"By the summer of 1861, Wilmer McLean had had enough. Two great armies were converging on his farm and what would be t…"

"The Civil War was fought in ten thousand places, from Valverde, New Mexico and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, V…"

"What began as a bitter dispute over Union and State's Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in Amer…"

"No day ever dawns for the slave," a freed black man wrote, "nor is it looked for. For the slave it is all night — all…"

"A slave entered the world in a one-room, dirt-floored shack. Drafty in winter, reeking in summer, slave cabins bred p…"

"There was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table dur…"

"Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery."

"We are separated because of incompatibility of temper. We are divorced North from South, because we hated each other so."

"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

"We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In …"