"The Civil War was really one of those watershed things.
There was a huge chasm between the beginning and the end of the war. The nation had come face-to-face with a dreadful tragedy... And yet that's what made us a nation. Before the war, people 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 knew the effort that they had expended and their dead friends had expended to preserve it. It did that. The war made their country an actuality."
Shelby Foote
"What a war! Everything we are or will be goes right back to that period. It decided once and for all which way we were going, and we've gone"
Shelby Foote author of The Civil War
From Fort Sumter to Appomattox the war is not forgotten here in the Deep South. It changed America and ended the heinous practice of slavery across the entire country . It also changed the economy from being based in agriculture to a more industrialized one.
Joe and I live right in the path of General Sherman's "March to the Sea." We go to sleep to the sound of trains changing tracks almost every night at our old house. Those very tracks were pulled up, heated, and twisted into "bowties" by his troops in an effort to stop supplies getting to the Confederate troops.
"We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war."
- William Tecumseh Sherman
General Sherman stayed at the Brown House, in Sandersville, and used it as his headquarters while he was in the county. When he left, after two days, he had the courthouse and jail burned. The county was fortunate in many ways as he burned much in his path. One reason why we have no records on our old house is because we believe they were burned in this Civil War fire.
Tremendous numbers of lives were lost in this war where brothers sometimes fought each other. Some five to six hundred thousand lives lost. Our cemeteries, in Georgia, are filled with Confederate graves like the first image above.
Joe and I firmly believe history must be studied and learned so that it is not repeated. We are still students of history.
"I can tell you who lost it — the South lost the war. But I'm not sure anybody won that war. It's a tragedy... On the face of it, the North won the war. But the bill for winning it was huge in human values, not to mention human lives.
I think that when the South was defeated to the extent that it was that the whole nation lost something when they lost that civilization, despite the enormous stain and sin of slavery". Shelby Foote
may joy and peace surround you
Olive
Sources: an essay on The Civil War on PBS and the New Georgia Encyclopedia
