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The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde,
New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont,
and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans
fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population,
died in it.
American homes became headquarters, American churches and
schoolhouses sheltered the dying, and huge foraging armies
swept across American farms and burned American towns. Americans
slaughtered one another wholesale, right here in America
in their own cornfields and peach orchards, along familiar
roads and by waters with old American names.
In two days at Shiloh, on the banks of the Tennessee River,
more American men fell than in all the previous American wars
combined. At Cold Harbor, some 7,000 Americans fell in twenty
minutes. Men who had never strayed twenty miles from their own front
doors now found themselves soldiers in great armies, fighting
epic battles hundreds of miles from home. They knew they were
making history, and it was the greatest adventure of their
lives.
The Civil War has been given many names: the War Between the
States, the War Against Northern Aggression, the Second American
Revolution, the Lost Cause, the War of the Rebellion, the Brothers’
War, the Late Unpleasantness. Walt
Whitman called it the War of Attempted Secession. Confederate
General Joseph Johnston called it the War Against the States.
By whatever name, it was unquestionably the most important event
in the life of the nation. It saw the end of slavery and the
downfall of a southern planter aristocracy. It was the watershed
of a new political and economic order, and the beginning of
big industry, big business, big government. It was the first
modern war and, for Americans, the costliest, yielding the most
American fatalities and the greatest domestic suffering, spiritually
and physically. It was the most horrible, necessary, intimate,
acrimonious, mean-spirited, and heroic conflict the nation has
ever known.
Inevitably, we grasp the war through such hyperbole. In so
doing, we tend to blur the fact that real people lived through
it and were changed by the event. One hundred eighty-five
thousand black Americans fought to free their people. Fishermen
and storekeepers from Deer Isle, Maine, served bravely and
died miserably in strange places like Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
and Fredericksburg, Virginia. There was scarcely a family
in the South that did not lose a son or brother or father.
As with any civil strife, the war was marked by excruciating
ironies. Robert E. Lee became a legend in the Confederate army
only after turning down an offer to command the entire Union
force. Four of Lincoln’s own brothers-in-law fought on
the Confederate side, and one was killed. The little town of
Winchester, Virginia, changed hands seventy-two times during
the war, and the state of Missouri sent thirty-nine regiments
to fight in the siege of Vicksburg: seventeen to the Confederacy
and twenty-two to the Union.
Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers — if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible. What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a "new birth of freedom."
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