If you visit Appomattox today, you will take in peaceful, bucolic meadows and woods. Nothing about the site suggests its meaning. But by artistic imagination I have tried to suggest that meaning. Not by depiction of a battle, but by suggesting the end of the longest, bloodiest and most important struggle we have ever fought, a struggle that lasted from 1776 to 1865. The blood shed by over three hundred thousand citizens of this country to end slavery had by the end soaked the fields of Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattox. That blood paid an enormous debt and righted an egregious wrong.
If you visit Appomattox today, you will take in peaceful, bucolic meadows and woods. Nothing about the site suggests its meaning. But by artistic imagination I have tried to suggest that meaning. Not by depiction of a battle, but by suggesting the end of the longest, bloodiest and most important struggle we have ever fought, a struggle that lasted from 1776 to 1865. The blood shed by over three hundred thousand citizens of this country to end slavery had by the end soaked the fields of Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattox. That blood paid an enormous debt and righted an egregious wrong.