Sept 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest day in US history. You have to wonder what might have been if some one other than McClellan commanded the Army of the Potomac. For a good read on the subject I suggest "Landscape Turned Red" by Stephen Sears.
150 years ago
by JeffT 6 Replies latest jw friends
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botchtowersociety
Didn't Lincoln sack him after that one? Lee got the better of him.
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Glander
Tomorrow night on PBS is a two hour special on the Civil War deaths and how the country dealt with 750,000 bodies. The US military had no system inplace to handle the casualties in such volume. Disease was a major killer. Bodies lay unburied, etc. If you are interested in the Civil War this is a must see.
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MrFreeze
I do enjoy the Ken Burns Civil War documentary.
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VM44
One Hundred Fifty years ago Charles Taze Russell was ten years old!
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Leolaia
The Battle of Antietam (
/ æ n ' t i? t ?m / ) also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the South, fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, as part of the Maryland Campaign, was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Union soil. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with about 23,000 casualties on both sides.It staggers the mind thinking about it. It's the causalties of 9/11 eleven times over. In a US population a fraction the size of what it is now.
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JeffT
BTS: Little Mac won the battle but lost the fight. Lee was forced to retreat and as Lincoln put it "McClellan got the slows." If the Army of the Potomac and pressed forward it could have gone all the way to Richmond.
Leolaia, if you apply that casualty rate to today's population you come up with about 250,000 dead, wounded, captured and missing in one day. The price paid by this country for that war is staggering to think about.
