by ROBERT BECKHUSEN
This article was sponsored by Open Road Media.
The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history and those who lived through it were beset by what historian Bruce Catton described as an “air of outright melodrama.”
The war certainly took on apocalyptic dimensions for many Americans. For others, it was a reckoning. The secession of the slave states and the outbreak of war in 1861 would escalate into an event which, to this day, is hard to wrap the mind around.
More than 700,000 people died. Millions of black slaves would be freed with the vanquishing of the Confederacy. There’s a strong argument that the Civil War was America’s second revolution.
I wish I knew more about the Civil War, which forever shaped the contours of my country’s society and politics. What I encountered in Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army is astonishing.
“The least inhibited theatrical director nowadays would throw out large parts of the script on the simple ground that it was too wild to be credible,” he writes.
