Opinion : After 150 years, there still is much to learn about the Civil War

Imagine a war that claims the lives of 6.5 million Americans.

You can’t. I can’t. Nobody can. It’s unthinkable. What kind of conflict would require that many casualties?

The Civil War – which officially ended 150 years ago tomorrow – was that kind of conflict.

More than 600,000 soldiers -- 2 percent of all Americans – died between April 1861 and April 1865. Most were men; and despite our mental images of Gettysburg and Shiloh and many other memorable battle fields (and all those movies) more soldiers died of illness in military camps than from war wounds.  At that rate, a war with that grave of an impact would claim the lives of between six and seven million souls in a country with our current population of more than 315 million.

I’ve spent much of my spare time in the past year or so – inspired by Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” – studying various aspects of the Civil War. I read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “John Brown’s Body” and many other books and articles. I understand the pain of “Bull Run Russell,” the journalist who basically lost his position because he described factually just how huge of a defeat that early battle was for the Union. I re-read “Lincoln and the Press,” a comprehensive collection of how the media and Lincoln’s administration dealt with each other. I visited Kentucky Bend, where soldiers from Iowa saw some of their first action in the Battle of Island No. 10; and Lost River Cave near Bowling Green, where both Confederate and Union soldiers sought shelter – and where the names of Union soldiers written in candle smoke still remain.  I know discovered Priscilla’s Hollyhocks and The Waterford News – two unique stories about the impact young girls had on the war – and the impact the war had on them.  I know just a bit about “The Bishop” – Thomas Ewing, who raised William Sherman, “The Fighting Prophet,” and how Ewing taught the young boy how important it is to have a strong federal government. I studied the life of the 18th Century Native American Leader Tecumseh – whose name the “T” in William T. Sherman represents. I know just the basics about the most deadly anti-war protest in U.S. History – the draft riots in New York City, which claimed 1,000 lives (including former slaves and white police officers) a week after Gettysburg.

We recently learned more about Capt. Thomas Drummond, one of the last Iowans to die in the Civil war. I wrote last September about many Benton County men who died in the Battle of Atlanta, when the outlook for Lincoln's re-election looked bleak, and whose deaths helped win that battle, which restored faith among 1864 voters that the war was almost over and Lincoln had a plan. 

I learned things that shocked me, for example:

Q. How long was it after the Pilgrims arrived in 1620 before slaves ended up in the New World?

A. Actually, the slaves came first. A Dutch ship landed on our East Coast with more than 20 slaves in 1619.

Also quite surprising was learning about the 1,000 slaves who helped the Cherokee go west on what we now call the “Trail of Tears.”

I also learned about how the invisible line between “North” and “South” was anything but straight and well-defined. Many Northerners were as pro-slavery as southern plantation owners; many in the south opposed secession.

And just today, I learned about Wilbur McLean, whose claim that “the war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor” is actually historically accurate. I also learned this week that one of the very last people to die in the Civil War – slave Hannah Reynolds, whose master lived near Appomattox. I even learned how to spell “Appomattox."

And yet, there are so many things about the war that I will never know.

There’s no way that one newspaper column could even begin to explain the history and issues surrounding the Civil War, and how those things do and/or should affect us now. A library organization called IPL2 says there are currently more than 50,000 books on the Civil War spanning the last century and a half. Who counted them, I don’t know.

But with that many books available in print – and many of them available for free on-line – there is no reason we can’t all take a little time to read and reflect on that era, its people, its conflicts and their continued impact on our society.

I hope that as our nation marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the war this week – and the 150th anniversary of the death of President Abraham Lincoln next week – that all of us will take some time to remember that history, the cause of the conflict, the families who sacrificed so much to keep our Union united, and how a century and a half later, we Americans ought to examine of the issues of race and the role of government and how we should talk to and treat people with a different skin color than ours.

If you need a place to start this research, the words and phrases in blue above represent links to some of the things I have been reading over the past year. Thanks to many universities and organizations, many of those books written that long ago are available.

I think it’s our duty as Americans to take some time to study those books now.