In April 1865, America was a different place from what it had been just four years before. Atlanta: burned. Richmond: burned. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania: burned. Swaths of the South were scissored with trenches and abatis and pocked with shell holes. Washington, D.C., had become an army town, with barricades in the streets and more than 500 bordellos behind the shades. And in every city and town, North as well as South, there were changes among the people: men who were gone, men who were maimed, people who had been masters who were now nearly helpless, people who were free who had to discover how to live freely. The story of America had been revised with chapters on Antietam, Gettysburg and Andersonville, and on emancipation and citizenship and a new birth of freedom, the meanings of which were unsettled then and elude full agreement even now.
Today, 150 years after the fighting ended, the Civil War remains central in the American imagination. Some of the landscapes are changing, but the stories prevail—tales of courage and foolishness and the very human outcomes that resulted. For the last four years, Americans have been marking anniversaries, from Fort Sumter onward. What we offer now, as a last 150th-year look back, is a tour of less-visited sites that reflect more intimately how the Civil War changed the nation.
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