So now we come again, as it seems we always must, to the Civil War. It still confronts us, this great divide. Perhaps it always will.

Nelson Lankford's book Richmond Burning (Viking Press, 320 pgs.) is just out. Publisher's Weekly says Lankford, who co-edited Eye of the Storm and Images From the Storm, two homages to Yankee artist and mapmaker Robert Sneden, and who works a day job as assistant director of publications and scholarship at the Virginia Historical Society, "offers comprehensive evidence that Richmond citizens clung unrepentantly to their sense of victimization, and denied the role of slavery in precipitating the war" when the end came in the spring of 1865.

At census time, in 1860, there were 490,865 slaves in this Commonwealth. Slaves. In this Commonwealth. Three hundred years of slave trade, 300 years of unspeakable degradation, of human abasement, of unimaginable demeanery, had produced 249,483 male slaves and 241,382 female slaves when the census was taken in 1860. Three hundred years. Fifteen generations.

Mull over that word, victimization.

An aside here. No, two asides. Can you picture Lincoln, in that tophat, that scraggly beard, coming up the James? He did, but hard to picture isn't it? And what county led the state in slaves in 1860? Must have been one of those plantation counties on the lower James? Or down in tobacco country? Surely Pittsylvania? Halifax? Albemarle, you say, home of the great, if hypocritical, Jefferson, that penner, not of mere immortal words, but those immortal words?

Henrico. You can look it up.

Most of us have some passing acquaintance with that affair that rended, and in the rending made, a nation. And in the making of a nation, set a race of people free. Mostly from the books we read. And they still come, an endless stream of them. And there are books about the books, and the writers of them.

David Johnson's Douglas Southall Freeman (Pelican, 476 pgs.), the book about the man, is just out, too, and worth the read, if for nothing else --but there is more -- the work ethic, the sense of discipline Freeman brought to his task. His four volume R. E. Lee, and the accompanying Lee's Lieutenants, consumed 19 years of six-day-a-week, after-hours labor. And he followed that with the seven-volume, and still definitive, George Washington. Both won Pulitzers. Freeman had a day job, too --for 30 years editing the Richmond News Leader and broadcasting the news twice a day on WRNL Radio.

And then there are the films, the best, by far, Ken Burns' epic, in recent re-run on public television. I read a theory once. Had we had television during that war, we'd be two nations now. The nightly barrage of carnage streaming in on the six o'clock news from places like Sharpsburg (Antietam, to you Yankees) would have turned public opinion like it later did in Vietnam. Northern sentiment would have become "It's not worth it. Let 'em go."

And well it might. That Sept. 17 in 1862 was the bloodiest day in American history. We recoiled in shock and horror, and seethed with rage, on a day in September one year ago. What was the final count? Three thousand?

Go back 139 years, and add 20,000 dead and wounded to it. Twenty-three thousand casualties. One day in September. Americans slaughtering Americans. Imagine what CNN would do with that. Or how about the analysis on two developments that followed?

You see, Sharpsburg was basically a draw, but because Lee didn't prevail in the offensive, Great Britain delayed recognition of the Confederate government.

The other, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued as an impetus following that standoff, would focus things, and give the war at least one sanctioned focal point. It gave the war a cause.

Lee still had most of his icon generals at Sharpsburg, first among them the quirky, brilliant, the deadly, Yankee-killing Jackson (Thank you, James Robertson), and the flamboyant Stuart, the befeathered cavalier. After all, the war was still young in 1862. It would grow old quickly.

The Maryland Campaign (there's that word), the run-up to that bloody day, was Lee's first foray north. There were only two. The second, a year later, born more of desperation, would be worse. He would stumble 75,000 Confederates into Meade's 90,000 Yankees at a crossroads town in Pennsylvania, a little place called Gettysburg.

The three day toll? Thirty-eight thousand dead and wounded. Americans slaughtered Americans that week of Independence Day, July, 1863. Could the talking heads on the Sunday morning shows make sense of that? On a dare, would they have called it 'noble'?

Not me. Not Americans slaughtering Americans.

I work in Stuart now, a small town named for 'Jeb', an acronym for 'James Ewell Brown'. He died at Yellow Tavern in 1864. A major general. Aged 31. Yellow Tavern, a quaint, bucolic sounding place to die. You know where that is?

It's about two blocks northeast of what members of the legislature universally know as 'the old historic' hotel in downtown Richmond (now, refurbished, the fancy Radisson). There is a marker there, on a gritty street, that marks the dying place of, one biographer said, "the greatest cavalry officer ever foaled in America."

You can't escape in this state. You can't escape this war, this stupid, tragic, senseless, thing that is our past, this thing of 620,000 dead Americans that had to be. You can't escape its symbolism. Nor its irony.

I live in Patrick County, named for the man who spoke on Church Hill the words "Give me liberty or give me death!" What would a slave in earshot have made of that? You think a few were there that day, standing outside, holding teams, tending the mules and horses?

Do I know the Black perspective? Of course not. How could I? But can I imagine, were I a black American, that a cruise down Monument Avenue might, on some days, raise up a chill in me? I think I can.

Melanie Scarborough, writing 'Southern-And Proud of It' in Sunday's Washington Post, ably let's fly into Wilder and Cantor on their umbrage to 'Cooter's' flag. Who's right on that? Can all be innocent? All sincere? 'Cooter', too?

Though, as is my nature, I suspect political chicanery, I'll benefit them all the doubt, for now, and say I think so. And, to boot, I'll throw in Senator Allen. Did you see him, a Confederate general, in last month's Washingtonian? His son, Forrest, is a winsome lad.

So where am I on that flag, the Stars and Bars, the battle symbol of a sad, sad time, a time that in the once laid terrible waste and made a nation? It offends a race of Americans. In my America. If naught but for courtesy, take it down.

Courtesy, too, is a Southern thing. Proud, Melanie? So am I, and as Southern as they come.