Apr 7, 2015 4 min read

Over a century before “Breaking News” alerts became a daily part of our media diet, news traveled at the pace of a tortoise to many parts of the country, and was often handled in a way that was more sober and deliberative than the bells and trumpets to which we have now grown accustomed.

Even though Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to his Union counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant, at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, 150 years ago Thursday, the Reporter and Tribune in Washington confined itself to a subdued discussion of what life could be like after the Civil War, without a hint of celebration.

“Businessmen who have a valuable trade should hold on to it,” the newspaper advised, forecasting, among other things, that there would be an increased demand for fabrics. Despite the end of the war being such an enormous event in the lives of all Americans, the Reporter and Tribune also informed readers about occurrences off the battlefield where many of their loved ones had traveled to and died. There was a report on the eruption of Mount Etna in Italy and thoughts on “old fashioned comforts.”

Almost 400 miles to Washington’s east, in New York City, The New York Times was less restrained. Then just one of many dailies in Gotham competing for eyeballs, it joyfully proclaimed, “Hang Out Your Banners; Union Victory! Peace!”

No one is alive now who was living at the Civil War’s end, and it’s receded so far into the past it’s become the stuff of dusty history.

And the wars that followed in the 20th century brought far higher overall death tolls than our internecine conflict. World War I claimed 16 million people, and World War II led to the deaths of 80 million people. But neither of those global clashes left as many Americans dead as did the Civil War.

Between the Confederate and Union sides, an estimated 625,000 troops perished – close to 2 percent of the United States’ entire population in those days. In comparison, 405,000 Americans died in World War II, just three-tenths of 1 percent of the country’s population, and 116,000 died in World War I, one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans.

One can only imagine the relief most people in Washington and Greene counties experienced at the Civil War’s end, and the continuing sorrow they felt over the loss of their sons. In Washington Cemetery, there is a section dedicated to the Civil War dead, and many of the markers are now worn away with the passage of time, making the names and dates hard to decipher. One of those buried there died at age 17; many others died in their 20s or 30s, in the prime of their lives.

Seven years after the Civil War ended, when Grant was in the White House and Lee was dead, a monument honoring Washington County’s “devoted sons who died for their country in the Great Rebellion” was dedicated in Washington Cemetery. It remains one of the cemetery’s most visible landmarks.

Throughout the Civil War, residents of Washington and Greene counties worried about the prospect of an invasion from the South. There were occasionally rumors that one was about to occur, and the battle at Gettysburg in 1863, a key turning point in the war, unfolded just 200 miles to the east.

The prospect of their homes and businesses being destroyed was a tangible and frightening one to our forebears.

Now, however, the Civil War is the subject of re-enactments, movies and an endless succession of books dissecting every aspect of the four-year conflict. Our understanding of the war is more clinical and detached, but it’s easy to understand why it retains such a hold on America’s psyche.

As Andy Masich, the president and chief executive officer of the Senator John Heinz History Center, told the Observer-Reporter in 2011, “It’s got everything that a tragic drama should have. It’s about slavery, it’s about ripping apart a nation that had just been born. It had great characters, like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and Frederick Douglass.”

Indeed it did. But it was an undeniable calamity. We can only hope we never see its like again.