Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers - if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.

Nathan Bedford Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say the essence of strategy was to git thar fust with the most men.

What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a new birth of freedom.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.

Beneath everything else, North and West, there ran a profound, unvoiced, almost subconscious conviction that the [American] nation was going to go on growing-in size, in power, in everything a man could think of-and in that belief there was a might and a fury that would take form instantly at the moment of shock.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.