The bloodiest day in American History was the Battle of Antietam, near a small town in Maryland, Sharpsburg, on September 17, 1862.
It was a horrific, stinking battle, highlighted by lunacy and incompetence on the Union side. It was like one of those World War I battles, in which all the fine young men , the best and the brightest, were force fed into the meat grinder of war, coming out on the other side, carnage.
It was a battle in which the Gods intervened, allowing the Union a chance to not only win the battle but the war. A chance muffed by the hesitation of the Union Commander, George B. McClellan.
It was a battle in which Lee, greatly disadvantaged by this intervention of the Gods, showed his brilliance, and merit.
It was the Battle which triggered the Emancipation Proclamation.
At the beginning of the Battle, the Union Army, one of the finest armies in history, the Army of The Potomac, under McClellan had 80,000 troops; the Confederate Army, one of the finest armies in history, the Army of Northern Virginia, under Lee, diminished by straggling and desertion, had 50,000 men, maybe less.
130,000 met on the Battlefield; before nightfall 23,000 were either dead or wounded-THE BLOODIEST DAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
McClellan was one of the great organizing generals in American history, like George C. Marshall and Winfield Scott, but he was not a fighter like Eisenhower or Lee. He created great and beautiful armies to parade, not to fight. War to him was the training camp; war to Lee was killing.
This Blogger believes that General Marshall, in World War II, deferred to Eisenhower as Field Commander because he saw his own fatal flaw; he was a McClellan, and Eisenhower was a fighter, who would give the order to land 250,000 warriors on beaches, under withering fire.
Maryland was a slave holding state that had not left the Union; Lee had invaded Maryland to win them over to the Confederacy, and once that was done, gain the support for the Confederacy of the other slave holding states that had not seceded(Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware), effectively ending the war with a defacto Southern victory.
The Army of the Potomac left Washington to chase down the Army of Northern Virginia.
At this particular juncture in human history, with Kutuzov and Wellington dead, with Winfield Scott too fat to mount a horse, Lee stood alone as the finest Field Commander (Strategy and Tactics)in the world, and would stay that way until Sherman assumed command of the Army of the Ohio.
Lee had just polished off the Army of the Potomac in the grueling Seven Days and with a brilliant victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
Marching to catch the Rebs, the Union Army camped at a site just vacated by Confederate troops; there, to their astonishment, their stunned shock, was a bunch of cigars, wrapped in a piece of paper. The paper was confidential orders outlining Lee's DETAILED BATTLE PLAN.
"."The front side of Confederate Army Gen. Robert E. Lee's Special Order No. 191 dated Sept. 9, 1862. The handwritten document detailed the Southern commander's audacious plans for an invasion of enemy territory that would propel the Confederates to victory. Carelessly left behind as Lee's army marched north, the copy was spotted in a field by Union infantrymen and relayed up the North's chain of command."
THE CORN FIELD
"Confederate troops began to see lines of Union soldiers advancing toward them as if on parade. The Confederates were positioned among rows of corn. Men on both sides opened fire, and for the next three hours the armies battled back and forth across the cornfield.
Thousands of men fired volleys of rifles and batteries of artillery from both sides raked the cornfield with grapeshot. Men fell, wounded or dead, in great numbers, but the fighting continued. The epic struggle in the cornfield became legendary, known as the bloodiest part of America's bloodiest day.
Fighting Joe Hooker, who would later command the Army of the Potomac, and who would consider, after presumptively defeating Lee, overthrowing the Republic and installing a Caesar regime with himself as Caesar(Lincoln told him fine, just beat Lee first and then we will all take out chances). Fighting Joe Hooker, who was not shy about making bloody war said this: "Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before.
"It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battle-field."
THE BLOODY LANE
Both Armies in the CORN FIELD were exhausted by the CORN FIELD, so the fighting shifted to THE BLOODY LANE.
"The Confederates had found a natural defensive position, a narrow road used by farm wagons which had become sunken due to wear from wagon wheels and erosion caused by rain. This obscure sunken road would become famous as "Bloody Lane" by the end of the day.
Approaching five brigades of Confederates positioned in this natural trench, Union troops marched into a withering fire. Observers said the troops advanced across open fields "as if on parade." The shooting from the sunken road stopped the advance, but more Union troops came up behind those who had fallen."
Confederate sharp shooting stopped the Union advance in its tracks; to ask Union troops to continue to advance into THE BLOODY LANE was like asking men to march into Hell; so naturally the Union commanders asked the Irish Brigade to do it, regiments of unwanted, unwashed, and illegal Irish immigrants were asked to do the impossible.
"... Advancing under a green flag with a golden harp on it, the Irish fought their way to the sunken road and unleashed a furious volley of fire at the Confederate defenders.
The sunken road, now filled with Confederate corpses, was finally overtaken by Union troops. One soldier, shocked at the carnage, said the bodies in the sunken road were so thick that a man could have walked on them as far as he could see without touching the ground."
Both armies were exhausted by the fighting in THE CORN FIELD and THE BLOODY LANE, so the fighting shifted to the southern end of the battlefield, Burnside's Bridge.
Ambrose Burnside(who was later to command the Army of the Potomac) was the WORST general In American history, worse than Wilkinson, Gates or Mark Clark-THE VERY WORST.
He was in command of Union troops.
He ordered his troops to charge a narrow stone bridge crossing the Antietam Creek.
Burnside funneled his troops onto a narrow bridge, "On the western side of the creek, a brigade of Confederate soldiers from Georgia positioned themselves on bluffs overlooking the bridge. From this perfect defensive position the Georgians were able to hold off the Union assault on the bridge for hours."
It was a turkey shoot for the Rebs.
Finally, in the late afternoon, boys from Brooklyn, and Pennsylvania just took the damn bridge in a heroic charge.
BURNSIDE THE WAR CRIMINAL, For Incompetence
"The attack at the bridge was actually unnecessary, as nearby fords would have allowed Burnside's troops to simply wade across the Antietam Creek."
Armies on the March have something called SCOUTS, among their job duties is to find fords across bodies of waters like creeks, streams, rivers. Burnside did not even send out ONE DAMN SCOUT....but he did give us sideburns.
Confederate skill, and Union stupidity had defeated God's gift to McClellan.
McClellan, could have finished the war right then, or lost the war entirely right then.
McClellan sought advice from Porter, one Democrat to another.
McClellan, the cautious Pompey did not throw all his troops into battle, leaving the battle a stalemate. The Army of the Potomac did not win the war that day, but also it was not destroyed that day by a Lee counter punch, which Stonewall Jackson would have delivered.
More blood, to pay for the blood of slaves harvested by the lash, would have to be expended to end the American calamity. Both armies were too exhausted and stunned by the killing spree to continue.
Lee withdrew to Virginia; Lincoln urged McClellan to pursue, but McClellan was paralyzed by so much blood being shed on his watch.
Lincoln fired him. McClellan ran as a Democrat against Lincoln in 1864, and LOST.
THE CLEAR DARKNESS
"CLEAR DARKNESS, when things get so dark, so black, so bleak you can suddenly see clearly. You are not blind in the darkness, you can see clearly because there are no distractions, no bothersome lights of distractions'.
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Every year Antietam illuminates the battlefield
THE CLEAR DARKNESS OF ANTIETAM and Great Britain
Up to Antietam, Great Britain had considered entering the war on the side of the Confederacy. But the immense casualties at Antietam, rivaling Waterloo, convinced the British that Lincoln was prepared to spend every drop of Union blood flowing to save the Union; it dawned on the British that it would not be a good idea to join a fray against a man who could preside over the bloodiest day in American history and still keep going forward toward his goal. As a result of Antietam, the British buried their plans to intervene in the American Civil War.
THE CLEAR DARKNESS OF ANTIETAM and THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
During the Viet Nam War, the Republican Senator from Vermont, George Aitken, advised the Texan Lyndon Johnson to just declare victory in a war America could not win and come home, another prime example of "Clear Darkness".
Antietam was not a Union victory; it was a stalemate, a draw.
But as Lincoln pondered the bloodiest day in American History, 23,000 dead or wounded IN ONE DAY; he had his moment of Clear Darkness. He came to understand that the American Civil War, to justify all the dead and all the dead coming, needed a moral component.
Therefore, this Man who in March 1861, had offered the South a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing eternal and perpetual Slavery, decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
".Lincoln issued a preliminary decree stating that, unless the rebellious states returned to the Union by January 1, freedom would be granted to slaves within those states. The decree also left room for a plan of compensated emancipation. No Confederate states took the offer, and on January 1 Lincoln presented the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared, "all persons held as slaves within any States, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."
The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States. Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control.
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