Category: HISTORY

     November 19th was the 147th anniversary of the Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln’s masterpiece of perfectly structured  prose defining for all time the standard of speech writing and public rhetoric.  In a mere 272 words, Lincoln memorialized the heroes of the specific Gettysburg battle, the larger principles that would be worth such horrid sacrifice, and the greater good that the cataclysmic struggle would bring to fruition.  Most importantly, he re-framed and confirmed the basic argument for the existence of the  American republic itself, and from that point on it was never again an subject for rational question.

    Reading the words and acknowledging his exalted place in the pantheon of American history, we can easily forget this man had only a few weeks total of formal education, was fundamentally self taught, and formed almost all his philosophy from his narrow exposure to Cicero, the Bible and Shakespeare.  The depth of his intellect in the face of such a hard scabble upbringing and limited means and exposure to intellectual critical analysis remind us to look again at our absurdly silly modern biases that the only intellectual leaders are those who have advanced degrees from ivy league type educational citadels.   Lincoln formed his genius the most credible way, though constant introspection, mental exercise through memorization, and intense study of the science of debate.  In Lincoln’s time, the availability of significant data to prove debating points was available to almost no one, and  the audience was almost assumed to be predominately illiterate.  The equally important point, however, was that Lincoln had honed his debating skills in the prairie wilderness of Illinois where the powers of thought and argument, and confidence in human intuition were required to be at a highly developed state due to the necessity of surviving in such a difficult and primitive world. In the harsh loneliness of the great west there was time only for hard work and hard thought, and no one made the prejudicial mistake to assume that intellect and talent were exclusive to the schooled.  Lincoln was a debater his whole life,  from the skills learned as a self taught travelling lawyer on the circuit courts of the rural midwest, to the state legislature, U.S. Congress, brilliant public debates with Stephen Douglas for Senate, and finally Presidency at the moment of greatest philosophical crisis in the history of the country.  He never made the modern political mistake of “dumbing down” the depth and seriousness of the argument to his audience.  He always assumed the native intellect of those he was communicating to, and the need to persuade, not to indulge. In modern times, only Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan come remotely close to this innate skill set of Lincoln’s.

     The Gettysburg Address as legend has it was framed by Lincoln on the train to the national cemetery commemoration at Gettysburg, and was considered an afterthought following intense oration of Everett Edwards, the professional orator who preceded him with an erudite 2 hours of rhetoric.  Ironically, it was only Edwards initially who recognized that Lincoln had done more to perfectly frame the moment in his three minutes then Edwards had in his two hours, and told him so.  We can only imagine the disappointment of the crowd gathered, when the president followed Edward’s loquacious sonorous testimonial with a brief high pitched simple discourse that was over almost before it started. It rapidly however was appreciated for its perfect structure and brilliance and has come to be recognized as a jewel of english language rhetoric and human thought. If only our current leaders would be capable of learning Lincoln’s special insight into humanity and the American Experience.

The Gettysburg  Address

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           A. Lincoln November 19th, 1863

      The month of November  is on the whole a gold mine of interesting events to a web blog that loves history as this one does, and no more stirring day exists to defenders of the ramparts of civilization than does November 9th.   I never thought growing up I would ever see the epic events of 1989, events that occurred with such spectacular suddenness, and with overwhelming affirmation of the human spirit.  No one not alive during the certainty of the eternal collision of communism and capitalist democracies can possibly relate to the awe and spectacle of that very special summer and fall.  The day of days was November 9th, 1989, when the East German government bureaucratically tried to reduce the enormous pressure of its population’s demand for free transit to West Berlin by suggesting limited access to be available over time.  No longer willing to accede to paternal restrictions of a stone deaf governmental  dictatorship, the people of East Germany simply refused to be held back any longer.  By the night of the 9th, thousands  pressed the entrances to West Berlin and eventually overwhelmed the pathetic efforts to hold them back.  History was changed for ever when  the psychological as well as physical wall constricting west Berlin was perforated, eroded, and finally destroyed.

     What was the Berlin Wall? Built in 1961 by the Communists to stop the uncontrolled flow of eastern Europeans unsatisfied by the communist alternative to western capitalist recovery after World War II, the wall quickly became the singular physical symbol of the communist challenge to individual freedom.  No transit between east and west would be tolerated; not in culture, not in interaction, not in economics.  The east would go a different way and it would be willing to enforce this difference with bricks, mortar, and sharpshooters.  Eventually 192 East Germans died at the hands of rifle bullets stopping their attempts at experiencing western freedom, and thousands more were incarcerated.  The wall had been up several years when President Kennedy articulated the response of the free world  to the draconian construction of the wall, declaring “Ich bin ein Berliner” as the appropriate retort of all free peoples.  The West and the people of Eastern Europe never gave in to the Stalinist effort to colonize – beginning with the Berlin air-lift of 1948,  the intense moments of the East German revolt of 1953, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring for 1968, and the Solidarity demonstrations of 1981, the tense events at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, the cold war cat and mouse fights in surrogate countries, submarine exploits, and  spy agencies.  No one noting the aggressive ascendancy of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s could have imagined the precipitous downfall of this massively powerful dictatorship with world wide reach.  The power of the individual proved devastating to the state hegemony and the names ring like celestial bells – Andrei Sakarov, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and, the champion of freedom, Ronald Reagan. 

     The push came from Reagan in his outing of the Communist Soviet Union as an “evil empire” to the aspirations of free people, and the focus from Reagan in his speech at the Berlin Wall.  He spoke to the final destruction of the artificial edifice of communist “separateness”, with the challenge to the Russian comissar to act;  “Open these Gates; Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  The groundswell built in Poland and Hugary that summer, spread to the Baltic republics, the Czech republic, the Romanian dictatorship, and finally Germany itself. It was as if for once undeniable evidence was present that good could ultimately triumph when for generations it had been preached that triumph over evil was impossible.   It was gripping television, at a time when people still got their news on television , and the real time miracles occured one after another in front of our eyes.  Unforgettable, inspirational, and majestic, the summer and fall of 1989 stand as a monumental time in the logs of the defenders of the ramparts of western civilization and human freedom.

     November 11, 2010 was celebrated as the Veteran’s Day holiday paying homage to all American soldiers who have served their country over the years, but is borne of a very specific event day referred to as Armistice Day.  On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, combat operations ceased in armistice ending for all purposes the cataclysmic conflict known as ironically known at the time as the Great War, and eventually, as the combatants were doomed to repeat the horror twenty years later, as World War 1.   The effects of all wars are devastating but this one in particular seemed to hold a special irrationality and sorrow.  The war was fought across multiple continents but prism of death and destruction focused on a fairly narrow 50 mile killing field stretched out from the North Sea to the Swiss border, gashing France with battles named for her three natural river barriers, the Meuse, the Marne, and the Somme.  I visited Verdun in my youth, where an estimated 1.5 million casualties exhausted any semblance of rationality to the battle and devastated an entire generation of French youth. Its poison to the French nation shows itself in microcosm in the village of Thones, France a town of 5800 inhabitants, where I visited the village’s World War 1 memorial in 2009, commemorating the deaths of over 200 of the village’s sons in the Great War.  Taking into account the population of women, children, and old men unavailable to service, it is obvious to project through the loss of so many young men, the end of this town’s and projectionally of France’s economic capacity, generational proliferation, and vitality. 

     To Great Britian, Armistice Day is an equally poignant memorial day, and was painfully scarred this year by the insensitive and caddish demonstration of muslim youths purposely disrupting a national moment of commerative silence for their own unaware, selfish, and petty complaints.  The years separating the incredible losses of the British nation have obviously made callous the youth of Britian today who have benefited from their countrymen’s dedicated service.  It would do all well to relive the events of one day of that conflict to understand the enormous sacrifice that separated Great Britian forever from her position as a leader in the world economy and politic.

     On July 1, 1916, a single day in the Great War, 100, 000 soldiers of the British Commonwealth surged out of their trenches and pressed out to engaged their German enemies at the Somme.  The surge followed an artillery barrage dedicated to dissolve the German lines with over 250,000 shells concentrated over one hour from 1000 field guns, 180 heavy guns, and 245 heavy howitzers (John Keegan).  The British commanders Haig and Rawlinson had little doubt the incapacitating nature of such a barrage and assumed back breaking separations in the German defensive line and resolve, to be rapidly exploited by the spontaneous charge of the 100,000.  The assumption was that the nearby holocaust at Verdun had weakened German capacity for resistance and that such concentrated power would show irreversible line collapse. The fantastical plan seemed to ignore almost two years already of similar attempts and failures by both sides.  The very heart and soul of British youth, drawn so romantically into the war by a desire to triumph in similar personal fashion to their forefathers’ glory in  much smaller conflicts, exploded out of the trenches that morning on cue and surged across the fields to engage the apparently weakened foe, only to discover almost unaffected German positions with impenetrable defensive structures armed with the modern  scythe of death itself, the machine gun battery.  100,000 went out , and in the day of greatest loss to the British nation in history 60,000 did not come back, with imperceptible gains in the line overwhelmed by the stunning losses of vital manpower.  By the end of the day, the battle, for all purposes, was over, but in the cruel tradition of this most cruel of wars, crawled on until November without identifiable strategic gain, until a total of 680,000 British Commonwealth troops were claimed as casualties, in this one, this singularly obscene battle.

     Armistice Day is now forward 92 years from the actual cessation of battle, but the damage to the romantic notions of western civilization’s view of conflict as a means to an end were forever destroyed.  there is no moment more deserving of reverential silence then the sacrifice of so many who willingly separated their personal life from the desire to complete “a war to end forever all wars”.  Such personal demonstrations of sacrifice for ideas bigger than oneself is a particularly poignant and unique human trait.

       On the morning of July 1, 1916, a 23 year old soldier named William Noel Hodgson, a British Lieutenant joined his 100,000 comrades in the surge, and was soon one of the 60,000 casualties of a war day like no other in British history.  He felt his day in history and prior to the charge from the trench left us this beautiful reminder of why no matter how many years separate us from his charge, that we take a moment to remember.   To you, William Hodgson and all like you…

“I, that on my familiar hill

Saw with uncomprehending eyes

A hundred of Thy sunsets spill

Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

Ere the sun swings his noonday sword

Must say goodbye to all of this!

By all delights that I shall miss,

Help me to die, O Lord.”

     A circumspect George W. Bush appeared on NBC with Matt Lauer reviewing the major difficult decisions of his consequential presidency on 11/08/10 recounted in his new book Decision Points which opened today on Amazon.com at #1.  It is no surprise to anyone that the former president states on multiple occasions that personal popularity meant little to him in determining the course of major policy decisions.  In a strange way it seems to be almost a source of pride to him that often the tough decisions seemed to be generally unpopular ones.  The tide of history certainly exposed his presidency to more than the usual profound moments and for the most part I think he believes he stayed true to the ” right course” for the country.

     The pivotal moment was clearly 9/11 and on this pinnacle of crisis essentially all of his decisions radiate outward.  His explanation for the emotion that formed a backdrop to his speech on the world trade center rubble is a riveting piece of history.  Almost as wrenching is President Bush’s description of the burden of serving as commander in chief in consequential times resulting in the deaths of over 4000 servicemen.  He relates the story of the Chapman family, who he met at a service for their fallen son among many others.  President Bush noted that after the service, Mrs. Chapman brought him a note that read,  ” My son did his duty, now go and do yours,”  a buckling, emotional moment.  His visible attachment to the memory serves as an undeniable view into the sincerity of his motivations in the actions he took.  President Bush sleeps well at night with his conviction that what he did was in the service of his country’s best interests and security.

     Equally interesting is the focus on the Hurricane Katrina natural disaster.  The former president is clear that the perception of the national government refusing to provide troop support and security was a false one.  The governor of Louisiana and  the mayor of New Orleans dithered for days on whether to invite in federal troops, and the president was hamstrung  without a state invitation.  The federal government would have had to declare an insurrection to put in the military without an invitation and that would have clearly led to an explosive situation.  He is clear, also, in his contribution to the sense of presidential detachment to the tragedy, and admits it almost single handedly brought his functional presidency to an end in the public purview of him as a leader.   Not one of his finer moments, and certainly not one of Louisiana’s.

     The consensus of the interview is the sense of the former President that he did his best and did what he thought was right.   It is certainly a presidency that will require more than a few years to absorb the extended impact of George W. Bush’s decision making.  On so many fronts, from defining western civilization’s response to the violent challenge of radical Islam, to the introduction of elemental democratic freedom to the autocratic Middle East, to destructive assault on free market mechanisms in the TARP legislation in order to “save’ them,  and surviving the closest election in American history with the capacity to lead intact, this has proved to be one consequential presidency, and one consequential man.

     In 1799, a willful, brilliant Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte who had led French troops to multiple victories under the auspices of the revolutionary government of France, managed to take advantage of the weakened and self defeating nature of France’s governmental structure and successfully undertake a coup d’etat.  Rapidly outmaneuvering the other coup leaders, he had himself named First Council, and over the next five years led France to a dominant position in Europe.   In 1804, the combined power of victory and superego brought his enshrinement as Emperor of France and the aggressive and grandiose nature of this brilliant and ruthless dictator held for all of the western world the spector of French world domination.

      It is one of the peculiarities of history that entire historical tides pivot around singular events, and on October 21, 1805, one of the most powerful pivots ever occurred off the coast of Spain.  The pivot point, as so often is the case, identifies one man as the opposing historical force, a slight of build,  intense Admiral of the British fleet who in an adult life of almost constant battle had given an arm and the sight of one eye in the service of his country.  The man with an ego, tactical brilliance, and battle aggression on the seas to mirror Napoleon’s on land, was Horatio Nelson.

     Added to the peculiarities of history is the fact that the catastrophic loss of  the American colonies and the untold wealth of the American land mass in 1783 paradoxically positioned Great Britain on an almost unimpeded arc of spectacular commercial and military success on the world stage for the next 150 years.   By 1805, Great Britain had restored world wide domination of the seas and was positioned to be the solitary check to Napoleon’s plan of world domination.  Napoleon had every intention of restoring French dominance of the English isles abdicated by Henry V’s 1415 victory at Agincourt, and knew the British control of the sea lanes had to be broken to achieve his aims.  He drove his French naval forces to take the fight to Britain, but struggled to find the necessary equivalent leadership in his admiralty, as most of the competent and experienced naval leaders used to doing battle with England were annihilated in the fires of the French Revolutionary tribunals.   The French Admiral leading the Mediterranean french fleet was Pierre-Charles Villenueve, a cautious and realistic admiral who had thus far succeeded by avoiding direct conflict with the British, but now was under great pressure to commit to battle.  He did his best to conjure up a fleet superior to Nelson’s in firepower and number of ships, but recognized the inferior depth of seamanship he had available and was fearful of the battle turning on the skill sets of individual ships. This proved to be a prescient insight.

     Nelson had the opposite problem.  He could not get into a slugfest where his inferior numbers would be worn down, but sought instead to defy traditional tactics and try to cut the French fleet down to more palatable size.  Traditional tactics called for ships to remain in line, allowing each to support the other, and keep their cannons focused broadsides on the ship they were facing.  This allowed ultimate fire power delivery, and in the case of progressively poor outcome, easy ship to ship communication, coordinating either advance or retreat simultaneously.  Nelson determined to trust the superior seamanship of his captains, the training of their crews, and the detailed quality of his instructions to allow his line to break and have individual ships charge the enemy line.  The risks were enormous; a ship heading headlong into an opponent’s line would for a significant period have no canons pointing at the enemy, and would be fully at the mercy of the broadside canons of the enemy ship, not a pleasant situation to contemplate for anyone on board the charging ship.  Nelson gambled that the unorthodox approach if successful would get his ships in close where all the battle hardened skills of his crews would take over, and overwhelm the less experienced french and supporting spanish ships.

     On October 21, 1805, off the Cape of Trafalgar, Spain, the collision occurred and history pivoted.  Nelson prepared his forces with a last surge of martial pride and motivation by relaying in a special message that the success of the plan would be related to the success of each individual in the fleet to perform with courage and competence.  Nelson was one of history’s unique leaders where his troops were always able to see through his vanity and appreciate his unique abilities that inevitably would increase the chances of any seaman surviving an engagement.  No one doubted his personal courage, and no one doubted that in a real fight, it was always best to be tied to someone who could think in a moment of crisis.  All members of that British fleet knew that was the man Nelson was in spades, and they knew he was talking in a personal way to each of them when on that fateful morning, the HMS Victory flew the semaphore flags that resonated to all in electric fashion, “England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty”. 

     It is is hard to express the violence ,viciousness, and chaos of sail driven sea battle in the 18th and 19th century to the individual sailor.  He faced the horror and and fury of metal projectiles flying everywhere, both huge cannonballs and grape sized razor edged shrapnel, lethal splinters of wood, heaving seas and bloody decks making mobility almost impossible, the deafening roar of 30 cannon spontaneously firing heaving the ship and making communication imperceptable.  It required a steely constitution, expert training, and years of experience for every man to “do his duty” under such circumstances. Through it all, the tradition of leadership required the captain admiral to be imperious to it all, in full view of all his men and the enemy, to provide the ultimate “backbone” to the effort.  Nelson knew in his heart that ultimate victory would likely on this day would require ultimate personal sacrifice, and resisted all efforts to reduce his exposure to enemy fire.  In the heat of the charge, Nelson stood as men around him were cut in two by fusillade, and simply directed his ship to closer contact. With the HMS Victory in deck to deck contact with the french Redoubtable, a sniper from the Redoubtable found Nelson and struck him mortally from fifty feet, through his lung and crushing his spine.  Nelson was taken below, where three painful hours later, assured that his controversial tactics had won an overwhelming victory, died, and brought himself immortality.      

       In a battle of forces in which he was outnumbered 32 ships to 27, 2500 canon to 2100, and thirty thousand men to 17, 000, Nelson’s forces captured or sunk 22 ships and lost none.  The devastating loss was one from which the French navy was never to recover, and put on permanent hold Napoleon’s plans for invasion of Britain.  Presaging Hitler’s decision following the calamitous loss of  the air Battle of Britain on 1940, Napoleon averted his eyes west and turned east toward Russia, and his eventual defeat and decline, the final blow at Waterloo in 1815.  Great Britain took Nelson’s victory and its now unrivaled seapower to create the largest empire the world had ever seen over the next 100 years.  The historical effect, a world dominated by the English language, not French; by commercial trade and mercantilism; and the British system of education and justice.

     On such days, western civilization and its concepts of individual achievement, revels.

     A history book that holds particular joy for me  is Samuel Elliot Morison’s ” Admiral of the Ocean Sea”.  Morison was one of America’s greatest literary historians and an expert seaman in his own right.  Eventually achieving Rear Admiral U.S.Navy status for his personal involvement and superb documentation of  the role of the U.S. Navy in World War II, Morison first achieved fame as a Harvard history professor for his hands on biography of Christopher Columbus, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”, winner of  the Pulitzer Prize in 1942.  Morison took it upon himself prior to the war to sail to the precise locations of the  Columbus voyages, to feel what he felt and see what he saw, bringing an irreplaceable awareness to the historical tome.  

     For many years prior to its destruction by political correctness, October 12th  had a special place in the American experience as a day that separated all that came before, from all that came after in history.  A single man, the explorer from Genoa, Christoffa Coromba in Genoese, or as we have come to know him, Christopher Columbus, determined to find the western route to the East Indies, and looked to find any government who could find a legitimate reason to underwrite his voyage.  Columbus was not a specially intellectual man, but was a well read one, who had come to believe strongly on the basis of his extensive sea voyages and what he had gleaned from books that a viable shorter way to the Orient existed sailing west that would compare favorably economically to the recent Portuguese discoveries of trade routes around the Cape of Africa.  The obvious financial benefits of such a shorter trade path were clear to all European powers, who were just beginning to escape the introverted scope of the Middle Ages and enter into a period of aggressive questioning and exploration known as the Renaissance.  Columbus went to Portugal first as this small country was the pathfinder in extensive transoceanic voyage.  King John of Portugal, whose own brother Henry had discovered the trans-African route, saw no reason to undercut his current seafarers.  Next, Columbus went to England, than Italy, but received little encouragement.  After all, most thought Columbus was seriously off base in his calculations and unlikely to return from such an expensive and risky undertaking.  King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain were initially not significantly more helpful, but changed their mind and granted Columbus a fairly generous contract they would later regret, of 10% of all economic benefits achieved from a successful trade route and expected discoveries.  They were comfortable with doing so as they thought he had little if any chance of  succeeding.

     Columbus was one of a growing number of conceptualizers that saw the world as round, as such, logically available to circumnavigation from either direction.  He seriously underestimated the world’s diameter, concluding Japan likely some 3000 miles due west of the Canary Islands, rather than the 19,000 it actually was.  A miscalculation of this magnitude of the distance between land masses was serious business for certainly no ship in 1492 was capable of maintaining necessary supplies to keep the ships going without replenishment anywhere near such a distance.  The Spanish monarchs, desperate to be players in the burgeoning European outreach to distant worlds, determined anyway to provide him three small ships, the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, and sufficient men to staff the ships.  Columbus left the Canary Islands September 9th, 1492, and, understanding the existence of the “trade” winds better than most, headed due west.

     Morison, traveling Columbus’s route, reproduces much of the tension and disappointment in the succeeding five weeks directly from Columbus’s journals, Nada it became clear to most on board that Columbus was willing to sacrifice them all to prove himself right, as he sailed far beyond the theoretical turn around point that supplies would allow.   Mutinous grumblings grew ominously as weather grew worse and no evidence of land was apparent.  Morison describes a risky moment where Columbus in early October commands a perilous cross ship meeting to impel the sub commanders to direct their men to go a few days more, and is rewarded finally by some floating evidence of human activity on the water that buys him some time.  Then, the night of October 11th, 1492, and Columbus “sees” a light in the distance,  and men begin to believe that a momentous day is upon them, and fully understand the significance.  Morison captures the moment:

          “Anyone who has come onto the land under sail at night from uncertain position knows how tense the atmosphere aboard ship can be.  And on this night of October 11-12 was one big with destiny for the human race, the most momentous ever experienced aboard any ship on any sea.  Some of the boys doubtless slept, but nobody else.  Juan de la Cosa oand the Pinzons are pacing the high poops of their respective vessels, frequently calling down to the men at the tiller a testy order-‘keep her off your damn eyes must I go below and take the tiller myself?'” …Under such circumstances, with everyone’s nerves as taut as the weather braces, there was almost certain to be a false alarm…only a few moments now and a moment that began in remotest antiquity will end.  Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on the Pinta’s forecastle, sees something like a white sand cliff gleaming in the moonlight on the western horizon, then another, and a dark line of land connecting them…tierra, tierra! he shouts, and this time, land it is…”

    The point of contact with the New World, not the orient Columbus surmised, was an island in the Bahaman chain, Guanahani, or as it was christened by Columbus San Salvador, and the world was never the same.  Columbus had reached beyond what men could do, and what men feared to try, and was victorious.  The untoward actions of Spain and other powers evermore in their treatment of the natives and resources of the American continent does not diminish the singular achievement of the explorer hero Columbus, who imagined the far side of creation and had the will to take the perilous journey to live out his dream.

    The American Civil War has so many teaching points and moments of inspiration for those concerned with the preservation of western civilization’s higher ideals that it bears constant review and re-focus. Though framed as a battle between “free” and “slave” states, it reached violent fruition in 1861 as a rebellion initiated by states determined to maintain their own principles of governance and a federal government determined to preserve a national union of states. It became clear in a short time that the battle over a state’s right to self governance and self determination, assumed by all to be a likely brief spasm of violence, had evolved into a cataclysmic trans-continental struggle for multiple principles of individual rights and individual servitude, with entirely opposing views as to who’s rights and who’s freedoms were being subjugated.
     By 1862 the war was assuming a frightful mass and scope predicted by few in power and the costs in lives and economy was beginning to reach into every household. The Union government holding dramatic advantages in infrastructure, manpower, and economic capacity found itself floundering in the most important expression of the righteousness of its argument to hold the union together along its former construct – victories on the battlefield. How does one win the victory of ideas when the means to enforce them are not present? How long will ideas maintain their energy when the sacrifices required to defend them reach epic levels without an end in sight? These were the extraordinarily difficult circumstances that were placed upon President Lincoln as 1862 was rushing to a close. He had faced a year of enormous financial and manpower commitment on his nation’s part placed in the hands of a sluggish and peevish General McClellan, who devised expensive and crawling campaigns on the Virginian peninsula that despite overwhelming capacities placed in his favor, never felt he was given remotely sufficient support, and achieved no headway against a superior general named Lee and his flexible, rapid movement modern tactics. Thousands of deaths and tens of millions of dollars of equipment lost, and the result of the Peninsula war and ignominious Union withdrawal. President Lincoln was caught in the crosshairs- no country would absorb loss forever and no country would fight on principle forever. If he was to re-frame the war onto a framework that potentially could survive the enormous pain and trans-continental scope of the evolved war – turning the war into a battle test no longer of the rights of states but rather, the Rights of Man – he needed a victory, and he needed it now.
     September, 1862, brought this moment to a pressure point just outside of the little town of Sharpsburg, Maryland along a creek named Antietam. General Lee now fully in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia, the primary military expression of the confederate states, felt the time was right and his force quality advantage sufficient to press the battle for the first time into the Union states,  potentially drawing the north into a truce that would accept the south. The north had shown no conclusive ability to marshall forces and multiple examples of inept generalship. Lee recognized his own limited window for achieving the necessary victories and aggressively moved to press a conclusion. On September 17th, 1862, on Antietam Creek 40,000 confederate soldiers and 75,000 union soldiers clashed in the most violent single  day expression of war in American history, with a resultant 23,000 casualties in one 24 hour period.   The elements of the battle are legendary both in their heroism and moments of ineptness, but are brought to incredible and intense focus, in what has been immortalized in the battle for “the Cornfield” – where thousands of men fought blindly  and frequently in vicious individual hand to hand combat with no perspective other than their own and their comrade’s basic survival.  It is in the Cornfield that North’s legendary Iron Brigade comprised of Midwesterners primarily from 2nd, 6th , and 7th Wisconsin Voluntary Infantry , as well as elements from Indiana and Michigan, held their ground and beat back the previously unconquerable forces of Stonewall Jackson, and earned their fearsome reputation that lasted through the rest of the civil war.


     The enormous scope of the battle and its horrifying cost riveted the nation on both sides of the conflict.  McClellan had at last succeeded at halting a confederate army and although not conclusive, forced Lee to retrench his forces back into Virginia, thereby ending any hopes for the south of a conclusive end to the conflict in their favor.  

     For Lincoln it was the victory he needed to convert the war into a battle for principles worthy of its size and cost.   On the basis of the battle result at Antietam, he determined to make the Civil War rather than a second american revolution desired by the southern states, a final resolution of the loose ends of the first american revolution, to put to final test the principle that all men are created equal and that this country could not survive without the universal acceptance of that idea.   Antietam allowed Lincoln the philosophical breathing space he needed to put forth the Emancipation Proclamation – and the war between the states became the battle for freedom and the end expression of the highest ideals of western civilization.