By Jim Scarantino
Outside Sharpsburg, Md., a stretch of soft grass rolls across a ditch to where corn sways in the wind. The ditch is barely wide enough to allow a truck or a horse-drawn wagon along its bottom. This is Bloody Lane at the Antietam National Battlefield.
On October 17, 1862, Union forces under General George B. McClellan attacked Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army across miles of these pastures and cornfields. Lee was on his first invasion of the North. Stonewall Jackson had captured Harper’s Ferry. The farms, factories and warehouses of Pennsylvania lay within Lee’s reach.
Five thousand men and boys rose out of the cornfield. Cheering with all the life in their chests they charged forward. A sheet of flame erupted from Confederates hidden less than 100 yards away in Bloody Lane. Scores of men fell. But the Union soldiers kept coming, holding their fire until they closed the distance.
The attack reached a split-rail fence offering no protection from cartridges and musket balls. Union soldiers stood or kneeled in the open. They fired, reloaded and fired until they were killed. Many died before getting off a shot. For everyone who fell, another soldier came forward to take his place until he also was hit.
The first photographs of battlefield casualties were taken at Antietam. They show tangled bodies lining Bloody Lane and corpses across rows of corn mowed to the ground by bullet fire.
So it went that terrible day. Twenty-three thousand men were killed and wounded in 12 hours. Four million bullets were fired. Nine men died every two seconds. Antietam remains the bloodiest day in American history.
The horror of Antietam led to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves on American soil.
We don’t know whether Lincoln ever imagined that the office he occupied could be held by a Black man. The men giving away their lives at Antietam may never have imagined a Black man addressing future American soldiers as commander-in-chief. More likely than Barack Obama on a podium draped in bunting, their minds held images of children traded like livestock, of men and women in iron shackles, never knowing justice or hope. Perhaps before battle, they sang “Amazing Grace,” a hymn written by a slave ship captain after denouncing the human commerce that had made him wealthy.
Over 300 years of slavery on this continent preceded Antietam. In 1862 Obama could have been bought and sold in some of the states where he has won primary elections. One hundred forty-six years later he leads the country’s largest political party. In November 2008 he could become this nation’s leader.
Antietam ended without resolving the Civil War. No winner was declared as the burial teams fanned out across the fields. It would be another year until Pennsylvania farmers and Irish immigrants used bayonets and bare hands to turn back the last energy of Pickett’s Charge. Fredricksburg, Chickamagua, the Wilderness and the burning of Atlanta still lay ahead.
Obama will compete for the presidency like every White man before him. He will be idolized and attacked. The American people will judge his ideas, convictions and character just as they judged Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush. He may not be voters’ choice in November. But in Obama’s historic accomplishment America is already victorious. If we turn our faces into the wind rattling Maryland’s cornfields, we might just hear brave, selfless heroes rising to their feet and cheering again.
Scarantino has been recognized as one of the country’s best political columnists by the American Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. His work has been published in more than 50 newspapers. You can contact him at jrscarantino@yahoo.com.
By Jim Scarantino