Meaningless Carnage

A quote by historian Barbara Fields, from Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War:

It could have been a very ugly, filthy war with no redeeming characteristics at all. It was the battle for emancipation and the people who pushed it forward—the slaves, the free black people, the abolitionists, and a lot of ordinary citizens—it was they who ennobled what otherwise would have been meaningless carnage into something higher.