One of Olgers’s ancestors had fought near the inn and died of his wounds a few days before the War’s end. To me, it seemed sad and pointless for men to have fought and died at that late date, rather than surrender. But Olgers didn’t see it that way. He thought the South’s leaders were wrong—“if they’d won, we would have been a divided country and had slavery for a few decades more”—but he identified with the individual soldier’s allegiance to home.
