Ely Parker, a full-blooded Seneca Indian was at the surrender at Appomattox. Robert E. Lee remarked to him, “I’m glad to see one real American here.”  Parker replied, “We’re all real Americans here.”

The PBS Civil War series by Ken Burns is burned into my being. I wore out my VHS tapes, and the masterful telling, the haunting movement of the camera lens over the black & white photos, the uncanny matching of modern-day voice to olden-day war participant resulted in my personal book awakening. In the miniseries, historian Shelby Foote says something like (paraphrasing): Any understanding of this nation has to be based on an understanding of the Civil War. Those words, that premise, speaks to me – I want to be closer to my country.

A lot of people want to be closer to their country. It is estimated that there are as many as 50,000 Civil War reenactors in America. History is about trying to get into the head or the shoes of someone who lived long ago and far away. And so it is with the Civil War, those consequences can tell us valuable things about our countrymen, about what motivates them, about the burdens they carry. Southern Democrats, so-called Fire-Eaters, sabotaged their own party in the 1860 election (making sure multiple men would split the Democratic vote), to ensure a Lincoln victory and all but guarantee secession. The Civil War was no fluke; it didn’t happen by chance, rather by design. For some, keeping what they had, namely, a slave-centric lifestyle was more important than country. In nine southern states in the 1860 election, not a single voter requested a Republican ballot. As such, it’s no surprise South Carolina seceded even before Lincoln took office, causing South Carolina lawyer James Louis Petigru to comment, “South Carolina is too small to be a country and too large for an insane asylum.”

Slaves in Mississippi picked cotton from “kin to cain’t” (from when you kin see the sun till when you cain’t). A field hand was worth $1,100 in 1800 ($75,000 to $135,000 today). The Civil War in Mississippi wasn’t theoretical, it was personal; just how personal could depend on your station in life. The average citizen owned no slaves, so when the Twenty-Slave Law went into effect exempting a Confederate man from service if he owned 20 slaves, it brought unmistakable perspective. Said Jasper Collins, a member of the so-called Free State of Jones: “This makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Even in the face of such an aristocratic loophole, the typical Mississippian was more than willing to pay the price. Seventy-eight thousand Mississippians fought, 28,000 died, 31,000 were wounded, the highest per capita casualty rate of any state North or South. Are you lucky or cursed in life if you encounter a cause you’re willing to die for?

It is theorized there may be as many as 200 “witness trees” at Gettysburg (trees that were at Gettysburg in 1863 and are still there now). What does the ruffle of a leaf, the creaking of a branch really say? A soldier’s body was found in Gettysburg in 1996 – 133 years or so after the fact, someone noticed a human protrusion, poking from the soil. The Daughters of the Confederacy had 3,320 Confederate bodies exhumed from Gettysburg for burial in the South. Hatred so deep, the land of our forefathers was deemed unworthy. There were 27,000 Rebel and 23,000 Union casualties at Gettysburg – 10 times the number of American casualties on D-Day.  All 103 of the Mississippi Grays were killed during Pickett’s Charge – every last one.

Bravery was not blue. Bravery was not gray. It came from unlikely places to be sure, but it was omnipresent. One hundred and forty thousand Irish fought in the Civil War. Many were recent immigrants, so for all practical purposes, it wasn’t their fight. They saw it differently. The Irish Brigade from New York City had a casualty rate fifty percent higher than all but two other units during the war. Honor was reason enough. Before the Civil War, most Southern leaders thought, “You may slap a Yankee in the face and he’ll go off and sue you, but he won’t fight.” Underestimating a patriot is not wise. Never question the passion of a man who is passive, or more pointedly, don’t assume the way a man lives is the way he will fight. 

The Civil War, as is true of all wars, seemed to find inventive new ways to get that killing done. The Union Army deployed eight hot air balloons, allowing soldiers for the first time to bomb something or someone they could not see, enemies up to three miles away. It’s quite possible that faraway enemy target or the guy doing the blind shooting was barefoot or seriously lacking adequate footwear. Union soldiers were issued what were called “gunboats,” shoddy shoes with no left or right. But regardless of the method or the attire, the most chilling and ultimately captivating aspect of the Civil War was who was doing the shooting. Maybe your neighbor, maybe the guy in the pew next to you at church, maybe your brother, maybe your roommate from West Point. On April 18, 1861, at the Blair House in Washington, D.C., Francis P. Blair on behalf of Abraham Lincoln, offered Lee command of the Union Army, to which someone commented: “The reverberation of a single yes or no …” In the end, only one thing is more unimaginable than taking up arms against your kindred or your country and that is the tenacity of kindred and country. “We’re all Americans here.”