article_snippet.sent: Over 600,000 Americans -- Northerners and Southerners alike -- had perished in the bloody Civil War.  
article_snippet.sent: Confederate soldiers would be paroled, not condemned to prison camps.  
article_snippet.sent: Personal property of Southerners would now be respected.  
article_snippet.sent: As we reflect on the sesquicentennial of Lee's surrender at that forlorn Virginia courthouse, today marvelously maintained by the National Park Service, we recognize that the scars of the Civil War are still with we.  
article_snippet.sent: The Mason-Dixon Line divide still exists.  
article_snippet.sent: Almost all the old Confederate States are now considered "Red" (Republican), while the Union States are "blue" (Democrat) -- a residual variation of Big Federal Government versus Confederate States Rights paradigm of the Civil War era.
article_snippet.sent: While the old spiritual "Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last" was sung by blacks in the hours following Lee's surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.
article_snippet.sent: While there no longer are beatings in Congress (like in 1856 when Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Congressional floor) the gridlock on Capital Hill in 2015, the inability to get anything done, is similarly cold-cocking the spirit of our participatory democracy.
article_snippet.sent: For while the scars of the monstrous Civil War still remain, the wounds have closed since 1865, in large part, because of the civility of Grant and LeeLee.  
highlights_snippet.sent: The spirit of that event is something to keep in mind for today's divided America .