WASHINGTON - Letters and diaries from those who lived through the Civil War offer a new glimpse at the arguments that split the nation 150 years ago and some of the festering debates that survive today.
The Library of Congress, which holds the largest collection of Civil War documents, pulled 200 items from its holdings to reveal both private and public thoughts from dozens of famous and ordinary citizens who lived in the North and the South. Many are being shown for the first time.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, for one, was grappling with divided federal and state allegiances. He believed his greater allegiance was to his native Virginia, as he wrote to a friend about resigning his U.S. Army commission.
"Sympathizing with you in the troubles that are pressing so heavily upon our beloved country & entirely agreeing with you in your notions of allegiance, I have been unable to make up my mind to raise my hand against my native state, my relatives, my children & my home," he wrote in 1861. "I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army."
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Lee's handwritten letter is among dozens of writings from individuals who experienced the war. They are featured in the new exhibit "The Civil War in America" at the library in Washington until June 2013. Their voices also are being heard again in a blog created for the exhibition.
"This is a war that trickled down into almost every home," said Civil War manuscript specialist Michelle Krowl.
While some still debate the root causes of the war, for Benjamin Tucker Tanner in 1860, the cause was clear, as he wrote from South Carolina in his diary.
"The country seems to be bordering on a civil war all on account of slavery," wrote the future minister. "I pray God to rule and overrule all to his own glory and the good of man."
