Lincoln Abraham - The war that forged a nation: why the Civil War still matters

Even before the many conferences, commemorations, books, exhibits, and other public events associated with the bicentennial of Abraham Lincolns birth in 2009 and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War from 2011 to 2015, that war was the most popular historical subject in many parts of the United States. In 1987 the historian at the Vicksburg National Military Park declared that Americans just cant get enough of the Civil War. A bookstore owner in Falls Church, Virginia, said a year or so later that for the last two years Civil War books have been flying out of here. Its not [just] the buffs who buy; its the general public, from high school kids to retired people. In 1990 some thirty million viewers watched the eleven hours of television documentary produced by Ken Burns, and rebroadcasts in the past two decades have lifted that number to at least fifty million in the United States and abroad. Civil War books are the leading sellers for the History Book Club. An estimated two hundred Civil War Round Tables meet monthly to listen to lectures and discuss the war. Thousands of Americans (and even some foreigners) are Civil War reenactors who fight mock battles every year before thousands of spectators at or near where they took place 150 years ago.

What accounts for this intense interest in the fratricidal conflict that almost tore the country apart? First, perhaps, was the sheer size of that conflict, fought not in some foreign land, as most American wars have been, but on battlefields from Pennsylvania to New Mexico and from Florida to Kansas, hallowed ground that Americans can visit today. Then there is the drama and tragedy of the wars human costsome 750,000 soldiers plus an unknown number of civilians who lost their lives in the war, according to the latest research. To illustrate the immensity of that figure, it equals 2.4 percent of the American population in 1860. If 2.4 percent of Americans were to be killed in a war fought today, the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million. Or to take another statistic: 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in a single day, at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. This figure was nearly four times the number of American casualties on D-day, June 6, 1944. The human cost of the Civil War cast a long shadow forward in our history, and continues to horrify us but also solemnly to impress us 150 years later.