19th-Century Battles Still Fresh in Minds of Many Modern Southerners : Civil War: Even though regional and racial divisions are fading, the memory of the conflict is kept alive by films, re-enactments, writings.

When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s troops chased the Confederate government from Richmond, a slave named James Wilder hid in a tobacco silo.

“He almost suffocated in that silo,” recalls the slave’s grandson, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, recounting the story passed down through his father.

Instead, James Wilder emerged to find himself suddenly a free man, and the city, which had been bombarded for months, wrapped in flames.

Grant rode on 95 miles to Appomattox, where Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the South’s main army seven days later on April 9, 1865, and Wilder went on to beget the father of the nation’s first black elected governor.

Though 125 years have passed since the end of the Civil War, it still is ingrained in the consciousness of many Southern natives.

Stories about the war are reaching more people than ever through a growing number of battle re-enactments, battlefield tours, books and specialty magazines, and through the celebrated movie “Glory,” about the Union’s first black regiment.

“There are so many events being re-enacted that we can’t keep track of them,” said David Roth, editor of Blue and Gray, a magazine with the motto “For Those Who Still Hear The Guns.”

The regional and racial divisions exacerbated by the “War of Northern Aggression,” the term still used by some Southerners, are beginning to close, and the symbols of the Old South are becoming more anachronistic.

Trucks with Confederate flags on the rear windows and bumper stickers reading “Forget, Hell!” and “The South Will Rise Again” are becoming endangered species, but the ironies of the South in transition still pervade Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy.

Residents celebrate the birthdays of Lee, Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the same day.

Mary Sue Terry, the state’s first female attorney general, is fighting a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit seeking to force Virginia Military Institute to admit women. VMI cadets fought to secede from the federal government, and many of the Southern generals were graduates.

One of only two buildings in Richmond’s commercial district that survived Grant’s 10-month siege is a granite structure that housed offices of the Confederate government. Occupying the building now is the federal court, the institution that helped rid the South of segregation.

Across the Martin Luther King Bridge and a block to the left are the Museum of the Confederacy and the Confederate White House, now surrounded by high-rise university buildings.

The museum’s sign-in sheet is replete with the names of visitors from cities to the north, as well as Canada and Europe.

Attendance never has been better, spokeswoman Barbara Hyde said.

“There always has been a high interest in the Civil War, but in the past four years, it has increased tremendously,” she said.

On Richmond’s Monument Avenue, two black women and a white man who attend a karate class nearby practice their moves at the base of a towering statue of Lee on horseback.

In between kick punches, Carrie Britton relates how she cried when she saw the movie “Glory” and only then learned there were black soldiers who died fighting for the Union. “There was a white woman who made a point of holding the door for me when I was leaving the theater,” Britton said. “She was touched too.”

The provocation for the Civil War was at first largely the labor-intensive South’s objection to tariffs favored by the industrialized North, although the issue of slavery bitterly divided the regions. Only later did the focus shift to the constitutional issues of secession and the abolition of slavery.

Those issues led to the poignant human drama of brother fighting brother, father fighting son and friend fighting friend, particularly in border states.

The cost of the war was tremendous. More than 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died over the 4-year period, nearly equaling the number of Americans killed in all other wars combined.

Because of the high number of casualties, almost everyone who had forebears in America in 1861 can associate with the war, said Ed Bearss, chief historian of the National Park Service.

Charles Bryan, director of the Virginia Historical Society, said he and other Civil War scholars on the lecture circuit are being asked to explain why people continue to be fascinated by the struggle 125 years later.

To answer, he pulls a cone-shaped rifle bullet from his pocket, a Minie ball recovered at a battlefield outside Richmond that is now a residential development.

“A young boy brought it to the historical society,” Bryan said. “One of the reasons the war is so fascinating is that it happened in our own back yard, both literally and figuratively.”

The war destroyed the economic and social system of the South. The 12 years of Reconstruction that followed, a period in which the 11 secessionist states were regarded as conquered territories, solidified the region’s antagonism toward the North.

“I don’t think there would have been a solid South had there not been what Southerners saw as a harsh Reconstruction,” Bearss said.

“The feelings were so visceral that it went past just disagreement on political ideologues,” Wilder said. “Rather, it was almost a lifestyle to be different. The only thing that can change that is the passage of time.”

An increasingly mobile society and the commonality of mass communications also are softening the divisions, Bryan said.

“Little by little, the separate identities of the North and South are beginning to change,” he said.

Bryan said the lingering prejudices became apparent to him when the topic of a speech he gave on the commemoration of Lee’s birthday--the 18 native Virginians who served as generals in the Union army--was publicized in advance.

“I got angry phone calls from people who said: ‘How dare you talk about Yankee generals on General Lee’s birthday?’ ” he said. “The Civil War still lives in the minds of many people. It will never be forgotten.”