Opinion: Reflections on a War Much Remembered
This year marks the 140th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, the single most significant event in all of American history. In effect, the war redefined us as a people, and in so doing it served to refine the purpose of our national mission, which, with much difficulty, has always been to try to translate into reality the idealist rhetoric of the introduction of the Declaration of Independence, which is often viewed as the "birth certificate" of the American Dream.


