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Hold at All Costs, Dale Gallon |
As for the North, even when you win you lose. Even when the "cause" is no less than the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery, the loss in lives, suffering, and economic upheaval fails to make the cost unquestionable. Yet, for better or worse, social change is inevitable; and when it is blocked for an excessively long period of time, war also becomes inevitable.
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Even when you win you lose. |
On April 12, 1861, a single cannon shot fired across the ramparts of Fort Sumter, suddenly unleashed a cataclysmic earthquake. An entire nation's way of life was jolted into four long years of hellacious conflict. Hatreds were embedded. Lives were lost, yet other lives were changed. Hope was engendered. It has taken more than a century, but an entire nation changed. The
United States would never be the same again.
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Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Artists depicting the historic event couldn't even agree on a carpet pattern. |
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Harry Davis capturing the battle
flag of the Thirtieth Louisiana
Regiment at the Battle of Ezra
Church. |
A surrender was signed. An army laid down its arms. Slavery ended. A pres-ident was assassinated just days later. A sort of uneasy peace gradually evolved despite Reconstruction and the Jim Crow laws which followed. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died. Civil rights were won. Yet the aftermath of the war wounds, now more than a hundred years old, remain. Today, sores are reopened. Flags come down. Statues fall on their face, or are rightly relegated to the dark recesses of art museums. Even some of the very paintings seen above are falling into question. Change takes time. When it happens too slowly, pressures build, tempers flare, nerves fray--then snap--in places like Charlottesville, Virginia, and Ferguson, Missouri. When changes hap-pen too quickly, despots and the tyrants condemned by Aristotle arise to make the most of them.
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The Aftermath at Bloody Lane, 1862, James Hope. Only when the hell of war creeps into the living room is there hope in avoiding such horrors. |
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Stonewall Jackson, 1911, N.C. Wyeth |
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