In graduate school, years ago, a couple of friends and I met once a weekat Sonny''s to eat pizza and drink red wine and talk about Shakespeare.Across the street the concrete tower of the English department stoodmotionless as winter ebbed into spring.One afternoon Gordon talked about the history plays. Gordon hadbeen reading Heidegger, and, so he explained, the histories were a goodexample of how it is that we meet our past coming to us out of thefuture. Abe Lincoln, Gordon told us, was an avid reader of Shakespeare''shistory plays.In a flash of wine-and-pizza insight, cars gliding by silently beyondthe plate glass window, I saw that the soul of Shakespeare''s history playshad transmigrated over four centuries into a TV miniseries. And indeed,just as Shakespeare picked his history carefully (he could please or offendthe ruling Tudors, depending on how he framed the wars of successiona century or two before his time), I found myself drifting back to thedays of Abe Lincoln''s presidency--brought to you by Chevrolet, theHeartbeat of America.Robert Penn Warren: To begin with, the Civil War offers a galleryof great human images for our contemplation.

It affords a dazzlingarray of figures, noble in proportion yet human, caught out of Timeas in a frieze, in stances so profoundly touching or powerfully mythicthat they move us in a way no mere consideration of ''historical importance''ever could.1 Edmund Wilson: Has there ever been another historical crisis of themagnitude of 1861-65 in which so many people were articulate? .The drama has already been staged by characters who have writtentheir own parts; and the peculiar fascination of this literature whichleads one to go on and on reading it is rather like that of Browning''sThe Ring and the Book, in which the same story is told from the pointsof view of nine different persons.2 Walt Whitman: The War of Attempted Secession has, of course,been the distinguishing event of my time.3On the small screen of my mind, Union and Confederate generalsstrut about, declaiming Shakespearean lines as pompously as MarkTwain''s Duke and Dauphin. Night. Another part of the field. Harry andHotspur somewhere in Virginia, the spring of 1865.

Dim and smokycampfires, councils of war. Harsh glances and savage words: The Road toAppomattox, perhaps, a dozen hours of docudrama, a full week of primetimeTV.From a thespian point of view, all war--despite the vagaries ofchance, despite differences in manpower and resources--comes down toan ultimate contest of will between the two commanding generals. Onthe Southern side stands Robert E. Lee, fifty-eight years old atAppomattox, former superintendent of West Point. Lee was a longtimecareer soldier in the U.S. Army, who had fought in the Mexican Warand whose father, Light Horse Harry Lee, a compatriot of GeorgeWashington, had been a cavalry commander in the Revolutionary War.

In 1859, while at home on leave in Arlington, Lee was chosen to go takecharge of the situation at Harper''s Ferry, where some crazy man namedJohn Brown and a bunch of Free-Soilers had taken hostages and wereholed up in the federal armory threatening to start a slave rebellion inVirginia. Walt Whitman: As the period of the war recedes, I am more thanever convinced that it is important for those of us who were on thescene to put our experiences on record.4Baltimore, Monday, October 17, 1859A dispatch just received here from Frederick, and dated this morning,states that an insurrection has broken out at Harper''s Ferry, where anarmed band of Abolitionists have full possession of the GovernmentArsenal. The express train going east was twice fired into, and one ofthe railroad hands and a negro killed, while they were endeavoring toget the train through the town. The insurrectionists stopped andarrested two men, who had come to town with a load of wheat, and,seizing their wagons, loaded them with rifles, and sent them toMaryland. The insurrectionists number about 250 whites, and areaided by a gang of negroes. At last accounts, fighting was going on.5Lieutenant Colonel Robert E.

Lee--aided by Lieutenant Jeb Stuartand a company of U.S. Marines--made quick work of what in fact turnedout to be only twenty-some individuals. The survivors, John Brown andsix of his followers, were tried, convicted, and hanged for insurrection.Less than two years later, when the war Brown had anticipated brokeout in 1861, Lee was offered command of the Federal armies, butdeclined. Soon thereafter, he resigned his commission and accepted commandof the Virginia forces when, following her sister states of the DeepSouth, Virginia seceded. Four years later, Lee is in command of all theSouthern armies. Walt Whitman: It does not need calling in play the imaginationto see that in such a record as this lies folded a perfect poem of thewar comprehending all its phases, its passions, the fierce tug of thesecessionists, the interminable fibre of the national union, all the specialhues & characteristic forms & pictures of the actual battles withcolors flying, rifles snapping, cannon thundering, grape whirring,armies struggling, ships at sea or bombarding shore batteries, skirmishesin woods, great pitched battles, & all the profound scenesof individual death, courage, endurance & superbest hardihood, &splendid muscular wrestle of a newer larger race of human giantswith all furious passions aroused on one side, & the sternness of anunalterable determination on the other.

6On the Federal side is Ulysses S. Grant, fifteen years younger thanLee. In 1854, Grant had resigned from the army--perhaps in partbecause of a drinking problem--and later rejoined, a political appointee,at the start of the war. In the interim, after various failed ventures, hehad worked in his father''s leather store in Galena, Illinois. By 1864, threeyears into the war, he has become commanding general of the Unionarmies. A year later, he is on the verge of victory--a good example ofhow war takes men who seem to have no particular success in civilianlife and makes of them illustrious heroes or killers, depending on yourpoint of view.Walt Whitman: My idea of a book of the time, worthy the time .incidents, persons, places, sights .

a book full enough of mosaic butall fused in one comprehensive theory . My idea is a book of handysize and form . to cost, including copyright, not more than thirtyfivecents or thereabouts to make; to retail for a dollar. I think an edition,elegantly bound, might be pushed off for books for presents, etc.,for the holidays, if advertised for that purpose. It would be very appropriate.I think it is a book that would please women. I should expectit to be popular with the trade.

7 Edmund Hatcher: Those who were witnesses and participants inthe great struggle can vouch for the correctness of this compilation,while those who have since appeared on the stage may find herein foodfor the production of an imaginary picture of the closing days of thewar, that they will never be able to properly paint.8America''s bloodiest war. More American soldiers died in the Civil Warthan in all the wars of the twentieth century combined. Out of a totalpopulation of about thirty million, more than three million soldiersserved--half of all military-age males--on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Two out of three men wore Federal uniforms (and 10 percentof those were African-American volunteers). All told, there wereapproximately seven hundred thousand battle casualties, with two hundredthousand deaths. Another four hundred thousand men died of diseaseor "other causes." Years later, wanderers in the Virginia woodswould stumble upon skeletons--soldiers who had crawled away duringthe heat of battle to die, and who were never found.

In all, more than one million men, one in every three soldiers, was acasualty of the war. Throughout the nineteenth century the Americanpeople would bear the scars of the Civil War, and the country would beirrevocably changed. "The past is never dead," William Faulkner said."It''s not even past."Well over a century after what many still see as the "War to Freethe Slaves," one in four black men in their twenties is in prison or on probationor parole--and, not coincidentally, the percentage of total U.S.population in prison is the highest of any nation in the world. Blackunemployment is double that of the white working class.

And accordingto the New York Times, a man from Harlem has less chance of reachingthe age of forty than someone from Bangladesh.In an economic sense the war was about slavery, as a system of agriculturalproduction in which plantation owners had different intereststhan the industrialists of the North. But even many abolitionists had nointention of extending to their black neighbors all the "natural" rightsexpressed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence--at least notwhen it came to living next door and dating your daughter--rightsenjoyed, to some degree, by all white male Americans.And there''s still no Lincoln automobile dealer in the city ofCharleston (though there is in the poorer, racially mixed northern suburbs)--Charleston, the so-called hotbed of secession, where in the year orso before the war it could be dangerous to one''s personal safety to soundlike a fellow who hailed from Boston, the so-called cradle of abolition. Mary Chesnut: I remember feeling a nervous dread & horror ofthis break with so great a power as U.S.A. but I was ready & willing--S.

C. had been so rampant for years. She was the torment of herself &everybody else. Nobody could live in this state unless he were a fireeater--come what would I wanted them to fight & stop talking .[they] had exasperated & heated themselves into a fever that onlybloodletting could ever cure--it was the inevitable remedy. So I was aSeceder--but I dreaded the future. I bore in mind Pugh''s letter, hisdescription of what he saw in Mexico when he accompanied an invadingArmy. My companions had their own thoughts & misgivingsdoubtless,.