Quote

Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.

I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that could be united.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.

Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.

Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.

I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.