Illuminating Antietam: Remembering America's bloodiest war
by Kevin Carl Petersen
| December 07, 2019 09:00 AM
On Sept. 13, 1862, as the Union Army marched into the Maryland town of Frederick, Cpl. Barton Mitchell of the 27th Indiana was taking a break in some shade until he noticed an abandoned envelope in some grass nearby. To his delight, inside it, he found three cigars wrapped in some paper. Upon closer inspection of the paper itself, however, he realized he discovered something far more significant — it was a lost copy of Gen. Robert Lee’s latest marching orders to the Army of Northern Virginia.
Using this intelligence, Gen. George McClellan sent Union Army regiments west toward Sharpsburg to confront the divided Confederate Army. Lee, however, after receiving intelligence of the new Union movements, positioned his troops by Antietam Creek to meet the incoming army. And just like that, extreme carelessness on the Confederate side and plain old luck on that of the Union converged into battle on Sept. 17, 1862 — the single bloodiest day in United States history.
To commemorate the heavy toll of this battle, every year since 1988, hundreds of volunteers spend a day in December carefully laying out 23,000 paper bag lanterns (one for each of the killed, missing, and wounded between the two armies) onto a vast grid that completely envelops the gentle hills of the Antietam farmland. The sprawling nature of this memorial, like the thousands of bodies left astray on this battlefield years ago, starkly illustrates the physical cost of the conflict. The speed with which it is set up, just half a day, like the length of the battle itself, reminds onlookers of its high intensity.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/illuminating-antietam-remembering-americas-bloodiest-war
