Alva Review-Courier -

Every spring, as April approaches, my thoughts (and those of other U.S. historians) are inevitably drawn to an examination of the Civil War.

That bloody confrontation began and ended in April. The first shots were fired in South Carolina on April 12, 1861, and the South surrendered to the North in Virginia on April 9, 1865.

In between those dates, over 620,000 young men (fully two percent of the U.S. population) died on the battlefields of America’s most divisive and bloodiest conflict.

Thousands of human interest stories exist about the Civil War, and historians like to tell them. This is one...