My rural reverie ended abruptly at the gate to the national park at Andersonville. The entrance road ran straight into a sea of white gravestones packed so closely together that they almost touched, like piano keys. Beneath lay the 13,000 Northern soldiers who died at Andersonville, a toll that roughly equalled the combined Union combat deaths in the War’s five bloodiest battles: Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, Antietam.
