James Longstreet

About James Longstreet

Family

“General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arranged for battle can take that position.”
— As quoted in General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier: A Biography (1993), by Jeffry D. Wert, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 283
“That man Grant will fight us everyday and every hour until the end of the war.”
— As quoted in The Civil War (documentary) by Ken Burns
“The highest of human laws is the law that is established by appeal to arms. The sword has decided in favor of the North, and what they claimed as principles cease to be principles, and are become law. The views that we hold cease to be principles because they are opposed to law. It is our duty to abandon ideas that are obsolete and conform to the requirements of law.”
— Letter to the New Orleans Times (8 June 1867)
“Great God! I thought to myself, how my heart swells out out to such magnanimous touch of humanity. Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”
— The New York Times (24 July 1885)
“If it wasn't about slavery, then I don't know what else it was about.”
— Regarding the American Civil War, as quoted in Letter to the Fauquier Times Democrat (2011), by Clark B. "Bud" Hall, Middleburg, Virginia

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.