A hundred and forty one years ago, the prelude began to the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, to those south of the Mason-Dixon line). Many focus on Gettysburg as a turning point in the War Between The States, but this was another, and an earlier and in some sense a larger one.

It was the biggest bloodbath of the war to date, and it was a cusp, in the sense that the Army of the Northern Virginia (and hence the Confederacy itself) was on the ropes in the aftermath of it. A steadfast follow through by McClellan could have ended the war there, and preempted three more years of it, but he always saw the enemy as ten times the height of reality, and reluctant (as always) to use his army, he refused to finish Lee off.

And so the carnage continued.