You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.

New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong.We are only an aggregate of states, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock. The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers.It was the beginning of the Confederate Army.The militia system in the South, which had been a joke before this, before then, becomes a viable instrument, as the Southern militias begin to take a true form and the South begins to worry about Northerners agitating the Blacks to murder them in their beds. Failure in everything in life, except he becomes the single most-important factor, in my opinion, in bringing on the War. John Brown, John Brown.very important person in history.I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.We are divorced because we have hated each other so.') Mary Chesnut (The actual quote from A Diary from Dixie is: 'We separated North from South because of incompatibility of temper.We are divorced North from South, because we hated each other so. We are separated because of incompatibility of temper.Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.Thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind, though not always on his tongue. Owing to the cotton gin, it was more than half awake. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. There was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent.Fewer than four in a hundred lived to be 60. The child who survived to be sent to the fields at 12 was likely to have worms, rotten teeth, dysentery and malaria. Drafty in winter, reeking in summer, slave cabins bred pneumonia, typhus, cholera, lockjaw, and tuberculosis. A slave entered the world in a one-room, dirt-floored shack.For the slave it is all night - all night forever.' One white Mississippian was more blunt: 'I'd rather be dead,' he said, 'than be a nigger on one of these big plantations.' 'No day ever dawns for the slave,' a freed black man wrote, 'nor is it looked for.What began as a bitter dispute over Union and State's Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America.And over six hundred thousand men, two percent of the population, died in it. More than three million Americans fought in it. Albans, Vermont and Fernandina on the Florida Coast. The Civil War was fought in ten thousand places, from Valverde, New Mexico and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St.And Wilmer McLean could rightfully say, 'The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.' And it was there in his living room, three and a half years later, that Lee surrendered to Grant. Now McLean moved his family away from Manassas, far south and west of Richmond, out of harm's way, he prayed, to a dusty little crossroads' called Appomattox Court House. Two great armies were converging on his farm and what would be the first major battle of the Civil War, Bull Run, or Manassas as the Confederates called it, would soon rage across the aging Virginian's farm: a Union shell going so far as to explode in the summer kitchen. By the summer of 1861, Wilmer McLean had had enough.In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.

We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Opening Lines) We have shared the incommunicable experience of war.

We have shared the incommunicable experience of war.

9 Episode 9: The Better Angels of Our Nature.

6 Episode 6: Valley of the Shadow of Death.

In fact, please support the poet’s work by purchasing the book in which this poem was originally published: The Dash Making a Difference With Your Life by Linda Ellis. We request that hosts and participants honor the poet’s copyright by not printing or sharing it in any other way. This poem is copyrighted by the poet and is included in the Healing Circles Global poetry wiki because it provides insight, nourishment, and inspiration to the hosts and participants of healing circles. He noted that first came the date of birth He referred to the dates on the tombstone

The dash poem narrated