It was a beautiful morning on July 21 at Henry House in Virginia. Soon, the sky grew dark as clouds of smoke filled the air. Cannons roared and thousands of soldiers in blue and gray marched onto the field. The Battle of First Manassas had begun. While it looked like 1861, it really was 2011, which marks the beginning of the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War. During the war, 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. According to ancestry.com, two out of three Americans have an ancestor who lived through the war. After the war ended, the states were truly united for the first time. Each year many events are held to remember the Civil War. Some can be intense battles like Manassas, where 9,000 reenactors marked the first battle of the war. Others are more somber like an Illumination in Gettysburg National Cemetery where candles are laid on the graves of more than 3,000 soldiers. Confederate and Union Soldiers met for the first time on the battlefield in Manassas, Virginia.
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