"'There they lay,' he said of the dead and wounded all around him, 'the blue and the gray intermingled; the same rich, young American blood flowing out in little rivulets of crimson; each thinking he was in the right.'" Shelby Foote , author of "The Civil War," records a Union soldier's response to the devastation at Champion Hill.

The fields today are mostly covered with pine trees. Many of them are not very old at all, maybe 10 to 15 years. The only other things that have come to stay over the past 136 years are a small trailer park and a few scattered houses. Most of the hill was torn up to make gravel for the local roads in the 1930s and has almost disappeared.

On some of the battlefields where the blue and the grey once fought, new battles are being waged. These often involve a clash between those who want to develop on or around a Civil War battlefield and those who want to make sure that these sites are preserved, although things aren't always that simple.