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The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and TUI-Lahoma, Tennessee, to St

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The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and TUI-Lahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vedmohan 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 Livermore American men fell than in all the previous American war? 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 soldier 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 na es: the War Between the States, the War Against Northern Aggression, the Sefond American Revolution, the Lost Cause,

the War of the Rebellion, the Brothers' War, the Late Unpleasantness. Walt Whit-man called it the War of Attempted Secession. Confederate General Joseph Johnston called it the War Against the States. By whatever name, it was unques-tionably 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, Ond the beginning of big industry, big business, big government. It was the first modern War and, fo 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 know

Inevitably, we grasp the war thrpugh such hyperbole. In O doing, we tend to blur the fact that real people it and were changed by the eveot. One

hundred eighty-five thousan black Americansrfou ht to free their people. Fisher-men and storekeepers frorp [j

eer Isle, Maine, serve miserably in

strange places like Baton Rduge, Louisiana, and Fredericksburg, Virginiq.lhere was scarcely a family the South that, did not lose a son r broth rp falher.

As with any pivil strife, the war as marked by excruciating ironesiRpbert E.ILee became a legend in thyCo ederatp army only after tu/ninådown On offer o

vFQVr of Lincoln's own brothers-in-lax)v foughi n

command the entire Union f

the Confederate side, end o e wa$ killed. The little towp of WI chester Virginia, changed hands seventy-two tiÆes during the war, and-ithe st te of Missouri sent thirty-nine regiments to fight j th lege of Vicks rg.•enteen to thé C nfeder acy and twenty-two to the n n.

Between 186 end '1 865, Ameri ansmade war on each,otheiand killed each oth-er in great nUmbers— if only.tU become the k!n4 Of cqyntry that could no longer

conceive o how thaVWas pössible. Whatbégci as a btter dispute ver Unen

and States' ights, ended asa struggle3öv'9if the mea ih of freedom in Ameriqa. At Gettysburg in 1 6j Abraham Lincoln said perhaps 0 6 than he knew. The war

ew irth of freedom."

was about

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