[NARRATOR]
On the twelfth of April, 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, thus beginning the bloodiest conflict in American History -- 620,000 dead -- more than all other American wars combined. The Civil War remains this nation's single most defining experience, ultimately giving new meaning to the word Freedom. Walt Whitman, a young newspaperman destined to become America's greatest poet wrote: "Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of this war -- and it is best they should not -- the real war will never get in the books."