BUY Rebel Flags For Sale“Our country demands all our strength, all our energies. To resist the powerful combination now forming against us will require every man at his place. If victorious, we will have everything to hope for in the future. If defeated, nothing will be left for us to live for.”
— attributed to General Robert E. Lee
A Call to Every Man
These words capture the situation General Lee faced through most of the war. The Confederacy had a far smaller population than the North, fewer factories, fewer railroads and almost no navy. Against those odds, Lee knew that victory depended on every soldier and every citizen doing his part.
The phrase “every man at his place” was more than a figure of speech. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was almost always outnumbered, often by two to one. At battles like Chancellorsville in 1863, Lee won by trusting his men and his officers to hold their ground and strike at the right moment.
Everything to Hope For
The quote also reflects what was at stake for the South. For the men in the ranks, the war was about defending their homes, their families and their states. If they won, they believed they could govern themselves as the Founders had intended. If they lost, they would lose the way of life their families had known for generations.
Lee’s Example
Lee asked nothing of his men that he did not ask of himself. He lived simply in the field, shared the hardships of his soldiers and refused special comforts. That example is a big part of why his men loved him and followed him to the very end at Appomattox.
The exact source of this quote has been hard to trace, but it is widely attributed to Lee and reflects the spirit of his wartime addresses. Read more about General Lee in General Eisenhower on Robert E. Lee and Happy Birthday, Robert E. Lee, and browse our Confederate flag collection.
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Exact commentary on time and our cultures progress…
Yep…. because the United States would no longer be a union of sovereignty for each state, but now stripped of that right the states will be in political homage to the central government the D.C, filling them with deceit so they never realize their participation in the union is voluntary