So You Want a Civil War? Let’s Pause to Remember What One Looks Like.

A little history could help us all. Those feeling some sort of primordial urge for civil war at this moment in our bitterly divided politics, on the right or the left, should carefully learn about a battle fought on this day, September 17, 1862, in our real Civil War. Today is the 163rd anniversary of the battle of Antietam, fought along a creek of that name in southern Maryland, near the town of Sharpsburg.

Two massive armies clashed in what some still call the most deadly fighting on any battlefield in that ghastly war. This was war-making as slaughter. The Army of the Potomac under the command of General George B. McClellan and the Army of Northern Virginia under command of General Robert E. Lee fought with desperate fury and modernized weapons of killing. In a sustained eight hours of brutal combat, the two sides experienced approximately 23,000 casualties, roughly 3,600 of them dead. In one cornfield, an estimated 8,200 dead and wounded bled out on the Maryland farm soil amid tall stalks of harvested corn.

It is the single bloodiest day in the history of American warfare, and after the photographer Matthew Brady went to the ghastly landscape immediately after the battle and took unforgettable images of the mangled dead near the Dunker Church, in the Sunken Road, and strewn along fences hard by the Hagerstown Pike, Americans have forever been able to see the results of unrestrained civil war. See, but not really hear, feel, taste, or smell so much death and unimaginable suffering in one concentrated place.