I may not be an expert, indeed Iím not, but I find the subject fascinating, perhaps because it seems very close to us. The Revolutionary War, for example, seems to be far away and its heroes more like gods on some cold Olympus than flesh-and-blood human beings. Thatís probably my failing, or the failing of scholars, but there you have it.

The people of the Civil War strike me as profoundly similar to us. Their weaknesses, their fears and their aspirations are uniquely American and poignantly human. The many battlefields and other historical sites are all around us; you can hardly avoid them in the southeast and South. The issues over which the war was fought ó the status of black Americans and the role of the federal government ó still drive the national debate.

And make no mistake, in the South, the Civil War, or the War Between the States, or whatever name it must take on, stays alive for many people. I heard a story about a man at a dinner party a few years ago in Savannah who announced he was a descendant of Gen. William Sherman, the 19th-century scourge of Georgia. He brought conversation to an end. Another friend of mine is a descendant of Gen. George B. McClellan, controversial leader of the Army of the Potomac. She grew up in Bardstown, Kentucky, near where great armies once struggled in the choking summer dust.

Through a quirk of fate we have in Fort Wayne a fine museum for the study of the most titanic figure of the war, Abraham Lincoln. And because itís impossible to study Lincoln without studying the war which consumed him, that is there as well. Gerald Prokopowicz, the Lincoln scholar and director of public programs at the museum, has written a book about the Army of the Ohio and its role in that war from 1861 to 1862.

All for the Regiment is a case study of the formation and battle record of the army, which was comprised of raw volunteers from Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kentucky and Tennessee. Yes, there were a significant number of Tennesseans who remained loyal to the United States. They lived mainly in the mountainous eastern section of the state and their support and safety was of great concern to Lincoln.

Prokopowicz takes extraordinary care to explain how the Army of the Ohio came together and how that affected its ability to coalesce into a fighting unit. He also explains the peculiar nature of all the various field armies of the Civil War, on each side, and why they fought as they did. For us amateur history buffs, itís a fascinating look into this world; for everyone else, itís also an insightful examination of human nature.

Prokopowiczís theme is that the massive Civil War armies were made up of volunteers and recruits who went directly from their hometowns or home counties en masse to the same regiments. An Indiana regiment, therefore, would consist almost entirely of men who came from the same area, who had grown up together and who may very well have beeen related. They trained and lived together and came to hold the strongest loyalties not to their larger armies, or to their commanding officers, but rather to each other. The soldiers were tremendously brave and willing to bear great danger because they were doing it for their closest friends and neighbors. No one wanted to return home disgraced in the eyes of his peers.

This had advantages and disadvantages, Prokopowicz contends. The cohesiveness in the relatively smaller units made the field armies hard to defeat decisively. Regiments tended to fight for their members no matter how desperate the situation or how inept the officers. In a famous scene, the Army of the Ohioís regiments came upon other Union soldiers in terrified retreat from the Confederate Army and ignored warnings of doom because these warnings did not come from their own ranks.

On the other hand, Prokopowicz has described Civil War armies as being like dinosaurs, able to take and hand out tremendous punishment but, hampered by a small brain (their leadership), not being able to act in concert to deliver a knockout punch. Hence the war dragged on for four miserable, bloody years with neither side scoring a decisive victory.

All for the Regiment is full of the kind of ironical detail that makes any story interesting, and Prokopowicz has a piquant fondness for laying bare the vagaries of human nature. More than anything, thatís what this book is about.