“For years I had wanted to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that battlefield where the direction of the nation’s history changed, the center of more than a century of memorialization. Yet, no amount of reading prepared me for its effect.”

When I was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the most powerful objects in that small, genteel, racially segregated southern city was the great equestrian figure of John Hunt Morgan at the courthouse square. I didn’t know much about the famed Confederate cavalry officer, but from his statue I knew he was important and figured he was probably good.