Bookends: Lest we forget

Something for genealogists working with mid-19th-century US ancestors to keep in mind (emphasis added):

"The Civil War matters to us today because it ended slavery and helped to define the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and equality," writes Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering. "It established a newly centralized nation-state and launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence. But for those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death." {xiii}