The Civil War

"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.

By the summer of 1861, Wilmer McLean had had enough.

Two great armies were converging on his farm,

and what would be the first major battle of the Civil War...

Bull Run, or Manassas, as the Confederates called it...

would soon rage across the aging Virginian's farm,

a Union shell going so far as to explode in the summer kitchen.

Now McLean moved his family away from Manassas,

far south and west of Richmond,

out of harm's way, he prayed,

to a dusty little crossroads called.

Appomattox Courthouse,

and it was there in his living room, 3½ years later,

that Lee surrendered to Grant.

And Wilmer McLean could rightfully say

that "the war began in my front yard"

"and ended in my front parlor."

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 three million Americans fought in it,

and over 600,000 men, 2% 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 here, in America,

in their own corn fields and peach orchards,

along familiar roads, and by waters

with old American names.

In two days at Shiloh, on the banks of the Tennessee,

more American men fell than in all previous American wars combined.

At Cold Harbor,

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 war made some rich, ruined others,

and changed forever the lives of all who lived through it:

a lackluster clerk from Galena, Illinois,

a failure in everything except marriage and war,

who, in three years, would be head of the Union army,

and in seven, President of the United States;

an eccentric student of theology and military tactics,

a hypochondriac who rode into battle with one hand raised

"to keep," he said, "the blood balanced;"

a college professor from Maine,

who, on a little hill in Pennsylvania,

ordered an unlikely textbook maneuver

that saved the Union army and possibly the Union itself.

Two ordinary soldiers...

one from Providence, Rhode Island,

the other from Columbia, Tennessee,

who each served four years

and together seemed to have been everywhere during the war

and lived to tell the tale;

the courtly, unknowable aristocrat,

who disapproved of secession and slavery,

yet went on to defend them both

at the head of one of the greatest armies of all time;

the runaway boy who "stole himself" from slavery,

recruited two regiments of black soldiers,

and helped transform the Civil War

into a struggle for the freedom of all Americans;

and then there was the rough man from Illinois,

who would rise to be the greatest president

the country has ever seen.

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 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."

1938... 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

President Roosevelt spoke to the remaining few Civil War veterans.

“Veterans of the blue and the gray:

“On behalf of the people of the United States,

“I accept this monument

“in the spirit of brotherhood and peace.”

Year after year, the nation remembered.

In 1930, veterans of the Union army

marched in Cincinnati, Ohio;

four years later, in New York City.

They and the surviving veterans of the Confederacy

were the last link

with a terrible conflict that tore America apart

from 1861 to 1865.

The last Civil War veteran would die in 1959,

and no longer would there be living memories of long-ago battles,

only history and legends.

Any understanding of this nation

has to be based, and I mean really based,

on an understanding of the Civil War.

I believe that firmly. It defined us.

The revolution did what it did.

Our involvement in European wars,

beginning with the First World War, did what it did,

but the Civil War defined us as what we are,

and it opened us to being what we became,

good and bad things.

And it... it is very necessary

if you're going to understand the American character

in the twentieth century

to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-19th century.

It was the... the... the crossroads of our being,

and it was a hell of a crossroads.

For me, the picture

of the Civil War as a

historic phenomenon

is not on the battlefield. It's not about weapons.

It's not about soldiers,

except to the extent that weapons and soldiers

at that crucial moment

joined a discussion about something higher,

about humanity, about human dignity,

about human freedom.

"Whence shall we expect the approach of danger?

"Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?

"Never.

"All the armies of Europe and Asia

"could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River

"or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves"

"be its author and finisher."

"As a nation of free men, we will live forever,"

"or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln, 1837.

In 1861, most of nation's thirty-one million people

lived peaceably on farms and in small towns.

At Sharpsburg, Maryland, a German pacifist sect, the Dunkards,

made their home in a sea of wheat and corn.

In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, population 2,400,

young men studied Latin and mathematics at the small college there.

Steamboats filled with cotton

came and went at Vicksburg on the Mississippi.

In Washington, D.C, Senator Jefferson Davis

reviewed plans for remodeling the capitol.

In Richmond, the 900 employees of the Tredegar Iron Works

turned out gun carriages and cannon

for the U.S. Government.

At West Point on the Hudson, officers trained,

and friendships were formed they thought would last a lifetime.

"In thinking of America,

"I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky

"her grand old woods,"

"her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers,"

"her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains,"

"but my rapture is soon checked

"when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit

"of slave-holding and wrong;

"when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers,

"the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean,

"disregarded and forgotten,

"that her most fertile fields drink daily

of the warm blood of my outraged sisters,

"I am filled with unutterable loathing."

Frederick Douglass.

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's (Jacob's)

Ladder (ladder)

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's (Jacob's)

Ladder (ladder)

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacobs.

Ladder.

Soldiers.

Of the.

Cross.

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing, )

We will (we will)

Make it (make it)

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing, )

We will (we will)

Make it (make it)

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing, )

We will (we will)

Make it (make it)

Soldiers.

Of the.

Cross.

"No day ever dawns for the slave,"