As one born and bred literally on the Mason Dixon Line, and raised from ancestors who spent the better part of the 150 years leading up to the war hopscotching back and forth across that line (and which is still spread along and across that line today) I always have trouble deciding where to fall in the Union-Confederate conflict as I reportedly had relatives fighting on both sides and others who simply hid out in the hills and waited it out. I doubt I could or would wear either Federal or Confederate tartans and feel right. Although the war was necessary in its time to settle longstanding conflicts in the large view, it was just plain wrong in the microscopic view, at the personal and family level. Literally family fighting family and dying and maimed in massive numbers, the like of which we have never before or since known in war. The South's greatest General coming from a major Virginia plantation directly across the Potomac from the Union capital known as Arlington, his ancestral home since well before the revolutionary war, believing in the cause of the Union but fighting for the South because of his loyalty to his state, losing that plantation home to the US government to now become (by governmental spite) the burial place of thousands of the Union dead from that conflict, now Arlington Cemetary. I am obviously speaking of Robert E Lee, only the most visible of the strange conflicts beneath the greater conflict that describe the bizarre and incredible nature of that most horrible war. I have spent literally decades reading about the war, visiting battlefield after battlefield, reading more about the backgrounds of the people both major and minor in the conflict, and the more I learn about it the more twisted my gut feels and the more pained my mind is by just the sheer ferocity and futility of the whole thing. But my morbid curiosity keeps me coming back, trying to learn more, trying to understand, trying to validate and make sense of it all. Speaking of futility.