My Passion with Tim Charge: Fascinated by the intricacies of the American Civil War

The American Civil War has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it was the bubblegum cards with narrative about the conflict that fired my imagination.

After graduating from university, I travelled through America and one of my stops on the Greyhound bus was in Atlanta in order to visit the Stone Mountain Memorial to the Confederacy. It's a stone carving of Generals Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and President Jefferson Davis, in the manner of Mount Rushmore, which commemorates Abraham Lincoln and other US presidents in granite.

Perhaps it was the sheer scale of the conflict; more Americans died in the American Civil War than in the First and Second World Wars combined, or perhaps it was the sheer incredulity of the situation. The two capitals, Washington and Richmond, were I think only some 80 miles apart and the war divided families. Some 40 per cent of generals in both the union and confederate armies had been trained at West Point.

Many books have been written about the American Civil War and one of the fascinating things is the many "what ifs".

What if the confederacy had followed up the victory at First Bull Run and moved on the poorly defended city of Washington?

What if General Stonewall Jackson had lived rather than being killed accidentally by his own men? What if the union artillery had not secured Little Round Top in the Battle of Gettysburg? What if England had supported the confederacy? What if General Lee had listened to Longstreet instead of sending 13,000 men on the fruitless Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg and finally, what would the history of the US have been had the South won?

Other than read some of the many books, I have travelled to the US and visited a number of battlefield sites , in particular Gettysburg, in rural Pennsylvania which is preserved as a monument to the war in the most amazing detail. It is highly evocative, not least because little has changed in almost 140 years.

The loss of life was unbelievable. At Gettysburg alone there were 51,000 casualties during three days of fighting. In total, there were over one million casualties – about 3.5 per cent of the population.

I am also amused by the encyclopaedic number of statistics of the America Civil War which are remarkably detailed – 67 per cent of all Civil War generals wore beards.