The war in North America between 1861 and 1865 cost around three
quarters of a million lives. Few societies in world history have lost a
higher percentage of their military-aged men in battle than did the
white South. Unsurprisingly, its scars lie deep on the American soul -
especially so in the former Confederacy. Yet the war's historical
significance is based on more than just the scale of the violence. It is
the great American story. "I am large, I contain multitudes," wrote Walt
Whitman, the great poet of American democracy, but the war through which
he lived, nursing devastatingly injured soldiers, contains even more
"multitudes" than him. It is a story that can be told in a million
different voices; it contains heroism and cowardice, craven injustice
and heart-warming redemption; above all, it is the great American story
because it seems to matter so much. It was "the crossroads of our
being", in the words of one popular historian. One of the world's
leading experts on the period, Dr Adam Smith, tells the story of a war
which is vital to any understanding of the great struggles and big
historical forces that have shaped the modern world. And he looks at the
great issues of the war: the morality of slavery, the leadership of
Abraham Lincoln, the importance of freedom. If the Civil War is the
crossroads of America's being, it is also, in a different sense, one of
the major crossroads over which the world has travelled in its journey
to the present.
