"As I continue to mark my yearly mile stones, I've been freed from many of the follies and diversions that I once deluded myself into pursuing. Two supreme sources of satisfaction grow with the years. One is continuing to learn, which we do principally by reading, but also by listening and conversing. The other is travel.
Since boyhood, when I first learned a bit about it in Barnes History of the United States, at the Finley Creek one-room country school in Webster County, I've been fascinated by the American Civil War. It was far and away the most dramatic, most heroic, most tragic chapter in the story of our Nation. Some 616,000 men, North and South, gave their lives in that struggle. It was the most important and the costliest in human resources of our nine wars. The Union was held together, and so, a century later one Nation stands strong to confront the Communist power in its attempt to conquer the world. If we were today two Nations, or perhaps half a dozen, instead of one, we would lack the power to block the plans for a take-over laid by Lenin and Stalin. I am one of those who believe that the Civil War was in its results worth all it cost the American people.
First, we drove to Memphis and took U. S. 64 to the East. Two hours drive from the Tennessee metropolis brought us to the road leading off to the Shiloh Battlefield Park. At Shiloh a visitor receives a map to the area which he can follow as a guide to a self-directed tour of the Battlefield in his own car. You start with No. 1 and make the circuit in numerical order of the points of special interest. One of these is the reconstructed Shiloh Church, which gave the battle its name in Union Army official records. The Confederates called it Pittsburg Landing, the name of a village on the Tennessee river. You know throughout the war the Union forces usually identified the battles by some natural landmark, as Stone's River or Bull Run, and the Confederates by the nearest Post Office, as Murfreesboro or Manassas…"
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