have had to research gettysburg. but i didn't because they did not live that long. i got a very close up view of the war's first two years. after i'd written the book, i was reading about the later war, some books about the end of the war. i was struck by how absolutely hard and cruel and bitter and vengeful it was, compared to the first couple years of the war. not that war is a pretty place, people were dying from bullets in diseases like crazy in the early war. but there were something more innocent about it. at the end of the war, you had the rise of guerrilla warfare, which you never had before. 10% of the union army black troops, who were given no quarter by confederate soldiers. you have the rise of the hard war, people like will sheridan, basically conducting anti-civilian warfare, burning forms to the ground, burning crops to the ground. what sheridan did in the shenandoah valley was probably worse than what sherman did in georgia and the carolinas. just the desperation at the end of the war on the part of t