Branch Rickey Quotes

In her opinion, Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Birdseye are the two greatest Americans that ever lived excluding Robert E. Lee. She believes we never lost the War Between the States, that General Lee thought General Grant was the butler and just naturally handed him his sword.

I am of Virginia and all my professional life I have studied of Lee and Jackson

The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.

I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.

Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.

The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.

While the scars of the monstrous Civil War still remain, the wounds have closed since 1865, in large part, because of the civility of Grant and Lee.

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to think of the Confederacy only as a romantic lost cause.

The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books.

The slave-owning South won the subsequent ideological war…the consensus of history was that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

Robert E. Lee was responsible for the deaths of more American soldiers than Hitler and Tojo.

In the retrospect slavery seems like such a monstrous thing that some of us are trying to prove that slavery was not the cause of the war.

I was born about 80 years too late. If you were a kid in 1910, the Fourth of July was a big deal. You knew all about the Revolution, and you still had Civil War veterans.

From last century's 'The Birth of a Nation' to this century's 'Gods and Generals,' Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War and, thus, modern America's very origins.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

During the Civil War, the fledgling Republican Party constructed the nation's first activist government, using taxes to fund social welfare legislation for the first time in American history.