1920s ante-bellum Ohio, circa 1964

If there is more than meets the eye, then surely it follows there is less one can possibly know.   With any certainty.  That at any rate has been my experience.  

For instance, as a child I devoured the famous books on the Civil War by Bruce Catton (1899-1978).  After all, who could resist a weighty tome with a title like "A Stillness at Appomattox" (1954), "The Coming Fury" (1961), or especially that page-turner, "Terrible Swift Sword"(1963)?   These thrilling tales of suffering and conflict, of long futile marches on dusty roads past abandoned pillared plantations and trees draped in Spanish moss, lonely nights of unspeakable hardship and terror on battlefields far from home, the painful struggles and lingering deaths of soldiers longing for their loved ones -- one need only throw in a little Walt Whitman to understand that what one was reading was a metaphoric guide to adolescence.  Harry Potter at Gettysburg, Ron Weasley his wounded comrade at Antietam, Ulysses S. Grant as Dumbledore, Andersonville a Civil War Azkaban.  Bruce Catton was my J.K. Rowling.

There was some confusion, of course.  It took a while before I realized there was no linguistic connection whatsoever between the belle and bellum of Southern Belle and Ante-bellum South; that there's little or nothing belle about bellum in fact, but this was  brought home to me more vividly after Kent State. 

"Whatever did happen to the anti-war movement of the 60s?" a not-very-educated young person asked me recently.

"They shot us," I explained.  "As you might imagine, we tended to lose interest after that."

"Four dead in O-hi-o," someone (no pun intended) well-versed in these matters, sang for clarification, dropping down on one knee and throwing her arms aloft for visual emphasis.

On a not altogether unrelated note, you may find it interesting that David J. Vance, a young African-American born in Lewisburg, West Virginia in 1839, enlisted in the Union Army in 1864, was discharged at Camp Dennison in 1865, and moved to Fremont, Ohio where he worked as a laborer until his death there in 1904. 

Meanwhile, John Brown Gordon, one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted Confederate generals and said by some to have been the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in the 1860s, also died in 1904.

Of course, what interests us and how we see the past is always changing, don't you think?  I think so.  But as I said, I know less and less these days.  The older I get, the less I can be sure, about nearly anything.