I have posted this before, but now there are many new folks on the board and, for their benefit, I thought I might post it again. These are words written by Bruce Catton in his little paperback, "America Goes to War - The Civil War and Its Meaning in American Culture," - p.68, "Making Hard War."

"We are people to whom the past is forever speaking. We listen to it because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices. Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone went through fire and storm to break a path to the future. We are part of the future they died for; they are part of the past that bought the future. What they did -the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the stories they told and the songs they sang and, finally, the deaths they died - make up a part of our own experience. We cannot cut ourselves off from it. It is as real to us as something that happened last week. It is a basic part of our heritage as Americans."

Then, Catton goes on to say,

"We have paid and will pay tribute to the men who fought in the Civil War, and will commune with them as their voices reach us from the past. Although we have heard their story a great many times, it is always worth a re-telling. They were pretty good men, those old veterans of ours. Not only do we owe them something that we can never repay: they have something to say to us that is worth listening to.

These words touch something deep down and nearly indescribable in me. Perhaps they will for you also.

Several years ago, I thought they only referred to CSA forces. Now, what with all that has taken place on this board in the last several years, I think they apply equally to the north and the South.