While the American Civil War has been relegated to some chapter in American history, that it ended some 159 years ago somehow places the conflict out of contemporary context. Yet, while the war raged, from April 1861 to April 1865, Michigan’s firmly pro-Union legislature ensured that each of the state’s counties would be heavily represented in every theater of operation.

After the Union surrendered to Confederate forces at Fort Sumter, in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asked Michigan to supply a regiment to aid in suppressing the rebellion. Governor Austin Blair responded by sending seven.

During the four-year contest, Michigan furnished some 30 regiments of infantry, including two Colored regiments, one of engineers and mechanics, a regiment of sharpshooters and 11 regiments of cavalry. Michigan would pay a heavy price for its patriotism.

More than 90,000 men from Michigan participated in the Civil War. Of those, 13,405 never returned home. Disease killed more than combat did. Of the 13,405, 9,230 died of disease in camps, hospitals and prisons, while 4,175 died in combat.

From Eagle Harbor, Coleman Casey was one among nine who never came home to Keweenaw County. Casey was old for a volunteer; he enlisted in Company C, 27th Michigan Infantry on January 2, 1862, and was mustered into federal service in October of that year. Like so many of his comrades in that regiment, Casey was killed in action at Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia, on May 12, 1864.

Thirty-four men who left Ontonagon County for the front never made it home to their loved ones. Among them was Peter Deutz, who enlisted at Rockland, on August 15, 1862. Like Casey, Deutz was older than the typical volunteer, enlisting at the age of 39. Like Casey, he was killed at Spotsylvania Courthouse on May 12, 1864. Others, like Lewis Garland, from St. Johns, Michigan, was not killed in combat at Cold Harbor, in 1864, but shortly after, died from wounds he received in action.

Not all those killed in service died in combat or from disease. Keweenaw County resident, Martin Effinger, was killed on a steamer in July 1862. James Dugray, who enlisted in Company E of the 27th Michigan Infantry, at Ontonagon in July 1863, was killed just a month later, on August 11, when he fell off a train near Centralia, Illinois.

While most of the Michigan men who enlisted to fight for the Union are forgotten now, their sacrifice to the nation, most historians today agree, had a far greater impact on American society and politics than other events in the history of the United States. The war changed the nation, even in ways most Americans are not aware of today. For instance, in countless historical documents, there can be found references to the states as a collection: “The United States are –.” After the war, the United States became a singular noun: “The United States is –.”

Writing for the National Archives’ publication Prologue Magazine, historian and author James M. McPherson wrote that at Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke also of a “new birth of freedom.” He was referring to the other problem left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776 — slavery, McPherson wrote. The Civil War settled that issue as well. Antebellum Americans had been fond of boasting that their “land of liberty” was a “beacon light of freedom” to the oppressed peoples of other lands. But as Lincoln had put it in 1854, “the monstrous injustice” of slavery deprived “our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” With the 13th amendment, that monstrous injustice, at least, came to an end.

Mark Twain, a deserter from the Confederate Army, was trying to put the war into perspective in 1873, when we wrote that it “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”

The Civil War also transformed the national economy from one based on agriculture and textiles to one of industrial manufacture. So great had American manufacturing become after the Civil War that when the nation emerged from the Great War just a half century later, it emerged as a world power.

The Michigan veterans of that war, who lay asleep on some forgotten field, are a legacy of the building of the greatest nation on earth.