SO A NATION MIGHT LIVE: CEREMONIES AT SR RURAL CEMETERY HONOR FALLEN IN AMERICA'S DEADLIEST WAR

The Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery came alive Saturday in honor of the 150th anniversary of the start of America's deadliest conflict -- the Civil War.

Union and Confederate re-enactors, sweating in thick wool, fired off rifle volleys. An Abraham Lincoln impersonator repeated the president's inaugural plea to pull people back from the brink. And a bugler filled the graveyard with taps, an appropriately somber sound to mark the beginning of a war that killed 620,000 Americans and reshaped the nation.

"It's from this point that everything in American history changed, which I'm not sure most people understand" said Chuck Seekamp, a retired Sebastopol trucker, as he sat besides a 3-pounder cannon, dressed in his red-striped Confederate gray.

The war, he said, redefined the federal government, not the states, as the dominant power in the country and settled the Union as something a state could join, but never leave.

The magnitude of the deaths required to settle those sovereignty matters can be hard to grasp. More Americans died during those four years than in all of the country's other wars from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam, combined.

Proportionate to the current population, it would be equivalent to a modern war killing six million Americans, event organizers said.

Still the fratricide can seem like distant history in California, thousands of miles from the battlefields that dot eastern and southern parts of the country.

But even in Sonoma County, the war cut through the community, said Bill Montgomery, coordinator of the cemetery and a speaker at the event. In Petaluma, Yankee roots meant sympathies mostly lay with the Union, Montgomery said. In Santa Rosa, a pattern of southern settlement aligned feelings with the Confederates.

The split played out in the newspapers. The Petaluma Argus boosted the Union, while the Sonoma Democrat in Santa Rosa supported the South.

"Whenever the South won a battle it was on Page One," Montgomery said. "Whenever the Union won a battle it was on Page 4."

Apparently, Southern sympathizers were the majority. Sonoma County was the only county in California to vote against Lincoln in the election of 1864, earning a rebuke from the Argus that "Every home has its cesspool and California has its Sonoma County."

Sonoma County also played a role as a future home for former soldiers moving on with their lives. The rural cemetery contains more than 150 known Civil War veterans, including several nurses.

Jacob Quinn, 11, couldn't get enough of the history. Wearing a Union kepi, or cap, he knew without asking that re-enactor Douglas Erickson had modeled his fu-manchu mustache on Joshua Chamberlain, a respected Union officer.

"I just love the history and learning all about it," he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Sam Scott at 521-5431 or at sam.scott@pressdemocrat.com.