43 Comments

A great retelling of a horrible episode of American history. I visited Antietam a few years ago while visiting family that lives in that general area. It's humbling to stand on the hill overlooking the field and imagine the scale of what it must have looked like to have so many soldiers marching at once, the magnitude of the violence, and, what always makes my skin crawl, the idea of two lines of infantry just lining up on either side and shooting at each other with no cover and defense to count on except cold and impassive probability that a bullet won't strike you. The natural beauty of the area makes it easy to forget just how steeped in blood it is.

It's also worth noting that the Blair Witch Project was filmed within spitting distance of Antietam and within walking distance of my relative's property and it really makes me wonder why they live there. The scenery is great but... I just wouldn't want to live next to a place where so many people met such a violent end. I have no doubt that kind of bloodshed leaves a tangibly intangible stain on a place.

Expand full comment

America is full of similarly bloodstained places.

Expand full comment

Maybe not THAT bloodstained. Not that bodycount is dispositive.

Expand full comment

Antietam was the bloodiest day, but there are several contenders for bloodiest battle, depending how you calculate things. The Civil War as a whole killed more Americans than every other war we’ve been in combined. No enemy has proven as deadly to Americans as Americans.

Expand full comment

When I was in high school battle histories bored me; I couldn’t follow what was going on and no one had ever bothered to explain topics like tactics, logistics, terrain, etc. It wasn’t until, as an adult, I moved to the mid-Atlantic within easy driving distance of so many battlefields from three wars — when I began walking them with a map of troop positions in hand — that I started to understand so many of the terrible realities that this essay illustrated so masterfully. I have been to Antietam, Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and Bull Run. I hope to visit Shiloh and Chickamauga someday, as my great-great-grandfather fought with the 8th Indiana Cavalry there.

The only detail I have to add is that at the time of the first Union assault it would have been barely first light, as sunrise was still 20 minutes away.

Expand full comment

Amazing story. Thanks for highlighting this fascinating and horrific story of intelligence, courage, cowardice and slaughter. Very very sad.

Expand full comment

It's hard to imagine that we'd have quality leaders in any future civil war. Just a bunch of McClellans trying to out-cower each other.

Expand full comment

Antietam (or Sharpsburg, as we call it in the South) was probably the last possible chance for a “clean” Confederate victory. Gettysburg is a popular turning point, and I’ve even seen a well-constructed scenario about a possible late-war Confederate victory involving Hood never replacing Johnston, who eked out enough victories in the west to get the peace democrats elected up north in 1864. But Sharpsburg, in my opinion, was the last, best chance for a viable and not-so-easily-disputed Confederate victory (inb4 the historical determinists who like to ruin these kinds of discussions).

A decisive victory that close to Washington, combined with no Emancipation Proclamation, would have lent serious legitimacy to the CSA as an independent country. The British may or may not have been potentially persuaded, there’s debate as to how strong the anti-slavery feeling in the government really was, but the French probably could have been won over by that point. Of course, even if CSA won the war, winning the peace is another question. Who knows how they would have turned out as an independent country for a prolonged period of time.

Expand full comment

As for the Brits and France, earlier that year (March 1862) the two powers had witnessed the Union maintain the sea blockade at Hampton Roads, when the Monitor held off the ironclad Virginia. The south’s hopes for foreign allies were destroyed then, although they might not have believed it yet.

Expand full comment

My great-great grandfather's unit, the 27th NC, suffered 63% casualties. His Company G started with 30 men and ended with five. It's impossible to imagine what it was like to stand in that cornfield, loading and firing, loading and firing. His only comment to his wife, home on leave, was that at the end of the day they went to gather their packs which had been laid in a pile before the battle. It was then that he realized that there was no one to pick them up except himself and his four fellow survivors. They left the packs where they lay.

Expand full comment

Ordinary men ennobled by marvelous courage.

Expand full comment

Having just wrapped the Punic Wars, Lee strikes me as an American Hannibal.

Great read.

Expand full comment

After being relieved by Lincoln, McClellan was recruited by the President's political enemies to run against him for the office in 1864. It didn't go well for him...

General Hooker is the reason why prostitutes are now known as "hookers" today- he permitted his men to consort with them freely.

Expand full comment

The Hooker etymology is debated, as is Hooker’s general character. While fond of drinking and partying to some degree, he was an aggressive and talented commander who simply found himself overmatched by Lee at Chancellorsville.

Expand full comment

Perhaps the "hooker" tagging was used as a form of slander...

Expand full comment

We use the word "insane" far too frequently, yet it is hard to conceive of the day retold here as other than a day suffused in mass psychosis. Yet this perspective cannot be sound for men led other men to their certain deaths on this day for uncertain ends.

Fortunately for us, citizens of the new millennium, it is not likely that any new civil war will involve much in the way of the soldier to soldier annihilation of the Civil War. Our national dissolution has become a rather halting and laborious effort, made possible by the pretense of continued functioning governmental existence. As neither bio-weaponry, financial chicanery, or direct attempts to assassinate, to name but a few tactics, have succeeded, one can only imagine what novel strategies will be next implemented.

Recent events within the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine unmistakably demonstrate that heretofore recognized ethical constraints -- the laws of war, often unironically called "humanitarian law" -- no longer serve as impediments to slaughtering others. Mass killings can be meted out as circumstances are believed to demand, by any means one might concoct, including feats of deadly technological cleverness.

This is not a world in which there exists much soundness of mind. In such circumstances, it helps to have thought-provoking pieces to read.

Expand full comment

Wrong, it was January 6th.

:)

Great piece!

Expand full comment

This was amazing. Thank you.

Expand full comment

Well, fantastic. Again. Bravo and thanks.

Last year I walked through Gettysburg with a legendary instructor from the Army War College, at Carlisle, not too far away. The problem for me, intellectually and emotionally, that you highlight with the cornfield, was the willingness to kill and be killed. To some extent, this was in the military philosophy of the age, though Lee does not appear to have read Clausewitz, the idea of the decision, with which you begin. Post Vietnam to say nothing of forever war, the idea of dragging an adversary into a pitched battle on favorable ground, and trading body for body, seems just insane. Like, literally cannot wrap your mind around it incomprehensible. The discipline (????) exhibited at places like Antietam, by gentlemen and farmboys alike, just seems like, well, madness. I can do the ideologies better than most, but . . .

Anyway, thank you. Bravo. Again.

Expand full comment

My grandmother used to tell stories about the civil war like she saw it happen in her backyard. I remember the moment in school when I realized there was no way she could have lived through it. She was the best story teller I ever knew. I always felt like I knew the people she was talking about.

There are few historians now who know how to tell a story like she did. Shelby Foote was one. The Librarian is another.

Expand full comment

Thank you so much. I’m not Shelby Foote-level yet, but that’s kind.

Expand full comment

Ever since reading about Antietam and the cornfield as a boy I have never been able to walk through a cornfield without thinking about the horror of it all.

Expand full comment

They’re oddly unsettling places in any case, claustrophobic and monotonous, like an agricultural Backrooms. I think it’s why they figure into Halloween stuff so much, and even horror movies (Children of the Corn, Signs). Having to fight in one…

Expand full comment

Hmmm... all this has seeded a schizo post in my mind where the fighting in the cornfield was a blood sacrifice ritual to initiate the newly created Secretary of Agriculture as hypostasis of the Aztec corn demon Centeotl...

Expand full comment

Thanks for the always welcome old stories that are ours by right. It always amazes me how one can live here and not know them. Antietam, the bloodiest day, foreshadowed Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle—and another speech (as well as a great book by Gary Wills.) The story of the years before the start of the civil war were of westward expansion and of the contest between the north and south for control of the government. That contest focused on how new states and territories, as a consequence of expansion, would be admitted into the US—as slave or free—much as we think of red and blue today. Obviously, the entry of a state, as one or the other, could and did change the balance of power. That fight was red hot for decades before the outbreak of war. So yes, for those still confused, the war was about slavery.

Expand full comment

Just fantastic!

Expand full comment

Thank you so much.

Expand full comment

Outstanding work!

Expand full comment