Photo by Peter Fink
In his "The Legacy of the Civil War," written in 1961, Robert Penn Warren declared: "The Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of national as well as personal fate." While writing that book, Warren described his challenge: "to distinguish between historical importance" of the war and its "fundamental appeal to the American imagination." All the "attractions" Americans felt toward the Civil War, he concluded, were not "worthy." "Because the war made us great we like to look at it — as the dog likes to look at the icebox door."...