This from Matt Warshauer, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, who is a Civil War scholar:
“At this moment, 150 years ago today, Union and Confederate Civil War forces were engaged in the Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American history. They met on the hills and in the cornfields of Sharpsburg, MD. Some 23,000 men were killed and wounded in the 12 hours that ensued. Captain Samuel Fiske of Madison, CT wrote, ‘the battle itself was a scene of indescribable confusion. Troops didn’t know what they were expected to do, and sometimes, in the excitement, fired at their own men.’ Sgt. Benjamin Hirst of Rockville awoke on the battlefield the next morning. Writing home, he remarked that he ‘saw War without romance, there was dead men lying around everywhere some with the head shatterd to Pieces, others with their bowels protruding while others had lost their legs and Arms. What my feelings were, I cannot describe, but I hope to God never to see such another sight again.’ In the days after the battle, the Hartford Courant listed the hundreds of Connecticut men who died and were wounded, noting ‘It is seldom that we are called upon to bury so many braves in so short a space of time. Their friends have the satisfaction of knowing that they have the sympathies of the city with them, and that their loved ones died in a glorious cause.’ The glorious cause was, at the war’s outset, merely saving the Union. Yet Antietam drastically changed that. President Abraham Lincoln utilized the nominal Union victory to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which promised freedom for slaves on January 1, 1863 should the South not lay down its arms. Ultimately, the war shifted, and Lincoln grounded it in what he believed were the most fundamental ideas of liberty enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. In this sense, and many others, Antietam altered our nation greatly. It’s day we should all remember.”