{"id":65675,"date":"2012-09-17T08:23:24","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T12:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=65675"},"modified":"2012-09-21T10:09:07","modified_gmt":"2012-09-21T14:09:07","slug":"antietam-a-civil-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/09\/antietam-a-civil-catastrophe\/","title":{"rendered":"Antietam: A Civil Catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeremy<\/a>
Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of CLAS.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jeremy Teitelbaum<\/a>, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>, is a guest contributor to UConn Today. For his previous posts, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The UConn community has been discussing civility over the past few weeks, and a recent panel discussion led by President Herbst talked about the challenge that incivility poses to our democracy. Whenever I hear a conversation about political civility, I find myself thinking of the U.S. Civil War\u00a0\u2013 the most cataclysmic failure of civil discourse in our nation\u2019s political history, and at the same time the event that redeemed the nation\u2019s commitment to the principle that \u201call men are created equal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such reflection is particularly timely, because today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam<\/a>, the bloodiest day of conflict in American history. More than 3,600 soldiers were killed when the Union\u2019s Army of the Potomac under Gen. George McClellan attacked the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, at the town of Sharpsburg, Md.<\/p>\n

\"Antietam,<\/a>
Antietam, Md., Confederate dead at Bloody Lane. (Wikimedia Commons, photo from’ Civil War Images. Plate of Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War,’ Vol. 1, Philp & Solomons Publishers, Washington, D.C. (1866))<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The story of Antietam is tragic, but also immensely frustrating. As Richard Slotkin, in his recent book The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution<\/a>, explains in devastating detail, McClellan had a deep reluctance to fight, an almost comical arrogance, treasonous political views, and a decided tendency to overestimate enemy forces by a factor of two. Nevertheless, he managed to find himself confronting Lee\u2019s Army of Northern Virginia with twice Lee\u2019s numbers, while Lee\u2019s army was exhausted from forced marches and had its back to a river. By using only a portion of his army and deploying it in pieces, McClellan sacrificed numerical superiority and the advantages of terrain and achieved only a hideously bloody draw. To make matters worse, he failed to pursue Lee\u2019s badly damaged force when it moved south back into Virginia, missing an opportunity to cripple the Army of Northern Virginia and potentially end the war.<\/p>\n

Still, Antietam should be remembered now as more than a bloody day of individual heroism under inept leadership. As Slotkin describes, its significance stems much more from its impact on the political environment of the war. During the summer of 1862, as Abraham Lincoln watched the failure of the Union\u2019s Peninsula campaign and struggled to find a general who was both loyal and competent to command the Union forces, he reached the conclusion that he could no longer separate the saving of the Union from the abolition of slavery. To save the Union, he would have to end slavery.<\/p>\n

\"Abraham<\/a>
Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan in the general’s tent at Antietam, Md., Oct. 3, 1862. (Wikimedia Commons, photo from United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In July of 1862, Lincoln surprised his cabinet with his plan to issue an emancipation proclamation. They urged him to wait for a military victory before announcing it so that it came from a position of strength. Antietam, for all its flaws, was enough of a victory for that purpose, and five days after the battle Lincoln published his preliminary proclamation.<\/p>\n

The emancipation proclamation is a deeply equivocal document \u2013 Frederick Douglass called it \u201cthe first step on the part of the nation in its departure from the thralldom of the ages<\/a>\u201d \u2013 but as Slotkin argues, it was nevertheless revolutionary. From that point on, the civil war was about the abolition of slavery. Through that lens, one can even make sense of the slaughter at Antietam.<\/p>\n

Surely it would have been infinitely better if we could have reached the emancipation proclamation, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and equal voting rights, and (someday) a truly just society, through a civil political process. But I do not forget that it was a \u201ccivil\u201d process that created the 3\/5ths compromise and established the United States as a free nation built on slavery \u2013 a moral contradiction that was only resolved by a war that took the lives of over 600,000 Americans.<\/p>\n

Slavery had to end \u2013 it had to \u2013 and looking back 150 years to the bloodbath at Antietam, I recall Lincoln\u2019s words<\/a>: if the war continued, by God\u2019s will, \u201cuntil all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,\u201d then one must still conclude that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflections on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, from CLAS dean Jeremy Teitelbaum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":65669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[66],"class_list":["post-65675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 16:49:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65675"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65704,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65675\/revisions\/65704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/65669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65675"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=65675"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=65675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}