Original subtitles

"Were these things real?

"Did I see those brave and noble countrymen of mine

"laid low in death and weltering in their blood?

"Did I see our country laid waste and in ruins?

"Did I see soldiers marching, the earth trembling

"and jarring beneath their measured tread?

"Did I see the ruins of smoldering cities

"and deserted homes?

"Did I see the flag of my country, that I had followed so long,

"furled to be no more unfurled forever?

"Surely, they are but the vagaries

"of mine own imagination.

"But hush! I now hear the approach of battle.

"That low, rumbling sound in the west

"is the roar of cannon in the distance."

Private Sam Watkins, Company H,

First Tennessee Regiment.

"Strange, is it not,

"that battles, martyrs, blood,

"even assassination,

"should so condense a nationality?"

Walt Whitman.

It is the event in American history in that

it is the moment that made

the United States as a nation,

and I mean that in different ways.

The United States was obviously a nation

when it adopted a constitution,

but it adopted a constitution that

required a war to be sorted out

and therefore required a war to make a real nation

out of what was a theoretical nation as...

as it was designed at the Constitutional Convention.

Before the war, it was said, "the United States are."

Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a

collection of independent states,

and after the war, it was always "the United States is,"

as we say today without being self-conscious at all.

And that sums up what the war accomplished.

It made us an "is."

The Confederate States of America had once stretched

from the Rappahannock to the Rio Grande.

Its leaders had once dreamed of a tropical empire

reaching ever southward

to Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua,

Brazil.

By April 1865, the dream was gone.

Richmond had fallen.

The Confederate government, and Jefferson Davis with it,

had fled into the wilderness of North Carolina.

The Confederate armies, once the terror of the Union,

had been battered and starved almost out of existence

and then forced to surrender at Appomattox,

where Ulysses S. Grant

had finally cornered Robert E. Lee.

In April 1865, Elisha Hunt Rhodes

would receive the best news of the war

and then the worst.

In the woods of North Carolina,

two old adversaries,

William Tecumseh Sherman

and Joseph E. Johnston,

would meet on the field of battle one last time.

By then, Confederate Sam Watkins would write,

"the once proud Army of Tennessee

"had degenerated to a mob."

In April 1861,

Abraham Lincoln had implored his countrymen

not to go to war.

to listen to "the better angels" of their nature.

Now in April 1865,

the bloodshed was finally coming to an end.

But in Washington, John Wilkes Booth

could not accept that the war was over.

In four years, more than a million photographs

were made of the war.

Now, no one seemed to want them anymore.

Mathew Brady went bankrupt.

Thousands of glass-plate negatives were lost,

mislaid or forgotten.

Thousands more were sold to gardeners,

not for the images they held,

but for the glass itself.

In the years that followed Appomattox,

the sun slowly burned the image of war

from thousands of greenhouse glass panes.

"The Civil War," a Harvard professor wrote at the time,

"opened a great gulf between what happened before in our century

"and what has happened since.

"It does not seem to me as if I were living

"in the country in which I was born."

The war was over, and it was not over.

"My shoes are gone.

"My clothes are gone. I'm weary, I'm sick, I'm hungry.

"My family have all been killed or scattered.

"and I have suffered all this for my country.

"I love my country, but if this war is ever over,

"I'll be damned if I ever love another country."

"So Blackwood and I left the army...

"our army...left them there on the hill with their arms

"stacked in the field, all in rows,

"never to see it anymore.

"Telling Clarke and Bell good-bye,

"we crossed the road into the fields and thickets

"and in a little while lost sight of

"all that told of the presence of what was left of the army."

Barry Benson.

Monday, April 10th.

"Lee and his army

"have surrendered! Gloria in excelsis deo.

"They can bother and perplex none but historians henceforth,

"forever.

"There is no such army anymore, God be praised."

George Templeton Strong.

"Near Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia.

"Glory to God in the highest!

"Peace on earth, good will to men!

"Thank God Lee has surrendered, and the war will soon end.

"How can I record the events of this day?

"Such a scene only happens once in centuries.

"General Meade rode like mad down the road with his hat off, shouting,

" 'The war is over, and we are going home!'

"The men threw their knapsacks and canteens into the air

"and howled like mad.

"The rebels are half-starved,

"and our men divided their rations with them.

"I cried and laughed by turns.

"I was never so happy in my life.

"I thank God for all his blessings to me

"and that my life has been spared to see this glorious day."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

Word of Lee's surrender spread fast.

A galloping rider shouted the good news

to Sherman's army in North Carolina,

and one gleeful soldier bellowed back at him,

"You're the son of a bitch we've been looking for

"all these four years!"

Church bells rang out in every northern town.

The people of Deer Isle, Maine,

had followed the steady march of Union victories

with the same joy felt by towns all over the north,

and when news of Appomattox got out to the islands,

shouting horsemen carried it from house to house.

But the grieving did not end.

Private William Toothaker succumbed to disease

aboard a transport ship,

leaving four small children whose memories of him

would quickly fade.

And a letter came, informing Private Albion Stinson's wife

that her husband had been killed near Appomattox Courthouse

just five days before the Confederate surrender.

When the news reached Clarksville, Tennessee, the Union military governor

ordered a grand, city- wide celebration.

"All the storehouses were brilliantly lighted.

"These blue devils desecrated our churches

"by ringing the bells.

"They did all in their power to a-rile us."

Nannie Haskins.

At Vicksburg, 2,000 liberated Union prisoners

crowded onto the decks of the steamboat "Sultana,"

gleeful to be on their way north at last.

Near Memphis, a boiler exploded,

and she burst into flames.

More than 1,200 men died,

still hundreds of miles from home.

"We are scattered,

"stunned.

"The remnant of heart left alive in us is

"filled with brotherly hate.

"Whose fault?

"Everybody blamed by somebody else.

"Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark

"on the battlefield escape."

Mary Chesnut.

When the news of the surrender reached Edmund Ruffin,

the old Virginia secessionist who had fired one of the

first shots at Fort Sumter,

he draped a rebel flag over his shoulders and shot himself

rather than live, he wrote, "in a restored Union

"with members of the Yankee race."

"You may forgive us," a surrendering rebel officer

told Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

after the ceremony at Appomattox,

"but we won't be forgiven.

"There is a rancor in our hearts which you little dream of.

"We hate you, sir."

April 14, 1865 was Good Friday.

It also marked to the day

the fourth anniversary of the surrender of Fort Sumter,

and within the fort's pulverized walls that morning,

everything was being readied for a noontime ceremony.

The fort's old Union commander, Colonel Robert Anderson,

was to raise the same flag he had been forced to haul down

in 1861.

An audience of northern soldiers and dignitaries

and some 4,000 former slaves watched.

Few local whites chose to attend.

"At first, I could not hear Colonel Anderson,

"for his voice came thickly,

"but in a moment, he said clearly,

"I thank God that I have lived to see this day.

"And after a few more words, he began to hoist the flag.

"It went up slowly and hung limp,

"a weather-beaten, frayed, and shell-torn old flag

"not fit for much more work,

"but when it had crept clear of the shelter of the walls,

"a sudden breath of wind caught it,

"and it shook its folds

"and flew straight out above us.

"I think we stood up.

“Somebody started the Star-Spangled Banner,

"and we sang the first verse,

"which is all that most people know.

"But it did not make much difference, for a great gun

"was fired close to us from the fort itself,

"followed, in obedience to the president's order,

"by a national salute

"from every fort and battery that fired upon Fort Sumter."

In Washington that same day, John Wilkes Booth

dropped by Ford's Theatre to pick up his mail.

A stagehand told him the president and General Grant

were both expected to attend that night

to see the actress Laura Keene

in a British comedy called "Our American Cousin."

Booth told his band of devoted followers of a new plan:

he would shoot Lincoln and Grant.

Lewis Paine was to kill Secretary of State William Seward.

George Atzerodt was to shoot the vice president,

Andrew Johnson.

Early that evening, Booth led his horse

out of the livery stable near Ford's Theatre.

A young boy was told to hold it at the stage door.

At the last minute, General and Mrs. Grant begged off the theater party

and left the city for Philadelphia.

The Lincolns arrived and took their seats in the presidential box.

With them were Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée,

Clara Harris.

What would you advise, ma?

Just remember, dear, he's rich.

Hush! Here he comes.

Ah, Mr. Trenchard!

We were just saying how you always seem sure of

hitting your mark.

The president seemed to be enjoying the play.

His wife held his hand.

Booth swallowed two brandies at a nearby bar,

then returned to the theater.

He waited for the laughter to rise,

then slipped silently into the president's box.

He held a dagger in his left hand,

- a Derringer pistol in his right. - The nasty beast!

Sir, your vulgarity

renders you intolerable in polite society.

Maybe I don't know the manners of polite society,

but I guess I know enough to turn

you inside out, old gal, you

sockdolagizing old man-trap.

Booth fired, then vaulted over the front of the box,

caught his right spur in the draped flag, and landed on stage

breaking his left leg.

He waved his dagger and shouted something to the stunned audience.

Some thought he said, "Sic semper tyrannis" --

"Thus be it ever to tyrants," Virginia's state motto.

Others heard it as "The south is avenged!"

For a long moment, the theater was still,

then Mary Lincoln screamed.

The bullet from Booth's pistol had entered the back of Lincoln's head,

torn through his brain, and lodged behind his right eye.

A surgeon from the audience pronounced the wound mortal.

Soldiers carried the unconscious president from the theater

into a boarding house across 10th Street.

"We put him on the first floor and laid him on the bed.

"When we took him into the room, we had to get out.

"They wouldn't let anybody in without it was a doctor or something."

Private Jacob Soles.

"The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed,

"which was not long enough for him.

"He had been stripped of his clothes.

"His slow, full respiration

"lifted the covers with each breath he took.

"His features were calm and striking."

Gideon Welles.

The doctors could do nothing.

Mary implored her husband to speak to her

and wept so inconsolably,

she was finally taken into the front parlor.

Cabinet officers stood by helpless all night,

doubly shocked to hear that Booth's accomplice, Lewis Paine,

had stabbed Secretary of State Seward,

then run out into the street crying,

"I'm mad! I'm mad!"

George Atzerodt had been too frightened to carry out Booth's order

to kill the vice president.

Around 6:00 the morning,

Navy Secretary Welles stepped outside

and found the streets filled with silent, anxious people.

"A little before 7:00, I went back into the room.

"The death struggle had begun.

"Robert, his son, stood at the head of the bed.

"He bore himself well, but on two occasions,

"gave way

"and sobbed aloud,

"leaning on the shoulder of Senator Sumner."

At 7:22 on the morning of April 15th, 1865,

Abraham Lincoln died.

He was fifty- six-years-old.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said,

"Now he belongs to the ages."

His pockets contained two pairs of spectacles, a pocketknife,

a linen handkerchief, and a wallet.

In it were nine newspaper clippings

and a Confederate $5.00 bill.

"Mother prepared breakfast

"and other meals as usual,

"but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us.

"We each drank half a cup of coffee, that was all.

"Little was said.

"We got every newspaper, morning and evening,

"and passed them silently to each other."

Walt Whitman.

The telegraph carried the news across the country in minutes.

No president had ever been murdered.

People would remember for the rest of their lives

where they were and what they felt

and what the weather was like

when they heard what had happened.

"Near Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia,

"Saturday, April 15.

"Bad news has just arrived.

"Corporal Thomas Parker has just said President Lincoln

"is dead, murdered.

"We cannot realize that our president is dead.

"May God help his family and our distracted country."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

"I have been expecting this.

"I am stunned,

"as by a fearful personal calamity,

"though I can see that this thing occurring just at this time

"may be overruled to our great good.

"We shall appreciate him at last."

George Templeton Strong.

"On the Avenue in front of the White House

"were several hundred colored people,

"mostly women and children,

"weeping and wailing their loss.

"This crowd did not diminish

"through the whole of that cold, wet day.

"They seemed not to know what was to be their fate

"since their great benefactor was dead,

"and though strong and brave men wept when I met them,

"the hopeless grief of those poor colored people

"affected me more than almost anything else."

Gideon Welles.

Lincoln's casket lay in state,

first in the East Room of the White House,

then in the Rotunda of the Capitol.

He was to be buried in Springfield, Illinois,

his adopted home.

The small coffin of his son Willy, who had died in Washington,

was disinterred to make the journey with him.

Mary Lincoln was too overcome with grief to go.

The funeral train took twelve days

and traveled 1,662 miles

through the soft spring landscape.

retracing the route Lincoln had taken

to Washington four years earlier.

In Philadelphia, Lincoln's coffin lay in Independence Hall,

where he had declared he would "rather be assassinated"

than surrender the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

In New York, the procession took four hours.

Scalpers sold choice window positions along the route

for $4.00 and up.

From his grandfather's window,

a young Theodore Roosevelt watched the procession pass.

At Cleveland, 10,000 mourners

passed through a specially built outdoor pavilion

every hour, all day,

despite a driving rain.

It ended in Springfield on May 4th.

The coffin rode to the Illinois State House

in a magnificent black and silver hearse borrowed from St. Louis,

and lay open in the chamber of the House of Representatives

where Lincoln had warned that a house divided against itself

"cannot stand."

Among the thousands of people who shuffled past his coffin

were many who had known him in the old days--

farmers from New Salem,

law clients and rival attorneys,

neighbors who had nodded to him each morning

on his way to work.

Sarah, the president's stepmother, had had a premonition

when Lincoln left for Washington four years before.

"I felt it in my heart that something would happen to him," she said,

"and that I should see him no more."

General Joseph Hooker

led the final, slow march to Oak Ridge Cemetery

through a gentle spring rain.

"You white people

"are the children of Abraham Lincoln.

"We are at best only his stepchildren.

"Viewed from the genuine abolition ground,

"Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold,

"dull, indifferent.

"but measuring him by the sentiment of his country,

"a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult,

"he was swift, zealous, radical,

"and determined.

"Taking him all-in-all,

"measuring the

"tremendous magnitude of the work before him,

"considering the necessary means to ends,

"infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man

"into the world better fitted for his mission

"than Abraham Lincoln."

Frederick Douglass.

On April 26th, Union cavalry trapped John Wilkes Booth

in a Virginia tobacco barn and set it afire.

His accomplice, David Herold, surrendered.

Booth preferred death.

A soldier shot him in the neck.

At the end, he asked to have his hands raised,

looked at them, and said,

"useless, useless."

That day, in a farmhouse near Durham Station, North Carolina,

Confederate General Joseph Johnston

surrendered what was left of his army

to William Tecumseh Sherman.

Jefferson Davis, exhausted but still defiant,

fled southward, hoping somehow

to rally the Confederacy from Texas.

"It may be that with a devoted band of cavalry,

"I can force my way across the Mississippi,

"and if nothing can be done there,

"then I can go to Mexico

"and have the world from which to choose a location."

On May 10th at Irwinville, Georgia,

Union cavalry caught up with him.

With the arrest of its president, the Confederate government ceased to exist.

Davis was sent north to Virginia under heavy guard.

Northern newspapers spread the false rumor

that Davis had been apprehended wearing women's clothes.

North and south,

he was reviled as the villain of the war.

These misconceptions about Davis are so strange,

that it's as if a gigantic conspiracy was launched.

It was partly launched by southerners,

who, having lost the war, did not want to blame it on their generals,

so they blamed it on the politicians, and, of course, Davis was the chief politician, so,

it was the southerners more than the northerners who vilified Jefferson Davis.

The northerners wanted to hang him from a sour

apple tree, but,

the southerners really tore him down after the war.

Davis was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe

in a cell kept perpetually lit

and was made to wear chains, though he protested

that "those are orders for a slave,

"and no man with a soul in him would obey such orders."

"Dear Varina,

"This is not the fate to which I invited you

"when the future was rose-colored for us both,

"but I know you will bear it even better than myself,

"and that, of us two,

"I alone will ever look back reproachfully on my career."

Scattered fighting stuttered on in Louisiana,

Alabama, and Mississippi,

and even further west, where on May 13th, 1865,

Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana

became the last man killed in the Civil War,

in a battle at Palmitto Ranch, Texas.

The final skirmish was a Confederate victory.

On the morning of May 23rd, 1865,

the American flag flew at full staff

above the White House for the first time since Lincoln's death.

U. S. Grant and the new president, Andrew Johnson,

stood side- by-side

to watch the grand armies of the Republic

pass in review down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.

"And so it came, this glorious old Army of the Potomac,

"for six hours marching past,

"eighteen or twenty miles long,

"their colors telling their sad history.

"It was a strange feeling

"to be so intensely happy and triumphant,

"and yet to feel like crying."

The great procession took two days.

General George Armstrong Custer stole the show the first day,

galloping past the dignitaries far ahead of his men,

brandishing his saber,

his long yellow hair whipping in the wind.

But the crowds cheered loudest the next morning

as William Tecumseh Sherman rode past

at the head of the great army he had led to the sea.

By May, most of the Yankees had withdrawn

from Clarksville, Tennessee.

What remained of the 49th and 14th Tennessee Regiments

came home.

Private John J. Denny of Company K was not among them.

He had died at Chancellorsville.

Of the 29 Stewart College seniors who went to war,

sixteen had been killed in battle.

Seven more had died of wounds and disease.

In September, railway service to Clarksville

was resumed.

Deer Isle, Maine, was an indirect casualty of the war.

When its men came home, they found fishing had fallen off.

There was new money to be made in other industries in nearby towns.

The old families moved away.

Some of the houses they left behind

became summer homes for vacationers,

most of whom were unaware of what had happened there.

John Wilkes Booth's accomplices

were swiftly tried before a military commission.

All eight were found guilty.

Four were sentenced to be hanged, including Mary Surratt,

whose only crime may have been that she owned the boarding house

in which the conspirators met.

The executions took place in the courtyard

of the old penitentiary building on July 7th.

The prisoners climbed the thirteen steps and sat in chairs

while the charges were read aloud.

Two priests comforted Mrs. Surratt and shielded her from the sun.

White hoods were slipped over their heads.

General Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg,

clapped his hands three times,

and soldiers knocked the front part of the platform

out from under the condemned.

It took them more than five minutes to die.

A northern newspaper said,

"We want to know their names no more."

"Somewhere, they crawled to die

"alone in bushes, low gullies,

"or on the sides of hills.

"There, in secluded spots,

"their skeletons, bleached bones,

"tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing

"are occasionally found yet.

"Our young men,

"once so handsome, and so joyous,

"taken from us--

"the son from the mother,

"the husband from the wife,

"the dear friend from the dear friend."

Walt Whitman.

Three-and-a-half- million men went to war.

Six-hundred-twenty- thousand men died in it,

as many as in all the rest of America's wars

combined.

One-quarter of the South's

white men of military age were dead.

In Iowa, half the men eligible to fight

served in the Union army,

filling forty-six regiments in all.

Thirteen-thousand-one Iowans died--

3,540 in battle,

515 while prisoners of war,

and 8,498

of disease.

Those figures were typical.

The 5th New Hampshire Regiment started out from Concord

in 1861 with 1,200 men.

When they returned to New Hampshire after Gettysburg,

there were only 380 left.

In Mississippi in 1866,

one-fifth of the state's entire budget

was spent on artificial limbs.

Millions were left with vivid memories of men

who should have still been living

but were not.

The survivors went home

and got on with the business of living.

"The morning after my arrival home,

"I doffed my uniform of first lieutenant,

"put on some of my father's old clothes, and

"proceeded to wage war on the standing corn.

"The feeling I had was sort of queer.

"It almost seemed, sometimes, as if I had been away

"only a day or two

"and had just taken up the farm work

"where I had left off."

Leander Stillwell,

formerly 61st Illinois.

The boys who had gone off to war were old men, now.

They walked over the old battlefields with their families,

pointing out the places where they had once done things

that now seemed impossible, even to them.

They had a theoretical notion of having a country,

but when the war was over,

on both sides, they knew they had a country. They'd been there.

They had walked its hills and tramped its roads.

They... they saw the country,

and they knew they had a country, and they knew

the...the effort that they had expended

and their dead friends had expended to preserve it.

It did that.

It made their country an actuality.

By the turn of the century, monuments and memorials and statues

stood in city parks and courthouse squares from Maine to Mississippi.

"Number 220--statue of American soldier.

"Price, $450.

"When used as a family monument

"and photos of the deceased soldier can be furnished,

"we will model a new head in a true likeness.

"The extra cost will be but $150."

The Monumental Bronze Company, Bridgeport, Connecticut.

"Hall's Hill, Virginia,

July 4, 1865.

"Another Independence Day in the army,

"and this has been my fifth.

"The first we passed at Camp Clark near Washington,

"the second at Harrison's Landing,

"the third at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,

"the fourth at Petersburg,

"and today we are back in Washington with our work finished.

"The day has been fun."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

The war made Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

Having risen from private to colonel during the war,

he was promoted to brigadier general after it,

then went into the cotton and wool business in Providence.

He devoted nearly every idle hour to veterans' affairs

and never missed a regimental reunion.

"America has no north, no south,

"no east, no west.

"The sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains.

"The compass just points up and down,

"and we can laugh now at the absurd notion

"of there being a north and a south.

"We are one and undivided."

Sam Watkins.

Sam Watkins returned to Columbia, Tennessee,

ran the family farm,

and in the evenings worked on his memoirs, "Company Aytch,"

despite, he said,

"a house full of young rebels clustering around my knees

"and bumping my elbows."

But for the war, these

men were like any other possible friends.

You can, remember the...

Thomas Hardy's poem, "Had he and I but met,

"some old ancient inn, we might sit down to wet

"right many a nipperkin," you know, but

"ranged as infantry, standing face to face,

"I shot at him as he at me, and killed him in his place.

"Strange and curious, a war is.

You shoot a fellow down, you treat where any bar is, or

"help to half- a-crown."

Isn't that it? Especially in our own...

our own society, where these men

shared a common history, men and women,

shared a common love of liberty,

gave it slightly different English

as...as it spun through their lives,

but at the same time,

when death came and there was

no more to fight about,

the sort of ocean of...of love and respect and...

closed over them again, and they were together.

"I think we understand what military fame is...

"to be killed on the field of battle

"and have our names spelled wrong in the newspapers."

William Tecumseh Sherman.

William Tecumseh Sherman remained a soldier,

fighting Indians and shunning politics

until his retirement in 1883.

"If nominated, I will not run," he told a Republican delegation

urging him to run for president.

"If elected, I will not serve."

He died in New York City in the winter of 1891.

Among the honorary pallbearers

who stood bear-headed in the cold wind outside the church

was 82-year-old Joe Johnston,

who had fought Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas.

When a friend warned him he might fall ill,

Johnston told him, "if I were in Sherman's place

"and he were standing here in mine,

"he would not put on his hat."

Johnston died ten days later of pneumonia.

"April 1866.

"There are nights here with the moonlight,

"cold and ghastly, and the whippoorwills

"and screech owls alone disturbing the silence,

"when I could tear my hair and cry alone

"for all that is past and gone."

Mary Chesnut.

When James and Mary Chesnut returned to Mulberry Plantation,

they found the old house stripped by Union men,

the cotton burned.

Mary managed to make a little money selling butter and eggs

in partnership with her former slave,

and she continued to write.

But she never completed the mammoth task

of reworking her war diary.

Jefferson Davis was never tried for treason,

nor could he ever bring himself to ask for a pardon.

After two years in prison,

he was released on bond and spent the rest of his life

living off the charity of a wealthy widow

and working on a massive memoir,

"The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government."

He died, still persuaded of the justice of his cause,

at the age of eighty-one.

Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black man

ever elected to the United States Senate,

filling the seat last held by Jefferson Davis.

Vice President Alexander Stephens was imprisoned briefly,

and then re-elected to his old congressional seat from Georgia

as if there had never been a Confederacy.

Mary Todd Lincoln never recovered from her husband's murder.

Her son Tad died in 1871.

Five years later,

her eldest son, Robert, had her committed to a mental institution.

She spent her last years in Springfield,

rarely leaving a room whose curtains were never raised.

For Clara Barton, the angel of the battlefield,

the grim work continued.

After the war, she went down to Andersonville

and helped arrange dignified burial

for thousands of the Union prisoners who had died there,

then went on to found the American Red Cross.

On November 10th, 1865,

Henry Wirz, Commandant at Andersonville prison,

was hanged in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison in Washington

for war crimes.

He pleaded he had only followed orders.

Walt Whitman published "Drum Taps,"

a book of Civil War poems he thought his finest,

then turned largely to prose.

His writings revolutionized American literature.

Phil Sheridan went out west to take on a new enemy,

declaring that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.

George Armstrong Custer went west, too,

carrying with him his belief in his own invincibility.

In 1876, the Sioux and Cheyenne

proved him wrong.

George McClellan stayed abroad for three years

after losing the election to Lincoln.

He heard no slander about himself there, he said.

Then he came home

and got himself elected Governor of New Jersey.

The conqueror of Fort Sumter,

Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard,

promoted railroads, managed the Louisiana state lottery,

and got rich.

Nathan Bedford Forrest promoted railroads, too,

but failed.

In 1867, he became the first Imperial Wizard

of the Ku Klux Klan,

but quit

when the Klan grew too violent even for him.

General Dan Sickles somehow escaped court-martial

for his blunder at Gettysburg.

He had the leg he lost in the Peach Orchard

mounted in a miniature casket

and gave it to the army medical museum in Washington,

where he visited it regularly for fifty years.

John Bell Hood, who had survived some of the fiercest fighting of the war,

died with his wife and daughter in the New Orleans yellow fever epidemic

of 1878.

leaving ten orphaned children.

George Pickett never overcame his bitterness

over the destruction of his division at Gettysburg.

Suffering from severe depression,

he turned down offers of command from the ruler of Egypt

and the President of the United States,

and ended up in the insurance business.

Confederate General James Longstreet joined the Republican party,

served as Grant's Minister to Turkey,

dared to criticize Lee's strategy at Gettysburg,

and for all these things

was considered a traitor to the south

by his former comrades-in-arms.

Frederick Douglass continued to fight as hard for civil rights

as he had against slavery

and became the most powerful black politician in America.

A young visitor once asked him what he should do with his life.

"Agitate!" The old man answered.

"Agitate! Agitate!"

Julia Ward Howe

helped lead the American Woman's Suffrage Association

for fifty- five years.

At her funeral in 1910,

4,000 mourners joined in singing

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Colonel Washington Roebling left the army corps of engineers,

finished his father's bridge at Cincinnati,

and went on to build the greatest suspension bridge in the world

in Brooklyn.

"I have fought against the people of the north

"because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the south

"its dearest rights,

"but I have never cherished toward them bitter

"or vindictive feelings,

"and I have never seen the day when I did not pray for them."

Robert E. Lee swore renewed allegiance to the United States

and by so doing persuaded thousands of his former soldiers

to do the same.

He was weary, ailing, and without work

in the summer of 1865

when an insurance firm offered him $50,000

just for the use of his name.

He turned it down.

"I cannot consent to receive pay

"for services I do not render."

He ended up in the noble way you

might have expected after you'd learned to expect it.

He was...didn't know what to do with himself after the war.

His profession was gone, even his country was gone.

And he was approached, with a good deal of hesitation,

by these people from a little school called Washington College,

and he accepted the Presidency of Washington College.

He had an annual salary of $1,500

and a house to live in,

and he spent the rest of his life at what after his death was called Washington and Lee.

"The greatest mistake of my life," he said,

"was taking a military education."

And whenever his students and those of the neighboring

Virginia Military Institute marched together,

Lee made a point of staying out of step.

He never returned to Arlington again.

Once, on his way to Washington,

he glimpsed his old home from a passing train.

He died in 1870.

In his last moments, he went back to the war,

ordering A. P. Hill to bring up his troops,

just as Stonewall Jackson had

on his deathbed at Chancellorsville.

Then Lee called out, "Strike the tent."

"For he will smile

"and give you with unflinching courtesy,

"prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders,

"photographs, kindness, valor and advice,

"and do it with such grace and gentleness

"that you will know you have the whole of him pinned down, mapped out,

“easy to understand--

"and so you have...

"all things except the heart.

"The heart he kept a secret to the end

"from all the picklocks of biographers."

"I feel that we are on the eve

"of a new era, when there is to be a great harmony

"between the Federal and the Confederate.

"I cannot stay to be a living witness

"to the correctness of this prophecy,

"but I feel it within me

"that it is to be so.

The qualities that served Ulysses S. Grant

so well in war--

stubbornness, independence, aversion to politics--

deserted him in peacetime.

He entered the White House pledged to peace,

honesty, and civil rights,

but corruption tainted his two terms.

After the presidency, he settled in Manhattan,

where he lent his name to a Wall Street brokerage firm.

Another partner in the firm

stole millions from the shareholders in 1884

and bankrupted the Grant family.

Once again, U. S. Grant was penniless.

At almost the same moment, he was found to be suffering

from inoperable cancer of the throat.

Determined to provide for his family before he died,

he set to work writing his memoirs.

In the summer of 1885, he moved to a cottage at Mount McGregor

in the Adirondacks.

Unable now to eat or speak,

he sat on the front porch in the afternoons,

laboring over his manuscript.

He finished it on July 16th

and died one week later.

Grant's memoirs sold half-a-million copies,

and restored family's fortune.

In 1913, the government held a

50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg.

It lasted three days.

Thousands of survivors bivouacked on the old battlefield,

swapping stories, looking up old comrades.

The climax was to be a re- enactment of Pickett's Charge.

As the rebel yell rang out

and the old Confederates started forward again across the fields,

a moan, "a gigantic gasp of unbelief,"

rose from the Union men on Cemetery Ridge.

"It was then," one onlooker said,

"that the Yankees, unable to restrain themselves longer,

"burst from behind the stone wall

"and flung themselves upon their former enemies,

"not in mortal combat, but embracing them

"in brotherly love and affection."

"Pageant has passed.

"The day is over,

"but we linger, loathe to think we shall see them no more together--

"these men, these horses,

"these colors afield."

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was at the Gettysburg reunion,

still imposing at eighty-three,

despite almost constant pain

from the unhealed internal damage

done him by a Confederate Minie ball at Petersburg.

The reunion was, he said,

a transcendental experience,

"a radiant fellowship of the fallen."

He had received the Medal of Honor for his courage at Little Round Top,

served four terms as Governor of Maine,

then became President of Bowdoin College,

where he managed to teach every subject in the curriculum

except mathematics.

He died of his ancient wound

in 1914.

The war was over.

Who won the war?

The Union army obviously won the war

in the sense that they were the army left

standing and holding their weapons when it was all over.

So the soldiers who fought in the Union army,

the generals who directed it, the president who led the country

during it won the war.

If we're not talking just about the series of battles

that finished up with the surrender at Appomattox,

but talking instead about

the struggle to make something

higher and better out of the country,

then the question gets more complicated.

The slaves won the war, and they lost the war,

because they won freedom,

that is, the removal of slavery,

but they did not win freedom

as they understood freedom.

I suppose that slavery is

merely the...

the horrible statutory expression

of a deeper... of a deeper

rift between people based on

race, and that is

what we struggle still

to...to heal.

And, I think the...

the significance of Lincoln's life

and his victory was that...that

we will never again enshrine

these concepts into law,

but now let's see what we can do to erase them from the

hearts and minds of...of people.

The Civil War is not only the central event of American history,

but it's a central event in large ways for the world itself.

If we believe, today, in the twentieth century, as surely we must, that

popular government is the way to go,

it is the way for the emancipation of the human spirit,

then the Civil War established the fact that

a popular government could survive,

that it could overcome an internal secession movement that could destroy it.

So the war becomes...in essence, it becomes a testament

for the liberation of the human spirit for all time.

Four million Americans had been freed

after four years of agony,

but the meaning of freedom in American life remained unresolved.

"Emancipated slaves own nothing,"

one Tennessee planter wrote,

"because nothing but freedom has been given them."

Thousands of blacks wandered southern roads

searching for relatives or looking for work or food.

Thousands more

stayed on their plantations as hired hands or sharecroppers.

The 13th Amendment was followed by a 14th and a 15th,

promising full citizenship

and due process for all American men,

white and black.

But the promises were soon overlooked

in the scramble for a new prosperity,

and white supremacy was brutally re-imposed

throughout the old Confederacy.

The white south won that war of attrition.

It would take another century before blacks gained back the ground

for which so many had given their lives.

I think what we need to remember most of all

is that

the Civil War is not over

until we, today,

have done our part in fighting it,

as well as understanding what happened

when the Civil War generation fought it.

William Faulkner, said once that

history is not "was,"

it's "is."

and what we need to remember about the Civil War is that

the Civil War is

in the present as well as in the past.

The generation that fought the war, the generation that

argued over the definition of the war,

the generation that had to pay the price in blood,

that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future,

also established

a standard

that will not mean anything until we have finished the work.

You can say

there's no such thing as slavery anymore. We're all citizens.

But if we're all citizens, then,

we have a task to do to make sure that that, too, is not a joke.

If some citizens

live in houses and others live on the street,

the Civil War is still going on.

It's still to be fought,

and regrettably, it can still be lost.

Gettysburg's guns are still,

and the dead sleep on.

America's most famous battleground is a camp again

with a road dividing the blue and gray.

There is no other dividing line now

as 2,500 veterans gather from north and south

to mark the seventy- fifth anniversary

of America's Armageddon.

- Hello. - Hello. How are you?

- Glad to see you. - Glad to see you, too.

Ha ha ha! You're all right.

Woo! Woo! Woo!

Woo! Woo! Woo!

That's the rebel yell.

Woo! Woo! Woo!

We think that we are

a wholly superior people.

If we'd been anything like superior as we think we are,

we would not have fought that war,

but since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times

and our generals were the greatest generals of all time.

It's very American to do that.

In time, even death itself might be abolished.

Sergeant Barry Benson, a South Carolina veteran from McGowen's Brigade,

Wilcox's Division, A. P. Hill's Corp, Army of Northern Virginia,

he had enlisted three months before Sumter, aged eighteen,

and served through Appomattox--

saw it so, when he got around to composing the reminiscences he hoped would

"go down amongst my descendants for a long time."

Reliving the war in words,

he began to wish he could relive it in fact.

And he came to believe that he and his fellow soldiers, gray and blue,

might one day be able to do just that,

if not here on earth, then afterwards in Valhalla.

"Who knows," he asked, as his narrative drew toward its close,

"but it may be given to us, after this life,

"to meet again in the old quarters,

"to play chess and draughts,

"to get up soon to answer the morning roll call,

"to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade,

"and again to hastily don our war gear

"while the monotonous patter of the long roll summons to battle.

"Who knows, but again the old flags,

"ragged and torn, snapping in the wind

"may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued,

"while the cries of victory fill a summer day.

"And after the battle,

"then the slain and wounded will arise

"and all meet together under the two flags, all sound and well.

"There will be talking and laughter and cheers,

"and all will say, 'Did it not seem real?'

" 'Was it not as in the old days?' "

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's (Jacob's)

Ladder (ladder)

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's (Jacob's)

Ladder (ladder)

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's

Ladder

Soldiers

Of the

Cross

Every (every)

Rung goes (rung goes)

Higher (rung goes higher)

Every (every)

Rung goes (rung goes)

Higher (yes, well every) (Higher)

Every (every)

Rung goes (rung goes)

Higher (higher)

Soldiers (soldiers)

Of the

Cross

Do you (do you)

Thank our (thank our)

Maker? (Maker?)

Since when, soldier?

Do you (do you)

Thank our (thank our)

Maker? (Maker?)

Since when, soldier?

Do you (do you)

Thank our (thank our)

Maker? (soldier)

Soldiers (soldiers)

Of the

Cross

Rise (rise)

Shine (shine)

Give God (give God)

Your glory (your glory)

Rise (rise)

Shine (shine)

Give God (your glory)

Your glory (your glory)

Rise (rise)

Shine (shine)

Give God (your glory)

Soldiers

Of the

Cross

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing)

We will (we will)

Surely make it (make it)

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing)

We will (we will)

Surely make it

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing)

We will (we will make it)

Soldiers

Of the

Cross

Children (children)

Do you (do you)

Want your (do you)

Freedom? (freedom?)

Children (tell me)

Do you (do you)

Want your (do you)

Freedom?

Do you (do you)

Do you (do you)

Want your

Freedom

Soldiers

Of the

Cross?

Soldiers

Of the

Cross