One hundred fifty years ago today, two great armies clashed in a titanic struggle that would decide the fate of a nation. "Around a cornfield and a little white Dunker church, around a stone bridge and in a pasture lane worn by cow paths, surged a human tornado," wrote
Until the federal Army of the Potomac, led by Union Gen. George B. McClellan, and Gen. Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia met on Sept. 17, 1862, in the broad valley between South Mountain range and a wild, looping curlicue of the Potomac River, the war had been largely a sectional dispute between competing economic interests in the slave-holding South and the industrial North.
After Antietam, it became a moral crusade to realize an ideal of American democracy that was then still struggling to be born, and which a century and a half later we have yet to perfect.
Antietam revealed to both sides the staggering sacrifice each would be required to make in order to prevail. The fighting that day was savage, crazed, unspeakably cruel. On both sides, entire regiments — 1,000 men or more — were wiped out in minutes, and their replacements fell just as quickly on blood-soaked earth carpeted with the bodies of their comrades.
Gen. George Hooker, who led the first Union assault on the Confederate lines, was astounded by the ferocity of the fighting: "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," he recalled, "and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before."
Historians rate the outcome of the battle a draw. The following day found both armies utterly exhausted. Lee's plan to invade the North as far as
For the president, however, even a partial victory represented an opportunity. Five days after the battle, on Sept. 22, 1862, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in all the states of the Confederacy. Fully as much as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, that transformative edict, in the words of historian Benjamin Quarles, "was destined to take on the evocative power reserved only for the half-dozen great charter expressions of human liberty in the entire Western tradition."