Today marks the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg if you’re a southerner). Antietam was the bloodiest day of the American Civil War and resulted when Confederate General Robert E. Lee attempted to invade the North. Antietam was tactically a bloody draw, but the North considered it a victory because Lee had to leave Maryland and return to southern soil to continue the war. There were 23,000 casualties between the Union and Confederate Armies, making it the bloodiest day of the Civil War.
More importantly than stopping the southern invasion, the Union “victory” at Antietam gave President Abraham Lincoln the “great victory” he needed to declare the slaves in the southern states free. He issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation just days later.
One of the tragedies of the Battle of Antietam was when General Ambrose Burnside marched his soldiers across a narrow bridge. Naturally this allowed the Confederates to pick his men off, when it turned out he could have simply marched his men across the shallow creek. These sort of blunders were typical of the early Union war effort.
On an interesting side note, Antietam seems to be one of those battles even non-history buffs recognize, though few casual readers know about. The entire battle would have been a rousing success for Lee had some Union soldiers not discovered his Special Order No. 191 in a cigar tin at an old campsite.
Because of this event, Antietam is often picked as a jumping off point for alternate historians who write about the South winning the Civil War. Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain is one of these alternate history books. By simply postulating what could have happened had Special Order No. 191 not been found, Turtledove imagined an entire series of novels covering an alternate time-line running right up to the 1940s. Admittedly, Turtledove isn’t the most gifted writer, but the stories are worth reading, especially the earlier ones. How Few Remain details a second war between the Confederates and the Union in the 1880s over the South’s acquisition of Mexican states to stretch from sea to shining sea.
At any rate, today is the 147th Anniversary of the Battle of Antietam. Take a moment to remember the 23,000 killed, wounded or missing during that bloody September 17th.



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