assumptions may be wrong
on the anniversary of the bloodiest day
Choosing a topic was far simpler today than most days when I anguish about adding something worth your time. Yes, I think a great deal about not flooding you with more blah blah blah, if possible.
The battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg, occurred 161 years today. The town is about two hours from bucolic Annapolis. The events there remain the single bloodiest day ever for U.S. armed forces with the long list of encounters in and near the small Maryland village that ultimately creating more than 21,000 casualties. Probably best known of the rapid deaths of 3600 men were in the Cornfield in savage killing. Descriptions include soldiers on both sides ‘mowed down’ as they attempted to step over the dead and the discarded war materiel. Nearby Burnside’s Bridge exemplified Karl von Clausewitz’s eternal reminder in Book One, Chapter Seven of Von Kriege—on War—‘Everything is very simply in war, and the simplest thing is difficult’ as Union forces found the act of crossing a bridge from one side to the other impossible for three hours in the face of terrific Confederate fire.
Union forces nominally ‘won’ Antietam but the war stretched fully another three and a half plus years before the Confederate surrender at Appomatox in April 1865. Antietam proceeded Marye’s Heights (1862), Chancellorsville (1863), Vicksburg (1863), Gettysburg (1863), Chickamauga (1863), the Wilderness (1864), Sherman’s March to the Sea (1864), Cold Harbor (1864), Mobile Bay (1864), Petersburg (1864 and 65), and countless lesser known attacks and counterattacks. The American Battlefield Organisation lists of dozens of battles, most following the brutality at Antietam. Countless commanders, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of dollars expended on both sides were yet to convince the rebels of the futility of their cause.
The Confederacy advocated for states’ rights; many millions of Americans still view the federal government as illegitimate over the will of those in individual states on issues ranging from education to religion to abortion to taxation. The Confederacy passionately believed in the morality of slavery—the ultimate form of inequality—even as millions were trapped in subhuman conditions over generations. The Confederates feared their way of life would vanish if they did not defend their cause. What they lost instead were youth sacrificed in vain, ultimately leaving the members of their self-declared nation broken and vastly underdeveloped during a period of massive industrialisation elsewhere.
Clausewitz also pointed out that war is continuation of policy by other means. What too often follows a civil war, as happened in our own, is that the objectives of preventing equality, rebuffing Federal government rights, and pursuing a different way of life manifest themselves through other means. This is not to say every single person in the Confederacy rejected the implications of Lee surrendering to Grant in April 1865 but for many it was not a final act in the struggle.
It is exceptionally difficult to ask people to abandon deeply held beliefs and certainty of being right in individual views.
The Civil War did not prevent to deep regional tensions, distrust, and perhaps low-level but smouldering frustration across some portions of our nation. The losing side did not see this as a resolved conflict. Instead it has been one to pursue through other means such as working around Constitutional Amendments, utilising law to prevent de facto equal opportunity, and various other actions to continue towards their desired endstate through other means.
And that is the point today. Civil wars, whether in the former Yugoslavia, the United States of America, South Asia, China, or England, rarely convince the losing side that their cause was illegitimate or is too flawed to pursue through other actions. Too often we in the United States view war as a determinative act from which the winners brook no dispute from the losers. Several of those handful of civil wars noted above persist, even if they have shifted from the violence to other means. The simmerig but never-far-away tensions in the Indian subcontinent prove this only too well.
Caught in the passion of any single day, those advocating violence to achieve goals rarely take stock of the opportunity costs. Yet war is the most brutal evidence of opportunity costs in the human experience, especially in civil wars against at least nominally brothers and sisters within a nation.
War is an instrument within a bigger struggle. It may ultimately exhaust itself within a day or within a century, or the fight may continue in other ways. Antietam today appears a battle in an extensive campaign still being fought in many quarters.
Perhaps your views differ. I welcome them as I fear we are seeing a hotting up, as the British would say, of views on the two sides of the United States today. Each side is certain the other must see the vaiidity and unshakable truth yet that only comes, I fear, as a result of recognising there can be another side. I am far from convinced we all share that view but perhaps you can show me I am wrong.
It was a beautiful, quiet sunrise
but the clouds reasserted their prerogative to intervene as the day progressed. I hope you have had a marvelous weekend.
Thank you for reading Actions Create Consequences. I suspect many of you have thoughts about civil war, Antietam, and the future so please send them out. I especially thank those of you who subscribe. Please feel free to circulate or restack.
Be well and be safe. FIN
American Battlefields Commission, ‘Civil War Timeline’, retrieved at https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/day-civil-war
Carl von Cluasewitz, On War, retrieved at https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/BK1ch07.html
Civil wars often involve people so convinced, regardless of their context of the rightness of the cause. We better take that seriously
First- I did not see the sunrise this morning, beautiful or not. And second- it's raining!!
As best as I recall Proverbs mentions that God raises Warriors--and I've thought about that quite a bit, then recently realized that any "weapon", i.e., a lifeless inert instrument, by which harm or death might come to another human remains harmless until wielded by a human being, regardless of the actual intent of the person. War is "bloody hell" to quote some I came across as a young child; yet, this individual believed that his sacrifice and the sacrifice of others was necessary to eradicate Hitler and put an end to his reign of terror in Europe, west to east. He never regretted his contributions to that success; though it did change him. Sometimes the only thing that works is the violent push back when tyranny will not restrain itself. Finishing up my math PhD in catastrophe identification has revealed that very often the achievement and maintenance of a steady state process, think our peaceful world, requires an explosive, i.e., violent, push back along the boundaries, of the domain of definition where those boundaries might delineate any form of human excess. Thus, God does indeed raise Warriors, who are adept at the accomplishing of that push back--I hope someday to increase each of their probabilities for a safe and hopefully healthy return home. They have all honed their physical form to accomplish their task, as I have sharpened my mind to facilitate my objective. My father Clifford, adopted me after my biological father 1st Lt. Robert Howard Harlan, II died while flying as a co-pilot when his plane when in the Sea of Japan. To keep others from such pain, constantly propels me onward. Thank you once again for all you and all who are there at the National War College do to maintain our relatively beneficent life's existence, i.e., the commonly preferred steady state process.