Personally, I don’t have a straightforward answer to that question, but I can tell you as a historian that the connections between violence and terrorism and our country’s long history of responding to violence with violence always leads me to think about John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry, Va. (now West Virginia), in 1859, an event that historians believe intensified the sectional controversy between North and South that eventually led to the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. And when I think about John Brown, a radical abolitionist who believed that violence could — and should — be used to end slavery in America, I can’t help also thinking about the place he raided, Harpers Ferry — one of the most peaceful, scenic spots in the entire United States.

There is a great incongruity between John Brown’s use and advocacy of violence and the bucolic tranquillity of the place he attacked. Harpers Ferry is a beautiful place where some terrible history took place. But unlike other historic sites, like, say, Lexington and Concord (note to Michele Bachmann: These towns are in Massachusetts; note to Sarah Palin: Paul Revere rode from Boston to warn the Minute Men in Lexington and Concord that the redcoats were coming to confiscate the colonists’ muskets and powder), Harpers Ferry has never gained the stature of sacred American soil. In part, I think that’s because the now-restored village suffers from the legacy of John Brown’s morally twisted and befuddling attempt to use violence in the name of ending slavery, as good a cause as existed in the middle of the 19th century. We like our history simple. At Harpers Ferry, one must confront a moral dilemma: Is violence ever justified in removing evil from the world?

Even if Harpers Ferry cannot qualify as a hallowed historic site per se, it has much to say about the American experience. Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and the surviving modern town adjacent to it are nestled in the deep shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a sharp point of land that juts out between the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. History flows through Harpers Ferry, just as it does along the mighty currents of the two famous rivers that come together just below the town.

There is no denying its physical beauty, which is as breathtaking today as it was in Thomas Jefferson’s day. Jefferson called it “one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature.” Resting at the foot of the surrounding blue hills and massive stone cliffs, which create stunning contrasts of shade and light across the face of the town, Harpers Ferry is an absolute wonder to behold. But there is also something quite unsettling about the place. The brooding ruins of old factories and the empty stone shells of dilapidated buildings (the town was burned during the Civil War), the endless force of the rivers as they flow mightily or gently (depending on the season) by the town, the abundant signs of devastation caused by repeated floods over the years, the now-silent landmarks associated with John Brown and his abortive raid on the armory and arsenal in 1859, and the tragic reminders of a town caught between contending armies in the Civil War — all of these things create an ominous tone, an atmosphere of gloom, that the scenic splendor of Harpers Ferry cannot be entirely offset.

Perhaps it is because the town is so vulnerable to destruction, even today. In 1996, two floods — one in January and the other in September — inundated the lower town, where most of the park’s property is located, with more than 29 feet of water each time. Since the town’s founding, freshets have disturbed its tranquillity and productivity. In the years before John Brown’s raid, floods routinely interrupted work at the U.S. armory, arsenal and rifle works. After the Civil War, high water continued to disrupt the town and the lives of its residents. An autumn flood in 1870 claimed 42 lives and caused incalculable damage. Nowadays, when the floods come and the waters finally recede, the National Park Service must close down the park and, in the aftermath of the rushing waters, take up the job once more of reconstructing buildings and exhibits that had previously been refurbished to perfection. Even with flood control upriver, there is no stopping the power of nature at Harpers Ferry.

But the menacing feeling that always seems to be below the surface at Harpers Ferry goes beyond a human wariness of nature’s unrelenting wrath. Underneath the natural beauty and fury, there is the more disturbing fact that this small town, this otherwise quiet hamlet resting in the soft cradle of the Blue Ridge Mountains, has had a very violent history. It was John Brown who brought violence to Harpers Ferry nearly 150 years ago, and in so doing he changed the character and the significance of the place forever.

My first impression of John Brown came in my youth, when I first saw a startling painting of him in the pages of American Heritage magazine. The original portrait, part of a huge mural painted by John Steuart Curry in the Kansas Capitol, shows a wild, crazed man, wide-eyed and wind-blown, with arms outstretched. (It’s the image at the top of this story.) Behind him a dark tornado sweeps across the Kansas plains. Brown’s mouth is open, and he is howling something — heaven knows what. I found the picture unnerving and downright frightening, which no doubt was Curry’s intention. At the age of 10, I decided that Brown would not be included in my private pantheon of American heroes.

Later I began to struggle with that decision. In another issue of American Heritage, I came upon yet another painting of Brown, this one showing an entirely different fellow. The illustration is a famous one, painted by Thomas Hovenden, depicting Brown as he leaves the jailhouse in Charlestown, Va., on Dec. 2, 1859, on his way to the gallows:

Wikipedia

As he descends some stairs, an African-American mother lifts her baby up to him, and he, in response, leans over to kiss the child. This scene never actually happened. A New York Tribune reporter, taking a great deal of journalistic license, included the fictional baby-kissing story in a dispatch, and the story became quickly embedded in the John Brown legend.

The contrasting pictures graphically demonstrate that two different John Browns have come down to us since the time of his famous raid on Harpers Ferry and his execution by the Commonwealth of Virginia for treason in December 1859. During his own lifetime, some Americans, especially Southerners and proslavery sympathizers, called him crazy, a madman who had hoped to incite slave rebellions throughout the South. In our own day, Brown still stirs up controversy and sets people — especially historians — at odds with one another. Yet among one group of Americans — African-Americans — there seems to be a consensus about John Brown that exists among no other segment of the society. For black Americans, John Brown is a hero, and ever since his death they have sustained their high opinion of him and have elevated him to a place occupied by few whites. “When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared,” wrote Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became an indefatigable advocate for black civil rights during and after the Civil War. “He was,” said Douglass, “a just man and true.” A century later, Malcolm X proclaimed to his fellow blacks:

John Brown … was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom — in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts.

John Brown has become the stuff of legend as well as history, and it is the legend more than anything else that captures our imagination and furnishes us with the two John Browns, one violent and villainous, one benevolent and heroic. There is, however, more to it than that. Legend or not, something deep down in our American soul truly shocks us about the man, like the way that the mural portrait of him as an avenging angel made my hair stand on end as a kid. John Brown disturbs us so much, so powerfully, that we want to explain him away — as quickly as possible. A more famous photograph of him, taken in the spring of 1859, just a few months before the Harpers Ferry raid, suggests why we feel so much uneasiness about him:

Wikipedia

Take one look into his eyes. There’s fire in them, more than in the discomforting Curry painting, and his riveting eyes are something you can neither avoid nor ever forget. In that disquieting stare something much clearer than his mental state is immediately evident. You can see this is a man of deadly purpose.

D.H. Lawrence once wrote that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Indeed, a deep river of violence runs throughout the American experience, and it cannot be ignored or avoided. Not every American, to be sure, fits Lawrence’s brutal description, but there is a strain in us that lets us denounce the violence that besets our society while we passively tolerate it. To a great extent, our own ambivalence is a lot like what one sees and senses in modern Harpers Ferry: To the naked eye, all is serene and resplendent; beneath it is that disquieting feeling of doom. The reality of nature’s violence lives in Harpers Ferry, and so does the legacy of human violence. With the zeal of a true believer, for he was convinced that God ordered and condoned his actions, John Brown took up the sword and used it ruthlessly and bloodily — and, it must be said, without giving much contemplation to what he was doing or to the malevolence he was spreading. His violence seemed almost instinctive and reflexive, like the violence that leads troubled souls to shoot random victims in a shopping mall or on a college campus. John Brown was convinced that his righteous cause justified his violent means, just as religious terrorists down through time and now, in our own uneasy age, have shed blood in the name of their gods and prophets.

Perhaps that is why many Americans, in the wake of the Harpers Ferry raid, believed Brown was insane. A good number of historians have also argued that Brown must have been crazy — or, at the very least, chronically depressed or a manic depressive. But in doing so they miss a vital point beyond Malcolm X’s discerning comment about why whites think Brown was nuts. Brown’s use of violence in the sectional controversy over slavery may have been abhorrent, but it was not necessarily aberrant. Like H. Rap Brown, another African-American militant of the 1960s, John Brown knew that violence was as American as cherry pie.

But we would prefer to think that Brown was insane or bipolar or maybe emotionally challenged because it is far too horrifying to acknowledge that Brown sprang from a long tradition of American violence and that he was, in so many respects, a product of the American soul. Americans tend to deny that violence is in our soul, for though we understand that much of our past has been filled with violence, and that much of our present is torn apart by violence, we find it very difficult to face up to the fact that we are, in the end, a very violent people and that aggression may be found at the very core of our experience as a people and a nation. We think of ourselves as an eminently peaceful people. We deny that D.H. Lawrence looked with any kind of clarity into our soul.

John Brown attracts us and repels us at the same time, but what we are most reluctant to admit is that his actions, and particularly his violent deeds, were — and are — quintessentially American. In that sense, then, what we cannot face is that John Brown is not an aberration. What we truly cannot face is that John Brown is us.

Lincoln was aware of his homeliness. One popular story, which might be apocryphal, claimed that a political opponent called Lincoln “two-faced” during a public debate. Without missing a beat, Lincoln replied to the crowd: “I leave it to you. If I had another face, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” For those who knew him well, however, they found Lincoln’s expressions to be soft and kind, despite a look of melancholy and sadness that never seemed to fade from his eyes. The poet Walt Whitman believed that Lincoln’s face was “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.”

In this slide show — which features photographs of the man from the time of his election in 1860 until the spring of 1861, a period during which the secession crisis divided the United States in two and the Civil War began with the surrender of Fort Sumter — you may judge for yourself how Lincoln looked as he ascended to the presidency and took on the burden of a nation divided against itself. In many instances, these photographs became the first accurate images the American public saw of the man who would either restore the Union or let it perish forever.

View the slide show

Historians have been fascinated by how dramatically Lincoln’s face changed during his presidency. Photographs reveal how increasingly careworn he became over the four years during which he waged war against the Confederate States of America and struggled to restore the Union. One of his secretaries, John Hay, remarked that “under this frightful ordeal his demeanor and disposition changed — so gradually that it would be impossible to say when the change began; but he was in mind, body, and nerves a very different man at the second inauguration [March 1865] from the one who had taken the oath in 1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant mediation on momentous subjects; the air of reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased. He aged with great rapidity.”

After his first inauguration in March 1861, William Howard Russell, an English journalist, described Lincoln’s appearance at the start of his presidency. At this first meeting in the White House, Russell was less than impressed:

He entered [the room], with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man, considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however, were far exceeded in proportion by his feet.

Russell reported that the president’s neck was “sinewy muscular and yellow” and that his beard was “a great mass of hair, bristling and compact like a riff of mourning pins.” Lincoln’s face, he said, was “strange” and “quaint,” and his head was topped “with its thatch of wild republican hair.” Russell did not neglect to mention the president’s “flapping and wide projecting ears” or his “penetrating” eyes, which he identified as “dark, full, and deeply set . . . but full of an expression which almost amounts to tenderness.”

Not surprisingly, John Nicolay, another of Lincoln’s secretaries, portrayed the 16th president with more sympathy and grandeur, explaining that artists had a particularly difficult time capturing Lincoln’s “rugged features.” In Nicolay’s opinion:

Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that serious, far-away look that with prophetic intuitions beheld the awful panorama of war, and heard the cry of oppression and suffering.

Nicolay believed that “there are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him.”

Except there are 136 photographic poses or views of Lincoln (not counting long shots of him in the distance, such as those of him about to be seated after delivering the Gettysburg Address or standing at the East Portico of the Capitol as he delivered his second inaugural address), all of which do show us how he looked at various times of his life, from his days as a prosperous attorney in Springfield, Ill., during the 1840s to his last days as president in the spring of 1865.

It’s true that even the photographs leave something lacking in our understanding of how Lincoln really looked: there is not a single photograph that shows him laughing (or that reveals his teeth), although some historians think they see the rudiments of a smile in at least one photograph (saying “cheese” for the camera did not become a convention until the early 20th century). Nicolay’s comment about the “thousand delicate gradations” of Lincoln’s face is probably well worth remembering; the existing photographs show a posed and practically frozen Lincoln, a necessity because photography at the time could not capture subjects in motion without becoming hopelessly blurred.

So we cannot know the animation of Lincoln’s living face; the closest example might be Disneyland’s Audio-Animatronics Lincoln, which, even with technological improvements that have been made since its debut 47 years ago at the Illinois Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair, still remains too robotic to be credible. The numerous life-size silicone and latex mannequins at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., look like Lincoln to a certain extent, but they are not animated, which is probably all for the best. What’s more, color photography did not exist in the 1860s, so Lincoln’s image — apart from painted portraits — survives only in black and white or, in a few instances, sepia tones. As a result, Lincoln remains forever a prisoner in a world of black and white, hidden to a degree by faded light and obtuse shadows. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means we have to use our imagination to conjure up the real Lincoln, the one who lived a colorful life in a colorful world.

In the end, we must rely on words combined with pictures to imagine Lincoln as he really was. His physical appearance, even during his youth, impressed nearly everyone he ever met. One neighbor in Indiana remembered the young Lincoln as “a long — thin — leggy — gawky boy dried up & Shriveled.” An Illinois man recalled Lincoln during the 1830s, when he lived in New Salem: “His eyes were a bluish brown, his face was long and very angular, when at ease had nothing in his appearance that was marked or Striking, but when enlivened in conversation or engaged in telling, or hearing some mirth-inspiring Story, his countenance would brighten up[,] the expression woul[d] light up not in a flash, but rapidly the muscles of his face would begin to contract. Several wrinkles would diverge from the inner corners of his eyes, and extend down and diagonally across his nose, his eyes would Sparkle, all terminating in an unrestrained Laugh in which every one present willing or unwilling were compelled to take part.”

Lincoln often joked about his facial features, even acknowledging that to most people he looked rough and ugly. One story attributed to Lincoln involved him swearing to kill any man uglier than himself. Coming upon such a man one day, Lincoln aimed a gun at him, vowing to keep his promise. At first the man was shocked and frightened, but when Lincoln explained his purpose, the other man calmed down. “Sir,” the man said to Lincoln, “you look as if you might put your threat into execution; but sir, all that I have got to say is, If I am any worse looking than you are, for God’s sake shoot me and git me out of the way!” Lincoln, of course, held his fire. Another story about his homeliness involved his riding through the woods and encountering a woman, also on horseback, traveling toward him. The women reined in her horse and said: “Well, for land’s sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw.” Lincoln agreed with her but said, “I can’t help it.” The woman replied: “No, I suppose not, but you might stay at home.”

As president, though, the weight of the war bore down on him. Noah Brooks, a journalist, claimed that “few persons would recognize the hearty, blithesome, genial, and wiry Abraham Lincoln of earlier days” if they were to meet him again during his presidency. In the White House, Lincoln suffered from a “stooping figure, dull eyes, care-worn face, and languid frame.” The president’s “old, clear laugh,” said Brooks, “never came back; the even temper was sometimes disturbed; and his natural charity for all was often turned into an unwonted suspicion of the motives of men.” Visitors to the White House repeatedly reported how sad Lincoln looked. David R. Locke, better known as the humorist Petroleum V. Nasby, described Lincoln’s deep and visible gloom: “I never saw a more thoughtful face, I never saw a more dignified face, I never saw so sad a face.”

Walt Whitman, who spent part of the war working in the Union hospitals in Washington, saw Lincoln often in the wartime city. After the war, Whitman declared that despite the “hundreds of portraits [that] have been made, by painters and photographers . . . I have never seen one yet that in my opinion deserved to be called a perfectly good likeness; nor do I believe there is really such a one in existence.”

Even so, the slide show that accompanies this piece reveals how Lincoln’s appearance changed drastically from the time of his election in November 1860 to the spring of 1861, after the surrender of Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War. As the slides show, the most notable change resulted from Lincoln’s decision to grow a beard. No one is exactly sure why he became bearded in time to begin his presidency, although most men of prominence in the early 1860s sported facial hair, sometimes in a great profusion of whiskers down to their breastbones. Some New York Republicans believed that Lincoln would look more dignified, by which they meant less homely, if he wore “whiskers and … standing collars.” He may have added the beard so that he would be taken more seriously — at age 51, he was one of the youngest presidents to date. Whatever the reason, the beard transformed Lincoln’s face into the icon we most readily recognize today, although the slides demonstrate that his facial expressions and the cast of his eye could create subtle differences in his appearance.

How he looks in these slides reflect some of the limitations of photography at the time — not only are these truly “still” pictures in the most precise meaning of the term, but field of depth and clarity were not hallmarks of Civil War-era photography, an art form that was still in its infancy. The wet-plate process relied on large glass plates immersed in a chemical solution that produced negative images that could be duplicated as positive images on paper. However, photographs could not be printed in newspapers or books because the half-tone, rotogravure technology would not come into being until two decades later. Nevertheless, images on paper, sometimes as stereographs that could be viewed through a stereoscope to create a three-dimensional effect, or sometimes on small cards known as cartes-de-visite, could be cheaply made and sold at modest prices. Many Northerners got to see Lincoln for the first time by seeing portrait photographs of him for sale in a local photographer’s gallery; these prints were purchased by the thousands and displayed proudly in parlors throughout the Union. A portrait-size print could be bought for $1.50.

In the North, most people knew what Lincoln looked like by the end of the war. Or, at least, they thought they did. During this early age of photography, nearly everyone believed that the camera could not lie — a belief now put to rest by Photoshop and other digital editing programs. Seeing is not necessarily believing. It also turns out that Civil War photographers, like the famous Mathew Brady and the less famous Alexander Gardner, regularly manipulated their subjects — including individuals sitting for studio portraits — more than anyone knew or understood at the time. These slides of Lincoln tell us a great deal about the man. They reveal, in fact, how his appearance changed over a relatively short span of time, sometimes blatantly (as with the addition of his beard), sometimes delicately (as with the cast of his eye). They show us how he attempted, in subtle ways, to control his public image with similar poses, his carefully chosen clothing, and even the tilt of his head. Here in these slides, in fact, are several different Lincolns, if you look close enough to find them. The man with the most recognizable face in American history turns out to have been a man of many masks.

The proposal has aroused a storm of protest in the state, particularly by African-Americans and black organizations such as the NAACP. An SCV spokesman, quoted by MSNBC, said that “the idea with the plate is that everything with the SCV is to honor Confederate soldiers, heritage and history, and the SCV and get this in front of the public” (presumably this quote is verbatim). But the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that Raoul Cunningham, president of the Louisville branch of the NAACP, said the Confederate flag “is offensive. It is an emblem that is mostly associated with the Confederacy and slavery. It is offensive to African Americans.” Cunningham vowed to launch a legal challenge to the license plate, but the state’s Transportation Cabinet revealed that the SCV has yet to file an application for the plate.

Probably the SCV should not waste its time trying to do so. Although the SCV has successfully persuaded nine former Confederate states (there are 11 such states in all) to issue commemorative license plates, Kentucky will probably resist the group’s effort, even if the SCV does getting around to submitting a formal application.

For one thing, Kentucky never joined the Confederacy, even though it was a slave state. During the Civil War, more Kentuckians served in Union regiments than Confederate ones, despite the deep divisions that made the conflict truly a war of brother against brother in the state. Despite its fondness for slavery as a labor source and as a means for racially controlling blacks, Kentucky remained staunchly Unionist during the war years. Suffering from an acute case of wishful thinking, Confederate authorities added a star to the rebel battle flag (the red flag with the St. Andrew’s cross, which most people incorrectly identify as the Confederate national flag) for Kentucky, but the star did not make Kentuckians give up their loyalty to the Union or persuade them to throw in their lot with the South.

Yet, the SCV campaign for a Confederate license plate might make some headway among some present-day Kentuckians, if only because historians have long argued that the state and its people began to express vigorously pro-Southern and pro-Confederate sympathies ever since Lee’s surrender. Kentucky, like so many other states located south of the Mason-Dixon Line or south of the Ohio River (or red states in the Midwest and West), basks today in a warm nostalgia for all things Southern, particularly if those things date from the antebellum period, when presumably white Southerners sat on their verandas drinking mint juleps and listening to contented slaves serenading them.

For anyone paying attention to the running of the Kentucky Derby on May 7, you no doubt noticed that “My Old Kentucky Home” was sung in earnest by the spectators while standing up before the race, as if the song was the national anthem. Actually, the song was written by Stephen Foster (a Pennsylvanian) in 1853, one of hundreds of minstrel tunes that he composed in his lifetime (he was, in some respects, the Irving Berlin of his time). The Kentucky General Assembly made it the state song in 1928.

What most people don’t know, however, is that there are two versions of the song, which tells of a slave who misses his golden days spent on a Kentucky plantation (he seems to have been sold down the river, where slave life was harsher than in the border states). Foster’s original lyrics say “the darkies are gay” (note for modern readers: “gay” means happy, not homosexual) living “where all was delight,” although they include some references to toting “the weary load” and other heavy work done by slaves. The lyrics were changed in 1986 by the Kentucky General Assembly after Carl Hines, the only black member, complained that the lyrics “convey connotations of racial discrimination that are not acceptable.” Most conspicuously, the word “people” was substituted for “darkies.” The song is sung often here in Kentucky, where I teach, and particularly at every graduation ceremony of Western Kentucky University (December and May). I’m told it’s also performed before every football game and after every basketball game at the University of Kentucky, which in this state is called “UK” (as a transplanted Northerner here, I’m still in the habit of thinking that UK stands for the United Kingdom). Occasionally, as one becomes accustomed to hearing “My Old Kentucky Home” wafting o’er various live venues, inevitably someone in the singing multitude will stir things up by purposely singing “darkies” instead of “people.” In Kentucky, tradition dies hard.

The same can be said of the South and the SCV, which is hell-bent on making sure that the Confederate flag, which it claims is a symbol of “heritage, not hate,” is always visible, if not on flag staffs, then at the very least on license plates. Of course, the national debate over the Confederate battle flag is nothing new, but white Southerners — who prefer their “history” to adhere to the melancholic tenets of the Lost Cause (on the insidious nature of the “Lost Cause,” see the recent Salon essay by historian Joan Waugh) — seem determined to argue falsely that the flag only honors the courage of the Southern soldiers who fought for the Confederacy; in the South, most whites still erroneously believe, no matter what historians say, that the Cause stood for states’ rights alone and not slavery. Interestingly, it’s not enough for the SCV to promulgate inaccurate history. It also has the audacity to claim that it’s a victim of discrimination. “It’s sort of typical of the way anything Southern or Confederate get treated anymore,” the Kentucky SCV spokesman told the Courier-Journal. “It has to go through the political-correctness filters, rather than the historical-correctness filters.”

Unfortunately, the SCV’s own “historical-correctness filters” are entirely flawed or perhaps clogged. If the Confederate battle flag had only been used by Southern soldiers during the Civil War, the SCV might be able to make a stronger case that “heritage” is their only interest in displaying the flag so prominently throughout the South. Still, African-Americans probably would dislike the flag, given the fact that it stands as a symbol for a nation — the Confederate States of America — that sought to protect, defend and prolong the institution of slavery. In his famous “Cornerstone Speech” of March 1861, the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, declared that the new nation’s “foundations are laid … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” White Southerners, like the members of the SCV, may wish that the battle flag could be just a symbol of Confederate bravery, but the flag itself — in 1861, when it was first designed, and today — is actually a symbol of exclusion and racism, meant 150 years ago to be for whites only, even if modern members of the SCV do not think of it in those terms.

But the larger problem with the battle flag is that it was used purposely during the 20th century and in our own time as a symbol of hate — a direct contradiction to anything the SCV claims. After the Civil War, the United Daughters of the Confederacy adopted the flag in its effort to rewrite history according to the gospel of the Lost Cause. During the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization that was revived in the 1920s, used the flag as a rallying emblem of white supremacy. From the 1950s to the 1960s, as historian John M. Coski has expertly demonstrated in his superb book, “The Confederate Battle Flag” (2005), the flag became “not simply a symbol of perceived racism in the country’s distant past but a symbol of explicit racism in the recent past and present.”

After the rise of the Dixiecrat party in the late 1940s, the flag could be found prominently waving across the South — even more frequently and in more places in the 1950s and 1960s as the civil rights movement gained headway than it had ever been flown during the short lifespan of the Confederate States of America. In 1952, an African-American newspaper in Baltimore saw clearly that the flag had become a symbol for “slavery … rebellion … bloodshed and segregation … oppression and disfranchisement … [and] white supremacy.”

One can argue, as the SCV does vociferously, that blacks are wrong in seeing the flag in this light. But the SCV’s own protests that the flag represents “heritage, not hate” are overwrought once one understands that black Americans have every right to regard it as a pernicious emblem. It also bewilders me why the SCV goes to such extremes to insult African-Americans in its campaign to champion the flag. Why would respecting the wishes of blacks today by taking their feelings into account detract from the heroism of the SCV’s Confederate ancestors? Putting the Confederate flag on a license plate doesn’t honor Confederate valor, it diminishes it. A license plate? Around here most license plates are covered in mud, especially given the plentiful spring rains we’ve had in Kentucky this year.

My point is that the Confederate battle flag is nothing a white Southerner should be proud of. It’s an embarrassment — or at least it should be to anyone who truly believes in freedom, who understands that the Civil War ended slavery forever in this country, and who respects that millions of Americans, many of whom are descended from slaves, resent and despise a flag that stands for white men who willingly gave their lives 150 years ago so that slavery could be perpetuated, or, for white people who sought with all their might to prevent African-Americans from enjoying the rights and freedoms guaranteed to everyone else. Either way, in my opinion, the Confederate battle flag remains an icon of hate, not heritage. It belongs in museums, where it should freely be displayed. If it is placed on a license plate, it deserves to be splattered with mud.

Saying that, however, will not endear me to my Kentucky neighbors or my students, most of whom — despite my efforts to convince them otherwise — seem to believe that the Confederate battle flag flew proudly over this commonwealth from 1861 to 1865 and should be displayed more prolifically now that we have entered the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. Nevertheless, the flag — no matter what the SCV thinks — continues to be contentious here, as it does throughout the country. As Tony Horwitz reported so movingly in the Wall Street Journal and later in his highly acclaimed book, “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War” (1998), white Southerners are still dying for the Confederate battle flag. Horwitz vividly describes how, in January 1995, 19-year-old Michael Westerman was pursued from Guthrie, Ky., to Robertson County, Tenn., by three carloads of black teenagers. The chase ended with an African-American shooting and killing Westerman. The black teens maintained that Westerman had shouted racial epithets at them, but some people believed that Westerman was killed because he flew a large Confederate battle flag from a staff attached to the cab of his truck. The case was complicated, not only by a flawed investigation and conflicting testimony, but also by the intense racial passions that Westerman’s murder aroused in Guthrie, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and across the nation. The victim was lionized as a Confederate martyr, the Klan moved in to spread its propaganda, and the community was torn apart. Two of the black teens were found guilty of felony murder, intimidation and attempted kidnapping; they are both serving life sentences. The mayor of Guthrie told Horwitz: “When I was a boy, no one cared about that flag. Heck, I never even thought of myself as Southern. But today there’s this intolerance, white and black. People feel they have to wave their beliefs in each other’s faces.”

Not much has changed since 1995. Heck, in some parts of Kentucky not much has changed since 1865, when white Kentuckians, who detested having to give up their slaves when the Civil War ended, decided they would henceforth side with the dead Confederacy rather than with the victorious Union. Kentucky did not ratify the 13th Amendment until 1976. Meanwhile, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home. I hope in the near future that it never gets to shine on a Confederate battle flag emblazoned on this state’s license plates.

Even so, the battle flag will not go away, no matter how divisive it continues to be. All I have to do here in the land of thoroughbreds and fried chicken is check my rearview mirror on the interstate. Inevitably what I see is an 18-wheeler bearing down on me with a Confederate battle flag stretched across its radiator. In a split second, every frame of Stephen Spielberg’s first movie, “The Duel,” flashes through my brain. Maybe it’s time for me to remove the “Obama ’08″ bumper sticker from the back hatch of my Jeep.

In fact, the “living historians” at Charleston fudged the history more than a little by firing their first shot at the fort at 6:45 in the morning rather than at the very famous historical time of 4:30 a.m. Presumably, this enabled the reenactors to sleep a little later than their historical counterparts did 150 years ago. Then, when the mortar shot was finally fired to begin the reenactment, it barely sailed up 40 yards or so into the sky, although the noise it made was, according to the Charleston Post and Courier, “thunderous.” But the newspaper also reported that the pyrotechnics left something to be desired: Rather than the “star shell” of a century and  a half ago, the explosion seemed more like a “bottle rocket.” The fireworks technician in charge of the mortar shot explained that the burst was “intentionally weak, as a safety precaution to the crowds of people on hand to witness the waterfront ceremony.” So much for historical accuracy.

The promoters of this observance insisted that their event was not a “reenactment,” but a moment of “living history.” Although I’ve been a practicing Civil War historian for quite some time, I’ve never quite understood why reenactors dislike being called reenactors. They almost universally claim to be “living historians” or to be engaged in “living history.” But I find these terms mystifying. For one thing, I think that I am a living historian; if not, someone should inform my loved ones of my passing. For another thing, “living history” makes me think of apparitions, like ghosts possessing the living and walking about historical sites in the manner of zombies, wide-eyed, with arms outstretched and flesh dangling off their faces. But if reenactors wish to be called living historians, so be it.

At any rate, the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is off and running (with the Union “living historians” dutifully surrendering Fort Sumter to Confederate “living historians” in a pageant held on April 14, fraught with high seriousness and furrowed brows suitable to the occasion. To a very large degree, I confess to some unease about all this playacting as we look down the road to four years of battle reenactments, fancy-dress balls (modeled on the ones portrayed in the films “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind”), and professions of neo-Confederate sentiments about the war having been fought over states’ rights and not slavery, as if that’s a good thing.

The sesquicentennial should be an enormous opportunity to educate the American public about the war, its causes and its consequences. The Civil War still captures the American imagination, and there is probably no more popular event in American history than the Civil War. Civil War books outnumber works about other periods of our national history (despite the fact that the American Revolution was actually the single most important event in our country’s history), Civil War national parks outnumber other historical parks from a single time period, and Civil War reenactors and buffs by far outnumber other enthusiasts who immerse themselves in the details of, say, the French and Indian War or even World War II. Still, for all this interest, many Americans still possess little understanding of the Civil War and its outcome. The sesquicentennial might help to remedy this knowledge gap by raising public awareness of the war in all its many dimensions, revealing local aspects of the war to many who might not know that their communities were involved in fighting the war or supporting the war effort, and spreading a broad public understanding of what the war meant to the people who experienced it and to subsequent generations of Americans who live, even 150 years later, in its very long shadow.

But the thought of being deluged with everything about the Civil War over the next four years leaves me with a distinct feeling of dread, if not outright exhaustion. For one thing, I already “live” in the Civil War era on practically a daily basis. It is my job to read and write about the war, to teach my students about it, to speak to scholarly and community groups about it, and to learn as much about it, day to day, month to month, year to year, as I possibly can. The fact is, I’m already immersed in the Civil War — so much so that I often feel like I need a vacation from the 19th century, just to stay in touch with my family, my friends and the world in which I live. Other Civil War academics have admitted to me their similar feelings: For those of us who “do” Civil War history, it is possible sometimes to o.d. on the Civil War. When that happens, I purposely take a vacation to some place unhistorical in nature or importance, drag along a suitcase filled with pulp fiction, detective novels and unread magazines from our coffee table, and find a quiet, shady place to forget about the Civil War. Inevitably, these “rehab” experiences fail miserably, and I usually end up with my thoughts drifting to some aspect of the war as Hercule Poirot continues to gather clues or as Thomas Frank says something truly brilliant in his Harper’s “Easy Chair” column. Predictably, I begin scribbling notes about my next writing project on slips of paper, napkins and those little, otherwise useless pads you find next to the telephone in hotel rooms. Being a Civil War historian means living in the 19th century, whether you like it or not, and it’s damned difficult to jump back and forth between centuries.

Which is why, in at least one respect, I find the unfolding Civil War sesquicentennial daunting. As more and more people become involved in the war’s commemoration, I fear not only immersion but inundation. How much more Civil War can I deal with in my in life? How much more can I sink below its depths before it drowns me? How much more can anyone stand?

Civil War reenactors and buffs seem to have a far greater tolerance level than I do. They live and breathe the war readily, without hesitation, and with a passion that veers close to a religious experience or even sexual arousal. I have a passion for my work, especially my writing and my teaching, but enough’s enough. I lack the hobbyist’s obsession with the war, its players (great and small), and its minutia (which is endless). My job requires me to be an expert about the war, a position I do believe I’ve attained, but I can’t bring myself to devote the entirety of my life to it — and I certainly (unlike some of my academic cohort) have no interest in donning a uniform, firing a Springfield musket, or participating in a battle reenactment under a blazing sun or a dripping sky.

In fact, the entire idea of commemorating the Civil War strikes me as perverse, including bloodless battle reenactments. Why would anyone want to replicate one of the worst episodes in American history? Why would anyone want to pretend to be fighting a battle that resulted in lost and smashed lives on the field and utter grief among the soldiers’ loved ones back home? Is there any uplifting message to be derived from such playacting? What’s more, these “reenactments” are contrived and orchestrated. In order to avoid everyone falling down and playing dead during these battle plays (or no one falling down at all), reenactors decide by lottery in advance who will clutch their heart and tumble to the ground as though they’ve been hit; some of the fallen inevitably try to lie still if they are supposed to be dead, others try to simulate wounded men by crawling away from the scene of “carnage” (if you pay attention, you’ll see that they’re actually crawling to the nearest shade tree), while still others sometimes try stealthily to get their hat over their faces to avoid sunburn.

No one, of course, uses live ammunition, except for one French reenactor who did so during the 135th anniversary reenactment of Gettysburg, where he slightly wounded an American reenactor in the stomach; all charges (assault with a deadly weapon, etc.) were later dropped against the Frenchman, who was speedily deprived of his ammunition and put on a fast plane to Paris. When cannons are fired at reenactments, they do not produce explosions or rip through the advancing ranks of the enemy, since they are in essence firing only blanks — that is, powder charges without projectiles. Nevertheless, these battle reenactments usually produce a good number of real casualties, which turn out to be mostly burns from overheated muskets and artillery pieces, heat prostration and the occasional heart attack among overweight baby boomers who are trying, despite their huge girths and hardened arteries, to portray fit, young soldiers.

More to the point, though, is the strange desire to impersonate soldiers of the Civil War by pretending to fight a battle. In the first place, these pretend battles look and sound nothing like the real thing, although reenactors have convinced the public (and themselves) that they do. In the second place, these theatricals lose every bit of authenticity the moment the demonstration draws to a close and the faux dead and wounded on the field rise up in a mass resurrection resembling the Rapture, which is usually accompanied by the applause of the onlookers (who, by the way, have paid a hefty admission price to see grown men shoot at one another with the adult equivalent of cap guns). The crowd usually finds these phony battles truly entertaining, perhaps in the same way that “professional” wrestling has its devoted fans. Nevertheless, entertainment — no matter how authentic the reproduction buttons and firearms might be — is not history. Interestingly, a good number of reenactors actually have been in real combat, having served (and gotten shot at) in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps these veterans find it difficult to leave their military identities behind. But it can’t be easy for them to reconcile the actual horrors of battle with the sanitized “combat” of a reenactment.

The Civil War as entertainment was something that particularly troubled Bruce Catton, the dean of Civil War historians during of the 1950s and 1960s. At the start of the Civil War Centennial, Catton warned:

“We are in serious danger of taking the most significant anniversary in American history and using it as a means of giving ourselves a bright and colorful holiday. How the Civil War soldier fought his battles is no doubt worth examining, but infinitely more important is a consideration of why he fought and what he accomplished. Lay on the sentiment, the romance, and the dramatic appeal heavily enough, and we shall presently forget that the war was fought by real living men who were deeply moved by thoughts and emotions of overwhelming urgency.”

If Fort Sumter and every one of the war’s significant events are to be reenacted in the sesquicentennial, will the bill of fare include the massacre of African American troops at Fort Pillow (1864)? Or the seizure of free African-Americans who were dragged against their will into slavery when Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army retreated back to Virginia following the battle of Gettysburg? Or the explosion of the S.S. Sultana’s boilers (April 1865), when an estimated 1,800 Union soldiers — some of whom were recently released prisoners of war who had already suffered countless miseries at the infamous Andersonville camp in Georgia — were killed on the Mississippi River near Memphis? Where should the paroxysmal “heritage” festivals begin and end? And how accurate will any of these celebrations of the past really be?

I’ve never attended a reenactment where the Confederate encampments are replete with compliant African-Americans portraying the slaves who actually accompanied their masters — officers and enlisted men — on the march. No doubt it’s hard to find modern African-Americans willing enough to play slaves alongside modern white Americans playing Confederate soldiers; in the actual Civil War, though, slaves often did all the hard work and toting, sometimes carrying their master’s musket, blanket roll, cooking utensils and the like. In the Union army, contraband (fugitive) slaves were sometimes put to use in equally menial ways. It’s telling, of course, that African-Americans don’t often attend Civil War battle reenactments. In fact, National Park Service statistics reveal that African-Americans rarely even visit Civil War battlefields. For good reason, modern blacks are a little sensitive about slavery and anything that seems to suggest — as reenactments most assuredly do — that the Civil War was all about battles, that each side fought with equal courage and grand moral purpose, and that the war had nothing to do with slavery or emancipation.

It also boggles the mind how over the next four years the nation is supposed to go about commemorating the war’s immense brutality. How, quite frankly, is one expected to commemorate the contents of the following letter, written by a Virginia soldier to his mother in 1864?

“I wrote you a few days ago after having received the sad news of my poor, dear brother’s death. I hope you received the letters. You do not know, dear Mother, how sad I am, and how deeply I feel the loss of him we all loved so dearly … The longer I live the more convinced am I that there is no real happiness in this world without the hope of heaven. I have tried for the last six months to live a better life, and I hope that God will aid me in the effort, and that when it may please him to take me, that I will have nothing to fear. You must remember, Mother, that you have five children left yet to comfort you and compare your condition with that of other Mothers who have had all [their sons] taken. Tell Lucy that she must remember she has two little children to live for. I know her affliction is too deep for utterance, and deeply do I feel for her. She and her little ones are dear, very dear, to me. Would that I could do a father’s part by them.”

Perhaps the impossibility of doing justice to this soldier’s feelings is precisely why Congress has repeatedly refused to authorize a national commission for the commemoration of the sesquicentennial. More likely, the partisanship that has created deadlock in Congress over almost everything else is the real political reason behind the lack of a federal commission, but without an agency to oversee the anniversary, the whole observance already seems to have fizzled. Of course, Congress is not about to tackle tough issues, and any official commemoration of the Civil War would only emphasize how hypocritical, how morally (and financially) bankrupt, our republic has become in the New Gilded Age of the 21st century. The Civil War, in other words, is too difficult for Congress to manage. It’s too messy. It involves taking stock of who we are and where we have come from. It means facing up to hard truths and unkept promises. So Congress, in typical fashion, has ducked the sesquicentennial.

If so, it’s not entirely without cause — beyond, that is, the nervous fear of confronting hard historical truths. The Civil War Centennial 50 years ago was a notable disaster. The national commissions created by Congress suffered from mismanagement in its early days, until several prominent historians stepped in and saved it from self-immolation, but meanwhile the civil rights movement made the commemoration of Civil War battles look and sound profoundly hollow. One hundred years had passed since the war had been fought, presumably granting full civil rights to African-Americans and ensuring those rights in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; and yet, blacks were still fighting to secure those rights and yearning to be treated with the dignity they deserved as Americans and as human beings. As African-Americans pushed their civil rights movement forward in the ’60s, they were vehemently opposed by states rights segregationists who resurrected the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of white supremacy. As Robert J. Cook, who has written a history of the centennial that should give all Americans pause as they stumble their way into the sesquicentennial, insightfully concludes: “If the Civil War centennial tells us anything, it is that seemingly entrenched historical memories are not always a match for the onrush of time.” Regrettably, as minorities continue to struggle for equality in our land of the free and the home of the brave, the lost cause of the Confederacy continues to dominate public conceptions of what the Civil War means to us today. Moonlight and magnolias define the essence of the Civil War for most Americans. And public celebrations dreamily embrace the romance of a war that should, by all rights, repel us and horrify us and send shivers of fright down our spines. The commemoration of the sesquicentennial deserves to be more funereal than mirthful, more disconsolate than cheery.

One prominent Civil War historian, Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College, sees the sesquicentennial as pitting so many different interests against one another — academic historians, popular historians, public historians, reenactors, community organizers and the general public — that he believes we might as well “call the whole thing off.” Needless to say, that’s not possible, since the sesquicentennial will happen whether we want it to or not, and the lack of a federal commission to oversee and coordinate the commemoration won’t stop anyone from doing so, as the recent festivities in Charleston have loudly made plain. If one takes the rather lackluster Lincoln bicentennial into account, I’m tempted to agree with Guelzo — a Lincoln scholar who, by the way, offered no such cautionary remarks about that overblown and extremely dull commemoration of the 200th birthday of the 16th president that dragged on for two excruciating years. Personally, though, I don’t think we need to call off the Civil War sesquicentennial; there are ways of commemorating it without necessarily indulging in battle reenactments or costume balls, hoop skirts and all.

One might begin by reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I’m serious. It contains only 272 words, but it spelled out for the American people — in Lincoln’s own time and in ours — the entire meaning of the Civil War. Actually it offers something for everybody in this second decade of the 21st century. If you’re a Tea Party right-winger, you’ll want to do some arm pumping during the opening lines of the address that refer to the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence. Any conservative has to take heart with Lincoln’s references to life and liberty and happiness. Liberals will react to the address with more melancholic feelings for the good old days, since the speech refers to a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” rather than our present reality of a government of the corporations, by the lobbyists and for the rich.

Still, Lincoln had a great deal to say in his little speech, which was delivered to dedicate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, and he said it so well, in timeless prose. Eloquently and in plain words, Lincoln held forth a promise that the war would not be fought in vain. He saw a new America emerging out of the old, a country more dedicated to its most cherished ideals, a nation reborn out of the fire and ashes of war. His words elevated the significance of the Civil War beyond a fight simply to restore the Union. Confronting the deadly reality of the battle — the grisly remains that still, in some cases, awaited reburial on the day of the cemetery’s dedication — Lincoln honored the Union men “who here gave their lives” for the sake of their country; by doing so, the president helped Americans, then and now, focus on the ideal of the warrior’s sacrifice rather than on the reality of the soldier’s suffering. The ground at Gettysburg, as Lincoln said, had been duly consecrated, as if gods, rather than ordinary soldiers, had spilled their blood there. His heroic image of the dead did not, at the time, diminish the awful reality of the battle and the war. As Lincoln’s speech gained popularity after his death, his words were increasingly understood as articulating the deeper meaning of the war, which, in his opinion, involved not only the preservation of the Union, but the initiation of a new era of equality and freedom.

One might successfully argue that the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln hoped for never came about, although most Civil War historians — including James M. McPherson, the present dean of Civil War scholars — insist that it did. He and the other experts who agree with him are right only in the sense that freedom for whites expanded and soared in the postwar era and well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Otherwise, it took a century, in the face of strong white resistance, for blacks and other minorities — including immigrants of every stripe — to win even a modicum of the rights and the fruits of freedom that the 620,000 lives expended in the Civil War were supposed to have given them. Nevertheless, the place to begin if one wants to understand the true, deeper meanings of the war — and how we as Americans have failed to keep its promises or bring about Lincoln’s hope for a new birth of freedom — is to read the Gettysburg Address. You might also want to glance at the Declaration of Independence to see how the two documents fit hand-in-glove.

All in all, it seems to me that the best way to commemorate the Civil War is to do so by leaving the war to the dead rather than the living — to acknowledge in a solemn manner how absolutely harrowing and heartrending the war actually was and to observe its anniversary with gestures that are private, quiet and gentle. While pudgy Civil War reenactors pretend to relive history, perhaps the soldiers who fought the real battles — and who gave their lives or shed their blood in them — should be honored with true respect and a hushed gravitas. How can a somber (and sober) commemoration be achieved?

Read a book about the Civil War, particularly any of a wide assortment of fine books about how soldiers endured the conflict’s many hardships and how the experience of combat altered their view of themselves and their world. I can recommend several that reveal in stunning detail how soldiers of the Union and Confederacy saw themselves and understood their respective causes; a good number of these works also reveal the soldiers’ day-to-day lives, in camp and on the battlefield — their dedication to ideology and cause, their courage and their fears, their humor and sadness, their fortitude and despair, their comradery and loneliness. Start with Bell I. Wiley’s two older (but not outdated) books: “The Life of Johnny Reb” (1943) and “The Life of Billy Yank” (1952). For a literary treat, as well as a narrative account of how Union soldiers in the Army of the Potomac endured the miseries of repeated defeats and inept generals, move on to Bruce Catton’s trilogy, “Mr. Lincoln’s Army” (1951), “Glory Road” (1952), and “A Stillness at Appomattox” (1953). Catton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Stillness” in 1954, maintains a tightly focused perspective on the ordinary soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. The reader gets to follow those soldiers down long dirt lanes, dusty or muddy, as they experience their distressing defeats and their greatest victories.

Several more recent books also offer valuable, and sometimes startling, insights into soldier life during the Civil War: Reid Mitchell’s “Civil War Soldiers” (1988) and “The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home” (1993); Gerald F. Linderman’s “Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the Civil War” (1989); Earl J. Hess’ “The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat” (1997); James M. McPherson’s “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War” (1997); and Chandra Manning’s “What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War” (2007). None of these works is a ponderous scholarly tome, although each one is based on solid scholarship, innovative research and engaging prose. I’ve also made my own contribution to the literature on Civil War soldiers in my book, “Twilight at Little Round Top” (2005), which examines the fight for a crucial hill at Gettysburg primarily through the eyes of six ordinary soldiers, three Union and three Confederate.

A flood of additional Civil War books will come pouring off the presses during the sesquicentennial, but caveat emptor — most of them will claim to be new and original on their dust jackets, but the greatest number of them will be derivative and redundant. For a list of what I consider to be the best 12 books ever written on the Civil War (since, that is, 1950 or so), check out my earlier Salon essay. If you don’t know where to get started reading about the Civil War, I recommend Louis P. Masur’s fresh and amazingly brief (for all the ground it covers), “The Civil War: A Concise History” (2011), which contains a superb bibliography that you can use as a guide to further reading on a variety of Civil War subjects, including general works that treat the war in more detail. When all else fails, the Internet offers oceans of information about the Civil War. Some websites, of course, are more worthy or reliable than others, but it won’t take long to learn how to find the good ones and navigate away from the schlock.

Fiction may be more to your liking, and if so, there are several novels about the Civil War that historians either revere or hate. Most scholars love Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” (1974), which tells the story of Gettysburg with terse prose and vivid characters; it later became the basis for the movie “Gettysburg” (1993), an uneven film that has a few moments of brilliance in it. The novels of Shaara’s son Jeff are not as beloved as his father’s book, which won the Pulitzer Prize; the younger Shaara wrote a prequel and a sequel to his father’s book, and in both instances the son’s extraordinary lack of talent as a writer is embarrassingly revealed (nevertheless, his books are uncritically adored by Civil War buffs). Another novel that’s generally despised by scholars, although not by me, is Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln” (1984), an epic (and, at times, almost whimsical) portrait of the president during the war years that blends myth and history artfully together in such a way that leaves the reader wondering if the real Lincoln can ever truly be known — a very real question that every Lincoln biographer must wrestle with. Those same Lincoln biographers, however, generally have condemned the novel for all its fictionalization of Honest Abe’s presidency — a criticism that Vidal answered by pointing out that his book was indeed a novel, which I think gives him the last word. Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” (1997) shot to the top of the bestseller lists and won rave reviews when it was first published, but the reader must trek through miles and miles of the author’s minute descriptions of blossoming flora and blue mountains and pastel skies, as his protagonist must do, to reach the story’s very predictable conclusion; this novel, too, was made into a tolerable movie that was filmed in Romania of all places and starred Nicole Kidman (an Australian) and Jude Law (a Brit). Go figure. And then, of course, there is “Gone With The Wind,” the novel (1936) and the movie (1939). The movie is better than the novel, which also won a Pulitzer, although both are well worth the effort. Personally, I consider Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884) the greatest novel written about the Civil War (although it takes place before the war broke out) and the greatest American novel of all time. Period.

If, however, you are “not really into reading,” as one of my students so candidly informed me after admitting that she had not read any of the eight assigned books for my Civil War course (she got an F), you can mark the sesquicentennial in other tranquil and reverential ways. It should not be necessary to point out that the Civil War was tragic, not romantic, but the romanticism is what dominates public conceptions of the war. Allen Nevins, a brilliant historian whose work is now mostly ignored by younger scholars, once attempted to emphasize the war’s enormous tragedy by making this profoundly powerful point: “We can say that the multitude of Civil War dead represent hundreds of thousands of homes, and hundreds of thousands of families, that might have been, and never were. They represent millions of people who might have been part of our population today and are not. We have lost the books they might have written, the scientific discoveries they might have made, the inventions they might have perfected. Such a loss defies measurement.” Nevins wrote those words in 1961, and it seems unlikely that his admonition, or anything I could add to it, will impress Civil War enthusiasts to abandon the romantic myths of the war in favor of a stark realism that lays out, without any varnish, how Americans suffered and sacrificed as they killed one another in droves.

Even some academic historians shrink from accepting the hellishness of the Civil War. One scholar, Mark E. Neely Jr., complains that vital aspects of the war have become hidden by what he believes has been an overemphasis on the conflict’s destructiveness, what he condemns among his fellow experts as “a cult of violence.” He argues, in fact, that the Civil War was, comparatively speaking, no more violent or destructive than other wars, which may or may not be so, but his contention that the war was somehow less violent than historians have claimed flies in the face of the fact that 620,000 Americans died in the four years between 1861 and 1865. Historians haven’t exaggerated the war’s human toll; if anything, they still have not dealt effectively with the sensationalized romance — promulgated in part by the Civil War generation itself — that smothers our comprehension of the contest between North and South as an excessive expression of an American tradition of violence (on this point, see my earlier essay, “Our permanent culture of political violence“).

It’s the Civil War dead, not “living historians,” who deserve our attention during the sesquicentennial. If you live in the eastern two-thirds of the country, from Nebraska to Maine and from Texas to Florida, chances are there’s a Civil War monument in a nearby town or city honoring the community’s volunteers who fought and died for their cause. A few years ago, just by chance, I came across a handsome soldiers’ monument in the little Massachusetts community of Marion, not too far from Plymouth. It stands boldly on a small patch of land at an intersection. What struck me, though, and the only reason I noticed it all, was that the lawn around the tall memorial had been carefully manicured and lovely clumps of marigolds had been planted around the stone base. Obviously someone — perhaps a community group, a senior citizens’ center, or a Boy Scout troop — cared deeply for the monument. I was impressed — and deeply touched. Someone in the community recognized the monument’s importance and respected the contribution the Marion soldiers had made during the War of the Rebellion, enough, in fact, to honor them with small gestures: a mowed lawn, some flowering plants and a polished, shining statue. Standing in the monument’s shadow, it occurred to me that someone, whoever it was, understood the true meaning of the Civil War and remembered eloquently and poignantly what the community’s brave young men — now long gone from this earth — had given so selflessly a century and a half ago. The groomed lawn was one thing, but the pretty marigolds, a fitting substitute for forget-me-nots, spoke volumes.

If there is a monument to Civil War soldiers in your community, you might think about leaving a bouquet of flowers or a wreath at its base. Or if the local memorial has been overgrown and is in disrepair, organize a community group to spruce it up. Commemorate Memorial Day by remembering not only the service to our country of all military personnel, including those killed in combat, but do so in a way that fits the origin of the holiday — in both the North and the South — as Decoration Day, a single day specifically dedicated to the memory of the Civil War’s fallen soldiers. If there is a national cemetery near you, there’s a good chance it contains the remains of Union soldiers, even if you live in the western states, such as California, Washington and Oregon. In the Southern states, there are numerous cemeteries either dedicated exclusively to the Confederate dead or that contain special sections marked off for Southern combat casualties or veterans who died after the war. Even in the Northern states, there are Confederate cemeteries located near former Union prisoner-of-war camps, such as Elmira, N.Y., or Point Lookout, Md.. You might want to visit these cemeteries and remember the dead by strolling through, reading the names, and leaving a flower or a small flag on a grave or headstone.

Civil War museums abound in the eastern United States, more so in the South than the North, but often state and local historical societies display artifacts or tell the story of how your community participated in the war. If the federal government can manage to survive this spring without shutting down, you might visit a Civil War battlefield administered by the National Park Service, which consistently does a fine job of educating visitors not only about the battle fought there, but also about the causes and consequences of that particular battle and of the entire war. In many Southern states, there are also worthy Civil War sites operated as state parks.

If you have an ancestor who served during the war, you might want to track down his grave and pay your respects. Don’t forget that civilian men and women served as doctors and nurses on both sides; they deserve to be honored and remembered as much as the soldiers who fought in the ranks. If you want to find out if one of your ancestors shouldered a musket for the Blue or Gray, the Internet is the place to start your genealogical quest. Several private and commercial sites will help you find your way and discover whether or not your kin helped to determine the outcome of the war. Perhaps you even have old letters or diaries written by a Civil War forbear. If so, make photocopies of them and then explore the possibility of donating the originals to a historical society, library, museum or even the Library of Congress, so that historians can benefit by using them in their research. You may not want to let such documents out of your family. If that’s the case, think about taking one of the letters and getting it professionally framed so you can hang it in your house or office and point it out to relatives and friends, proudly telling them: “Here’s a letter written by my great-great-grandfather during the Civil War.”

Yet none of these silent tributes really get to the heart of the Civil War. Some historians talk about the Civil War’s “unfinished business,” as if the conflict involved a checklist that no one got around to completing. Actually the war changed everything in the United States: how Americans thought about themselves and their country; how work and industry could be organized, just like the huge armies that tramped from battle to battle; how the nation would henceforth define citizenship and civil rights; how equality would be heralded and, sadly, curtailed (both at the same time); how the federal government steadily grew in size and scope but adopted laissez-faire policies, especially when if came to regulating business or neglecting the downtrodden; how people would relate to one another — more circumspect, less innocently than in the old days before the war; and even how people would speak to one another using new, crisp, declarative slang words and a rugged American language, captured so perfectly in the writings of Mark Twain, that resembled soldier talk and the realism of war. What the war did not change — not permanently, anyway — were white attitudes toward African-Americans and other minorities. Nor have those attitudes changed all that much in our own time, despite some of the very real advances that have marked race relations since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other tangible victories of the civil rights movement.

In 1961, at the start of the Civil War Centennial, Walker Percy, the talented Mississippi novelist, observed that “the country has still not made up its mind what to do about the Negro.” Fifty years later, while a black man occupies the Oval Office, we still haven’t made up our mind as to what we should do about African-Americans and every other minority that inhabits this nation. White racial fears are hidden behind “birther” accusations, draconian immigration proposals and political attacks on federal entitlement programs; some white Americans even cry out that they want to take their country back.

The Civil War sesquicentennial can give them only one answer: You may try to get it back by pretending to fire on Fort Sumter, as the Civil War reenactors did in Charleston two weeks ago. Or you may try to get it back by joining the Tea Party and working to turn back the hands of time to the glory days you imagine as having once existed. But you can’t get your country back. You lost it 150 years ago. Ever since then, whether you like it or not, the steady march of the United States has been toward the higher ground, the greater purpose, of democracy and equality. And while that march has sometimes been stalled or even derailed, while it has been barricaded, hosed down and even sold out, nothing, nothing, has ever succeeded in keeping it permanently from moving forward. Perhaps, in the end, that’s the real legacy and the true significance of the Civil War.