My favorite Civil War sites

The North held the position, so though it was a stalemate, Abraham Lincoln could claim a victory. More important, a few days later, the president said he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which would free slaves and keep France and England from joining the South's cause.

Fredericksburg, Va.

This is a particularly horrendous battle that took place between Richmond and Washington. In December, during a relatively late-day battle, the South had the defensive advantage.

The Union was pinned down in a ghastly battle in which dead Union soldiers were stacked on top of each other, while surviving members huddled behind their dead comrades. Chamberlain remarked that he had to listen all night to the sound of bullets thudding sickeningly into his comrades.

Fredericksburg is a beautiful, quaint, restored town, and the battlefield tour allows you to understand the street-to-street fighting that took place there.

Gettysburg, Pa.

After a spectacular battle at Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee moved the army of Northern Virginia through Maryland and into south central Pennsylvania. The idea was to capture the capital of Pennsylvania at Harrisburg, move on to an undefended Philadelphia and then be able to bargain an end to the war and separation from the Union.

The Union raced up to catch them, and the two forces met at the small town in the middle of Adams County. From July 1 to 3, 1863, they fought the most important battle of the Civil War. On the third day, George Pickett, the dashing Confederate general, led his infamous, ill-fated charge from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Ridge, where the Union position held after some of the most furious fighting.

Gettysburg has built a spectacular new visitors center, after a model of an old Pennsylvania barn. They have further restored the old cyclorama, the circular painting that described the battle at Gettysburg. They also have a film introducing people to the battle.

Vicksburg, Miss.

A day after the battle at Gettysburg, the battle of Vicksburg out on the Mississippi River also ended. The North controlled the river from the Delta up past New Orleans — and from Minnesota to down past St. Louis — but never could get past Vicksburg, the key to the main highway of the west.

Grant spent the spring moving his men through the swamps west around Vicksburg, crossed the Mississippi and came up from the east to lay siege to Vicksburg for days. The people inside printed the newspaper for a while on wallpaper. They were starving and took to eating varmints and other things.

Finally, on July 4, they surrendered. The victory at Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg was a double victory for the Union cause.

The site is just outside the city of Vicksburg, where you enter a 26-mile one-way road. There are opportunities to exit sooner, but you are committed to essentially traveling and winding through all the intricate areas where the defenses of Vicksburg and Union assaults took place, and it is an incredibly intimate view of a battle. The site really rewards visitors who might not have a chance to travel to the major battlefields in the east.

Chattanooga, Tenn.

Lincoln had had a succession of failed generals since the beginning of the war. His Union Army had gone through Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, Joseph Hooker and McClellan again. It had George Meade in charge at Gettysburg, and finally it brought Grant east. He left his No. 2 man, William Tecumseh Sherman, in the west, but the west began at Chattanooga.

At Missionary Ridge, against impossible odds, the Union Army was able to claw its way to the top in a vicious battle, take the high grounds and plan for the march to Atlanta and then to the sea.

Visiting Chattanooga, an elegant Southern city, will give even the most casual observer a chance to see the stakes of this battle. At the top of the ridge is a military park where you can look down and still shake your head at the impossible odds the Union solders had scaling those heights.

Petersburg, Va.

By spring 1864, Grant knew the North's industrial might and advantage in population meant that it could lose a battle and still win the war if it kept going.

Finally, the Confederates retreated to Petersburg near Richmond, and they set up defensive works that anticipated the trench warfare of World War I. The North dug a tunnel under Southern lines and set off a huge explosion, which was initially successful, but then the North made the mistake of rushing down into the crater, and the South regrouped and came back and fired down into the Northern troops.

The war settled into this bloody stalemate, from the summer of '64 all the way to March of '65, and you can see the trenches to this day in Petersburg. You're close to Richmond, so you can visit the capital of the Confederacy and see the Confederate White House, where Jefferson Davis helped to prosecute the war, and Hollywood Cemetery, where some of the heroes of the South are buried.

Appomattox Court House, Va.

Richmond fell in March 1865, and the South's government and its armies began a retreat south and west away from the capital and Petersburg as the trench warfare ended. But another Union force was coming from the west to block that retreat.

The Confederates saw a sea of Union troops marching up the road toward them, and it was at that point that Lee realized the cause was hopeless and agreed to meet Grant in the home of a man named Wilmer McLean. McLean, ironically, had had a farm on the site of the first battle of Bull Run in Manassas — No. 2 on our list — and a Union shell had exploded in his family's kitchen. He decided he would move away from harm's way, south and west of Richmond to this dusty little crossroads. McLean could rightfully say, “The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.”

The village of Appomattox Court House, a stunning array of a half-dozen or so brick houses, is a perfectly preserved museum of the end of the Civil War and the reconciliation that eventually would bring the country together. It was here the country began the difficult and painful work of healing and rebuilding.

When I visited Antietam many years after The Civil War debuted on PBS, I was approached by a man breathlessly asking me to sign his dog-eared companion book to our series. I learned that his family traveled the country with a copy of the film and would watch an episode each night before visiting a battlefield the following morning at sunrise.

Many families, including my own, have made similar pilgrimages.

I vividly recall my children climbing Little Round Top where Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain made history, and discovering Devil's Den, a striking outcropping of boulders that provided the Confederate Army protection as it fought off Union soldiers.

As our country marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, we can all better understand our collective past by experiencing the many historic Civil War sites firsthand.

We noted in our film that the Civil War was fought in more than 10,000 places, from Valverde, N.M., to Tullahoma, Tenn.; from St. Albans, Vt., to Fernandina on the Florida coast. Given that vast number, it's impossible to cover them all.

There are, however, some sites that are central to grasping the history and significance of the Civil War. These places — listed chronologically from the start of the war — provide a strong foundation.