On fame's eternal camping ground
Their silent tents to spread,
And glory guards, with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.
Confederate History and Heritage Month is gone for another year, but in the aftermath comes a few passing thoughts.
Years ago, I stood on a grassy rise above a rock wall and looked down a long slope that dropped off a few hundred yards to a serpentine curve in the Mississippi River. Plaques displayed about Vicksburg National Cemetery contained lines from Theodore O'Hara's poem, "The Bivouac of the Dead."
Vicksburg Park is big: 1,800 acres containing 1,324 monuments and markers. It also contains 18,000 graves, the largest number of Civil War soldiers of any national cemetery in the United States. From my vantage point, rows of stone markers stood like troops in formation, a tribute to the infantry and cavalrymen who lay beneath. The afternoon sun filtered through the trees, casting a reverent softness over a scene of everlasting peace.
On July 4, 1863, Vicksburg's surrender was a compounded blow for the Confederacy. Just the day before, the disaster at Gettysburg had ended, where North Carolinians making up a fifth of Southern forces, had suffered nearly a third of the casualties. The 26th North Carolina, with 843 men, lost 615 killed or wounded, likely the battle's worst casualty rate. Thousands of brave men in blue and gray had fallen, and thousands more would join them in the next 21 months.
We may fantasize war as gallant men on horseback charging bravely into the face of certain death - swords raised, flags waving, and muskets firing - to defend the honor of some noble cause. But the faces of war were all too real: young soldiers frightened at the prospect of too quickly becoming men, or worse, of never reaching their manhood. The ordinary foot soldiers walked countless miles and went days without decent food and rest. Men suffered from the natural ravages and physical deprivation inherent to all battlefields.
The majority of Southerners who answered the call to arms were poor farmers, small landowners, and shopkeepers. The plantation gentry who served were a comparative few, and those wealthy enough on either side paid someone to fight for them. This underscored that the 95 percent of non-slave owning Southerners fought for something other than to preserve slavery. Even worse, these civilian-soldiers did not fight a war to defend their homes and lands from foreign invaders. They fought for what they believed to be the unwarranted intrusion of the Federal government into their lives, and to preserve their personal freedoms.
As they had done over Charleston harbor in April 1861, the thunder of big guns rolled over the hills and valleys of the South. Their deafening roar mixed with rumbling hoof beats of thousands of horses moving their riders from one battle to another, or charging head-on into eternity. Sometimes God's thunder rolled across the heavens, as if to protest man's sorry spectacle on Earth. Rain poured. Wagons and men mired in mud. Then the sun beat down with its smothering heat.
In the winter, man and beast struggled to endure the killing cold of a frozen countryside, amid blowing snow and the flesh-numbing waters of rivers and streams. With spring came new life, bringing the sweetness of Virginia apples and Georgia peaches. Fragrant honeysuckle vines bloomed, with succulent blackberries growing on thorny bushes.
But with the spring warmth also came the terrible, pungent odor of death from men and animals left in haste on desolate battlefields, embarking on their Biblical journey back to dust. And after that first barrage in Charleston, the sun would rise and set over the South nearly 1,500 times. For all who fought, that would seem like a lifetime. For all too many, it was.
As Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest said, "War is about fightin' and fightin' is about killin'." And in the nasty, blood-spilling outrage of the Civil War, tens of thousands fell in one battle after another. The combined losses of the Union and Confederate armies were enormous - 630,000 dead on battlefields and more than a million casualties - all Americans. Gen. Robert E. Lee placed the carnage of war in another perspective: "It is well that war is so terrible - lest we should grow too fond of it."
By the spring of 1865, the worst upheaval and carnage the United States may ever see within its borders was grinding to its end, and the American Civil War would take its place in history. Four years of bitter fighting and bloodshed had concentrated hardship and terror from the shores of the Potomac River to Texas.
But the impact of war does not always come from the dramatic roar of artillery exploding across a battlefield or a tattered flag rising through the dust of human attrition. In the cities and small rural towns of the South, the devastating effects on the economy - which was virtually wiped out - the violation of land and homes, and the human loss was felt with an especially brutal impact. In the Confederate states, 50,000 civilians lay dead in the war's aftermath.
The people who experienced the hard downfall and bitter losses shared a special bond. Even after the passage of time had assuaged their grief, an exclusive sharing of emotions and a will to overcome and rebuild connected the survivors throughout the Southland. But even that connection was fragmented by loyalties divided between the surviving Federal government of the victorious Union and lingering memories of hope for a shattered Confederacy. Long years of rebuilding lay ahead in the South. Those years were called Reconstruction, and that was another chaotic time for all.
Bill Ward lives in Salisbury and is a historian, writer, and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Contact him at wardwriters@bellsouth.net 
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