Peggy Noonan on the Civil War

The civil war was, in short, a great moral struggle in which a nation went to war with itself to answer, for us, forever, a question: Does one human being have the right to own another? The answer, got after four years of carnage and grief, was: no. Another epochal moment in human history. And if we handn't remained one strong and unified nation, the triumphs that followed would not have been possible.

~ Peggy Noonan, "What Americans Need to Know," The Wall Street Journal, November 21, 1990