Bring up the Civil War, and sooner or later in that conversation, I’ll be time-traveling back to my adolescence, between the ages of 10 and 12, turning the pages for the umpteenth time of my family’s two-volume set of the “American Heritage Civil War.” I’d be charging through the fields and woods around our home with friends, pretending to be a Billy Yank or a Johnny Reb, or setting up several hundred blue and gray plastic toy soldiers with my brother in our basement playroom.
Nearly every summer, Mom and Dad would pack us kids into a station wagon and drive from our home in Piedmont, North Carolina, to New Castle, Pennsylvania, to visit grandparents and other relatives. Route 11 ran straight up the Shenandoah Valley—there was no interstate route then—and here was more magic as we traveled through battlefields and historic towns. Lexington, Staunton, New Market, Strasburg were all imbued with Civil War history. I’d look at the old houses and wonder whether Confederate troops had once marched past those front porches, or we’d stop at some country store selling Civil War memorabilia and even authentic bayonets and Minie balls (cylindrical bullets used in rifles during the Civil War). For a kid like me, this trip through history was the equivalent of a gargantuan hot fudge sundae crowned with heaps of whipped cream.
