The war that made us 'we'

It is simply the most important event in American history, says Ken Burns. The award-winning documentary filmmaker has famously remarked that before it happened, people spoke of "The United States are...." Afterward, they said "The United States is" – one nation, indivisible.

But the Civil War is also a perpetual political hot potato that holds a searing truth: Americans once tolerated, and in some cases wholeheartedly engaged in, human slavery.

The war marks an important anniversary on April 12, exactly 150 years after Confederate forces bombarded federal troops occupying Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. – the first shots fired. Almost four years to the day later, when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, more than 630,000 Americans on both sides of the conflict had died, about 2 percent of the country's population at the time.

Historians today are hopeful that the 150th commemoration will provoke the most honest and wide-ranging look at the war yet.

"This is not your father's Civil War commemoration," says Peter Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, Pa. The war, he and other Civil War scholars say, is no longer just about generals and battlefield tactics.

From the role of women and African-Americans – both as slaves and as fighters for the Union cause – to lives on the home front and the horrors of mid-19th century warfare, the Civil War will be viewed from perspectives that have been either largely ignored or were not well understood at the time of the 1961 centennial.

Centennial clouded by civil rights issues

The 1961 centennial was overshadowed by two huge issues of the day: the civil rights movement at home and the cold war against the Soviet Union abroad.

A federal Civil War Centennial Com­mis­sion, established by Congress and Pres­ident Eisenhower in 1957, wanted to show the world, and the Soviets in particular, a picture of the valor, deeds, and bravery of 19th-century Americans in both blue and gray uniforms – and play down the awkward issue of racial segregation and inequality at home.

A national convention was scheduled at a hotel in Charleston to commemorate the shelling of Fort Sumter, says Caroline Janney, who teaches Civil War history at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. "An African-American member of the New Jersey State Commission was denied lodging because of segregation," she explains in an e-mail. "Her exclusion led the NAACP to respond, and the convention was moved to a naval station in Charleston."

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