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."