At the time, many of these grainy, out of focus, non-action, black and white pictures were intensely horrific. Today, however, our schools tend to gloss over the Civil War as if it had no bearing on today’s society.

“Only” 407,000 Americans died in World War 2. A comparatively minuscule 5,000-and-counting have died in Iraq-Afghanistan. In only four years of fighting, the American Civil War was by far the most deadly war in US history. The outcome shaped American society which in turn eventually affected the entire world.

The result of the Civil War was a country dedicated to industrialism, strong State governments, equal civil rights, and a propensity to butt into everybody else’s business in order to impose these same ideals on them.

The cause of the Civil War is usually over-simplified as being a fight over the right to enslave human beings. Slavery was just one outrage that helped bring things to a boil. America was becoming divided by industrial vs. agricultural philosophies, differing regional social conventions, Federal law vs. State law, and the last straw: the election of Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president.

It is a tragic symmetry that Lincoln’s death punctuated the end of the Civil War.