?” With his honeyed words he had the crowd in the palm of his hand, only to be interrupted by a querulous, impatient Jubal Early. Old Jube forced his way through the onlookers to confront Extra Billy and snarled, “General Smith, what the devil are you about? Stopping the head of this column in this cursed town!” Not the least taken aback, Extra Billy replied, “Having a little fun, General, which is good for all of us, and at the same time teaching these people something that will be good for them and won’t do us any harm.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg

“Harvey Hill expressed no regrets for his mulishness and no sympathy for what Lee was seeking to accomplish. “Genl. Lee is venturing upon a very hazardous movement,” he told his wife; “and one that must be fruitless, if not disastrous.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg

“to the icy roads and the pockets of resistance which”
― Stephen W. Sears, The Battle of the Bulge

“George McClellan was by no means the only Civil War general to believe he was outnumbered when he was not, but he was the only one to believe it so obstinately and for so long.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“General Lee, in his confidence that he could complete the Harper’s Ferry operation and reunite his army without interference, once again displayed an intuitive ability to read his opponent’s mind. It was an ability that General McClellan conspicuously lacked.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“The issue was at once sectional, political, and economic, and the result was a hopeless deadlock.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“Complaint was made, then and since, that Meade failed to coordinate his attacks, that he was not up to managing these offensive operations. But Cold Harbor was a stark demonstration that by 1864, whether coordinated or not, no frontal assault on the entrenched Army of Northern Virginia could possibly succeed. And at Cold Harbor Meade recognized that fact before Grant did.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac

“One of Pleasonton’s officers later observed that at Antietam the Federal cavalry arm “had not yet fallen into the hands of those who knew the proper use to make of it.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“Even as McClellan conferred with his superiors, sounds of renewed battle came from the direction of Chantilly, a country estate a few miles north of Centreville and on the flank of Pope’s army.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam

“The President says if Hooker had been killed by the shot which knocked over the pillar that stunned him, we should have been successful.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac

“Only the English created a new England, settled not by subjects of the Crown resolved to live beyond the seas, but by pioneers and builders in a land of new promise.”
― Stephen W. Sears, The British Empire

“Wise, seeing that his well was ruined, made the best of a bad bargain. He arranged to take over the job for a dollar a body, and before the day was out had filled his well, sealed it, and earned himself sixty dollars.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam

“Henry Halleck was a pedant and a military bureaucrat, but he was not an easy man to fool,”
― Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign

“The advance of a political general to corps command was disturbing enough to the old guard without the additional fact that Dan Sickles was, in a word, notorious. In 1859, in broad daylight a block from the White House in Washington, Sickles had shot down and killed his wife’s lover. Worse, the lover was Philip Barton Key, son of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sickles’s trial was the most sensational of its day. After lurid testimony he was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity, a pioneering defense that one of his attorneys, Edwin M. Stanton, helped construct. Sickles then proceeded to compound his notoriety by taking Mrs. Sickles back to his bed and board. There were those in the officer corps who shuddered at the prospect of Joe Hooker, Dan Butterfield, and Dan Sickles at the same headquarters.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“While he correctly judged General McClellan to be defensive-minded, it did not occur to him that General McClellan would give up so easily: that after a single battle—which the Federals won—he would decide to abandon his campaign, cut his losses, and run for safety.”
― Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign

“Whatever advantage he would have as a military administrator in 1861, he possessed no more tactical insights into the war to come than did any of his fellow (or opposing) generals.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“It is something of a curiosity that the American cavalry arm utilized a tactical manual and a saddle developed by an officer who had never served—and would never serve—a day with the cavalry.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“Like Pinkerton, Alfred Pleasonton combined great industry with small judgment.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“Joe Johnston was not a general noted for his attention to detail, and Seven Pines would demonstrate how careless he could be.”
― Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign

“the long roll called William Wofford’s Georgia brigade to fall in for duty. Orders were issued to fill haversacks with snowballs and form line of battle, and behind its color guards the brigade marched two miles to the camp of Joseph Kershaw’s South Carolina brigade. “We were in line of battle on a hill and Kershaw’s formed and come out to fight us,” Georgian Jim Mobley wrote his brother. “The field officers was on their horses and when they come against us, they come with a hollar! and, Benjamin, Great God, I never saw snow balls fly so in my life.” The order to open fire was given at 100 feet. Charge and countercharge were spirited by the Rebel yell. Combat was hand-to-hand, prisoners were taken. “I tell you it beat anything . . . ,” Mobley exclaimed. “There was 4000 men engaged on both sides, and you know it was something!”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“The fact of the matter is that George G. Meade, unexpectedly and against the odds, thoroughly outgeneraled Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg.18”
― Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg

“When it became necessary to replace Burnside, Joe Hooker’s popularity with the men would be a decisive factor in selecting him over John Reynolds or George Meade.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“the essential fault lay with the Confederacy’s failure to have produced a single good map of the approaches to its own capital.”
― Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign

“I prefer Lee to Johnston,” he explained. To his mind, General Lee was “too cautious & weak under grave responsibility . . . wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility & is likely to be timid & irresolute in action.”
― Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign

“Behind the recriminations was the fact that in this first test as a battlefield commander McClellan took resort in caution when his plan miscarried, leaving a portion of his army in possible peril.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“General Lee, having defended Richmond in June with 200,000 men and threatened Washington in August with 120,000, would hardly invade the North in September with an army of less than 120,000. That in fact General Lee commanded a third of that number—that he was daring to challenge the Army of the Potomac with so small a force—was a reality contrary to George McClellan’s most strongly held conviction.”
― Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon

“Confederates in Jackson’s column reported seeing a Yankee balloon—it was the Eagle—and assumed that if they could see it, it could see them. Yet such were conditions aloft that not a single report reached General Hooker that day from the aeronautical corps that an enemy column was marching to the south and west of Chancellorsville.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“Edwin Stanton made a point of shutting off inquiry into the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren affair. At war’s end he called on Francis Lieber, keeper of the captured Confederate archives, for the papers found on Dahlgren’s body. On December 1, 1865, these papers were delivered to Stanton at the War Department . . . and never seen again.”
― Stephen W. Sears, Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac

“At one point they passed a newly abandoned Rebel encampment, and Captain Bowers was surprised to see that it looked just like one of their own. “In every respect it was as good a camp as any we have had. . . .” (Rummaging through this campsite, men of the 2nd Maine came upon a packet of photographs of Federal soldiers. Someone recognized a name on one of them as a man in their brigade, and before long Sergeant Walter Carter, 22nd Massachusetts, was handed the pictures he had lost on the Fredericksburg battlefield five months earlier. And scavengers in the 83rd Pennsylvania recovered some of the fancy French knapsacks they had lost at Gaines’s Mill the previous June.)”
― Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville

“the Federal left, were undertaken by”
― Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg