Best 9 quotes of S. C. Gwynne on MyQuotes

And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.

If news of his impending doom bothered Jackson, he did not show it. He sent no urgent dispatches to Richmond; he asked no counsel of any of his officers. He wrote no dramatic letters home, as Banks had, bidding a sentimental farewell to his wife as his own death loomed. Jackson seemed, in fact, at the center of this building storm, to be completely calm.

Jackson went happily into the field anyway, calmly picking and eating the ripe fruit even though, as Douglas observed, “the bullets seemed to be as plentiful as blackberries.” At one point he turned to his increasingly anxious aide and, with a large, juicy berry between his thumb and finger, asked Douglas casually “in what part of the body I preferred being shot.” Douglas, nervously handing the general berries while minié balls whistled overhead and buried themselves in the trees around them, replied that while his first choice was to be hit in his clothing, he preferred anyplace other than his face or joints. Jackson said he had “the old-fashioned horror of being shot in the back and so great was his prejudice on the subject that he often found himself turning his face in the direction from which the bullets came.” Just then a bullet thudded into a sapling near their heads, and Jackson, with a “vague remark about getting his horse killed,” reluctantly left the feast.18

Some of them screamed for locks of his hair, to which the blushing general replied, “Really, ladies, this is the first time I was ever surrounded by the enemy!

Stonewall Jackson was master of all he surveyed. Two Union forces were withdrawing from his front. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to it. The campaign, which started with a single enemy army pursuing Jackson southward through the valley, would end with two beaten Union armies withdrawing from him in a northerly direction. A week later, Jackson advised his mapmaker, Hotchkiss, to 'never take counsel of your fears.' A person who followed such advice would be doomed to a short life.

Success depended once again on speed and deception, qualities that residents of the Shenandoah Valley were beginning to associate with Thomas Jackson. •

There is no way to know Jackson’s thought process as he prepared to engage the Union army in front of him. He knew very little about it and certainly he had no idea that, at the moment he ordered his men to advance, he was actually outnumbered five to one. But it was characteristic of the man that his means of determining the enemy’s strength was to hit the enemy in the face and then see what happened. Typical, too, was his impatience to fight. As at Port Republic, he chose to attack before his full force had arrived.

The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon. And when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.

Will you follow me back to where the fighting is going on?” The men—one hundred of them—responded with a resounding yes. Now Bee pointed to his left, up the slope toward the pine woods on the edge of Henry Hill. “Yonder stands Jackson like a stone wall,” he said. “Let’s go to his assistance.”16