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Mystic Cords of Memory: Our Fascination with the War

© Perry Cuskey

The last gun fell silent nearly 14 decades ago, yet in a sense the American Civil War remains with us still, defining us as a nation and haunting our collective memory in ways that we perhaps do not yet fully understand.

While the shooting war that began in 1861 finally came to an end in 1865, the 'writing war' that dealt with it was only getting started. It has been estimated that well over 50,000 books and magazine articles have appeared on this brief, violent period.

Why the continuing fascination? The United States has fought a number of wars in its history, yet save perhaps for World War II, no other war - and in many respects no other era of American history - has held our interest to the same extent as our national nightmare of the 1860's.

Perhaps the answer to this fascination lies in part with the sheer number of lives impacted by the war. More Americans were killed in that four-year span than in nearly all of our other wars put together.

The human toll on the Civil War generation itself can be difficult to grasp, even with the knowledge that over 600,000 of them did not survive the war. To put that figure in perspective, historian James McPherson points out in Drawn With the Sword that with our present population, a war today on the same scale would produce more than five million American casualties. One need not bleed either Blue or Gray to be given pause by such a thought.

The horrific nature of the war is further reflected in the fact that on several occasions, the casualties from individual battles exceeded those from previous American wars. Awesome conflicts such as Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Antietam, and Shiloh, brought the reality of warfare home to the country like never before. No other American generation has experienced death and suffering on such an astonishing scale.

In addition to the human cost involved, our fascination with the war may also stem from the tremendous changes it wrought.

The most far-reaching of these changes surely ranks as the greatest social transformation in American history - an entire race, the majority of which had been enslaved for generations, found itself at last on the road to freedom and equality.

That the road would be unnecessarily long and include far too many detours is beyond question; yet after being so long delayed, the speed with which the change took place is nothing if not remarkable. Over two hundred years of black slavery was brought to a sudden, crashing end in what amounted to the blink of an eye.