This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton

embraced the state of Kentucky.
    It was a queer summer in Kentucky. And yet, although nothing much seemed to be happening, the Confederates were playing a losing game. Whether they realized it or not, they had to have Kentucky. While it stayed neutral the rest of the border was being nailed down for the Union, and if western Virginia and Missouri were firmly held by the national government, Kentucky would eventually be held also, even though southern leaders would ultimately go through the motions of voting the state into the Confederacy. From Kentucky the road to the Deep South would be wide open. 8
    By the middle of July, in fact, the Lincoln administration had taken the all-important first trick. It had the border states — not firmly, as yet, by any means, and either military reverses or political clumsiness (both of which would be encountered) might easily lose them — but the first big danger had been passed. The time for serious fighting was approaching, and when it came the North would be operating with a solid advantage.
4.
The Rising Shadows
    Nearly four years later, when he was just five weeks away from the casket with the bronze handles, the echoing capitol dome above, the blue-coated soldiers standing with sober and disciplined unease in the flickering purple twilight, Abraham Lincoln tried to sum it up.
    “Neither party,” he said, “expected for the war the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.… Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.” 1
    The easy triumph did not look very far away in the early summer of 1861. There was going to be a short war, and it would be romantic and glorious — crowned, of course, with victory. In the Confederacy people held to the belief that one Southerner could whip five Yankees; in the North it was supposed that secession would collapse once a blue battle line came over the hills with the sunlight glinting on polished musket barrels; and no one, as Lincoln remarked, could see that what was going to happen would be fundamental and astounding, a tearing up and a breaking down, a consuming tragedy so costly that generations would pass before people could begin to say whether what it had bought was worth the price.
    The price … Well, what do you pay for an American Civil War? What is the cost of development from national adolescence to manhood; for the idea that the oneness of all people must run unbroken all through the national fabric; for a notion of citizenship that draws no line of color, birth, or where your grandfather’s people came from? The coins are various: a boy dying of typhoid in a cold tent, trampled grass growing up around the legs of his cot, a careless steward offering salt pork and hardtack for a final meal; another boy falling in a swamp with a slug of hot lead in his lungs; a home disrupted, with the goods that were to keep a family through the winter trampled on by grinning hoodlums; a woman on a farm in Indiana, or Mississippi, learning that the child who used to run barefooted across the meadows in spring has gone under the turf in some place whose name she never heard before … These are some of the coins, bloodshed and suffering and a deep sorrow in the breast, spent prodigally by folk who had not wanted to buy anything at all but who had just hoped to get along the best they could, winning a little happiness out of life if their luck was in: the total of these coins high beyond counting, the payment exacted from people who had made no bargain, the thing bought a mystic intangible dim in the great shadows.
    But the payment had hardly begun in July of 1861, and what lay ahead looked easy, looked like something that would soon be over.
    It was time, northern patriots believed, to whip the South and endmatters. Specifically, it was time for General McDowell to take his army down to Manassas Plain, crush the rebellion, and march triumphantly on to Richmond. A clamor of press and oratory