In April 1862, Private Joseph Diltz wrote his wife in Ohio about the battle of Antietam, which he had just survived: "I went into the fight in good heart, but I never want to get in another. It was awful, Mary. You can't form any idea how it was."

But Diltz of the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and others kept fighting until the American Civil War was won, the nation restored, and the promise of equality, liberty, and justice for all saved. But we, too, find it hard to form an idea of "how it was."

That's because half of the American Civil War --the most important half--was underappreciated while it was happening, and since then has largely been neglected. Preoccupied with battles in Virginia and the bloody three days at Gettysburg, Americans have failed to realize how the war was decided in the Western theater by Midwesterners--Ohioans most of all.

Scorned by Easterners as "armed rabble" and largely out of sight of the big eastern news media, the Midwest's tough but poorly trained and supplied farmers, schoolteachers, and country lawyers won battle after battle. Meanwhile, in the east,the handsomely prepared Army of the Potomac was humiliated so often by the Confederates that Western generals--Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan--had to come east to finish the war.