I fear that there are many, many aspects of Civil War America we know little of because those who write the histories have tended to concentrate on the military, political and diplomatic aspects of a time period, any time period, and even when getting into social history tend to concentrate on particulars that are complementary to the those aforementioned fields of interests. For example, in discussing slavery, historians frequently write about items like the 3/5 clause, Missouri Compromise, Dred Scott, Compromise of 1850. But how much effort has gone into marriage customs of the enslaved, wages paid to skilled slave workers in Southern cities, life expectancy of the enslaved versus those of the white population, causes of death of the enslaved population versus the white population. Were hookworm and pellagra diseases endemic in the entire Southern population or only of the rural portion of it? If so, why? Now, one might argue that knowing the particulars of the Compromise of 1850 was more important to the outbreak of the Civil War but to a yeoman family in the Piedmont of North Carolina in 1850 it might have been a matter of the "milk sickness" that most occupied his mind that summer. How did Southerners cope with the shortages caused by the blockade? What did they do when those Sulphur Lucifer's (matches) disappeared from the marketplace? Or going up North at the same time period. There, parents still expected to lose about half of their children before they reached adulthood. Just look at the heartbreaking statistics on the tombstones of any mid 19th century cemetery. Why did so many infants and children die? Was the infant and child mortality rate the same in the North and South in 1860? Did it change in the South from the impact of the war? Perhaps Lee ordered Pickett's Charge against the advice of Longstreet for no other reason than he was suffering from the effects of a coronary embolism and was not thinking straight.
History is the record of what one generation finds noteworthy in another and to a great extent, because most writers of history, and their reading audience, prefer military strategy to microbial forensics, to prefer parsing speeches to dissecting cadavers, we probably always will have huge gaps in our understanding of any period of time. There is so much we do not know that there will never be a time when we can say we know enough to reach certitude about our understanding of what it was like to have lived at any period of history earlier than our own, and probably not even that. Perhaps if destructive hurricanes begin with a butterfly fluttering its wings in a tropical rain forest, wars are lost because one cannot find a match to light a lantern. Yes, indeed, we do what Socrates admitted, we admit that wise men are only wise because they recognize that they know far less than they think they do.