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The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.

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

Something is wanting, and something must be done, or we shall be involved in all the horror of failure, and civil war without a prospect of its termination.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.

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 this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.