Did you know...
Though C.S.A. General James Longstreet was a Confederate in the war, after the war, he joined the Republican Party and supported rights and freedoms for former slaves which made him unpopular to former Confederates harrassed and impoverished by the War and Reconstruction. Longstreet was one of the foremost Confederate generals of the American Civil War and the principal subordinate to General Robert E. Lee, who called him his "Old War Horse" and "the staff in my right hand." He served under Lee as a corps commander for many of the famous battles fought by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Eastern Theater, but also with Gen. Braxton Bragg in the Army of Tennessee in the Western Theater. Biographer and historian Jeffry D. Wert wrote that Longstreet, "was the finest corps commander in the Army of Northern Virginia; in fact, he was arguably the best corps commander in the conflict on either side." After the War, he led African-American militia against the anti-Reconstruction White League at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874 in which he was eventually pulled from his horse, shot by a spent bullet (i.e. not badly injured) and taken prisoner. Criticism from authors in the Lost Cause movement attacked Longstreet's war career for many years after his death. Knudsen maintains that because Longstreet became a "reconstructed rebel", embraced equal rights for blacks, unification of the nation, and Reconstruction, he became the target of those who wanted to maintain racist policies and otherwise could not accept the verdict of the battlefield.

Some Quotes

C.S.A. General Robert E. Lee, "I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South its dearest rights. But I have never cherished toward them bitter or vindictive feelings, and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them."

U.S.A. General Ulysses S. Grant, "The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on."

C.S.A. General Stonewall Jackson letter to his pastor after the First Battle of Bull Run, "My dear pastor, in my tent last night, after a fatiguing day's service, I remembered that I failed to send a contribution for our colored Sunday school. Enclosed you will find a check for that object, which please acknowledge at your earliest convenience and oblige yours faithfully."

U.S.A. General William Tecumseh Sherman in a letter to his wife dated 7/1864, "I regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash — and it may be well that we become so hardened."

Quote from Sherman's memoirs, "You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the national feeling."