This is a tough question, when do you place the actual start date? Nobody agrees on that.
I should have phrased it as who was president of the USA during the American civil war. That is a technicality though, my point in the original post is that we have history majors in my area who cannot correctly name the DECADE of the American civil war and don’t really seem certain of the century! I swear I am not making this up, you could forget about asking them for any detail like, name one Confederate general and one Union general, they don’t know anything like that. If one did manage to do it it would be because he saw something on the history channel and remembered it. They know even less about the revolution that birthed America. As I have said before we have history majors here who hold a university degree in history but could not pass a seventh grade history final from a South Carolina public school of the nineteen fifties. I had a conversation recently with a seventeen year old who is still in high school and his ignorance of history is nothing short of astounding. I honestly don’t know how one can grow up today and know nothing of history, he should have learned something from movies and television.