"Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books."
--Walt Whitman
"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth...could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years... If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
--Abraham Lincoln
"We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.... In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes
"I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country that the dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, an I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation."
--Robert E. Lee
"Sunday a soldier of Company A died and was buried. Everything went on as if nothing had happened, for death is so common that little sentiment is wasted. It is not like a death at home."
--Elisha Hunt Rhodes, 2nd Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry
"The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. Mr. Matthew Brady has done something to bring us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along our streets, he has done something very like it."
--The New York Times
"Dear Henry, I feel more lonely and sad than I have been in some time.... Oh! that I knew what the termination of this awful conflict would be. Henry, I want to see you, but don't you come. Join for the War if 'tis forty years. If you get killed, 'tis the most honorable death. If you escape I will rejoice. I love thee still."
--Mollie Vanderberg