“The Civil War
defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and
bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a
crossroads.”
~ Shelby Foote,
The Civil War: A Narrative
Unharmed he reached
the nearest sufferer. He knelt beside him, tenderly raised the drooping head,
rested it gently upon his own noble breast, and poured the precious life-giving
fluid down the fever scorched throat.
This done, he laid
him tenderly down, placed his knapsack under his head, straightened out his
broken limb, spread his overcoat over him, replaced his empty canteen with a
full one, and turned to another sufferer.
~ Excerpt of
Confederate Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw’s account of the Angel of Marye’s Heights.
“And let the perpetual light
shine upon them.”
~ My wife Cora.
We left Washington DC for a driving tour of Virginia. Our drive crisscrossed Virginia's Civil War trails. You can't hardly drive for a few hours in Virginia without coming across a site related to the Civil War. If it isn't a building or a battlefield it might simply be a sign describing a particular spot as being some general's headquarters or a place where a skirmish took place. The white signs are along highways, on country roads, near schools and on the fringes of shopping malls.
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| Confederate cannons on the hills above Fredericksburg |
