And In
The End...
"Shortly after Appomattox, Walt
Whitman, a Brooklyn journalist and sometime poet who worked in the appalling Union
hospitals, warned prosperity of what he had seen. "Future Years will never know
the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and
interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never
get in the book."
In the century and a quarter since
the war's conclusion more than fifty thousand books have been published on the Civil War;
countless personal diaries and regimental histories, biographies and military narratives,
pictorial essays, social analyses, works that have treated the causes and effects,
demographics, crop statistics, and even the weather. There have been books of maps, books
of letters, books of orders, books of books, philosophical essays, novels, poems and
music. Each year dozens of new titles appear, offering to revisit the war, to reinterpret
or rearrange those strange days and hard events.
And yet Whitman's words retain their
force. The "real war" stays there, outside all the books, beckoning to us. Why
did Americans kill each other? How did it happen? Who were these people who fought and
killed, marched and sang, wrote home, skedaddled, deserted, died, nursed, lamented,
persevered? What was it like to be in that war? What did it do to America and Americans?
Why are we still so drawn to this tale of suffering, catastrophe, valor and death?
Geoffrey C.
Ward, Ken Bums, Ric Bums
PBS Series
"The CIVIL WAR"
"Any understanding of this nation
has to based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. It defined
us. The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good
and bad things. Its was the crossroads of our being; the suffering the enormous tragedy of
the whole thing. Its what made us a nation. Before the war, people had a theoretical
notion of having a country, but when the war was over, on both sides they knew they had a
country. They'd been there. They had walked its hills and trampled its roads. They saw the
country. And they knew the effort that they had expended and their dead friends had
expended to preserve it Before the war, it was said "The United States are..."
After the war, it was always United States is....
Shelby Foote
"the sun rises over the hills and
sets over the mountains, the compass just points up and down, and we can now laugh at the
absurd notion of there being a north and a south... We are one and undivided
Sam Watkins Company H 1st Tennessee
Regiment
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous Page |
Next Page |
|
Last update: Friday, November 05, 1999
http://www.nps.gov/vick/eduguide/chp_7/intheend.htm |
|
|
|
|