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.

Decisively indecisive, like the First Battle of the Marne -- it did not directly determine the outcome of the war, but did determine that it would go on.

As dreadful as what happened from 10/62 to 4/65 was, the reabsorption of the South as slave states, which is what would have happened had McClellan written his orders ever-so-slightly-differently, doesn't strike me as a much better outcome.

I'm just glad I'm here now and not there then ...

I think there's a good chance that slavery would have been outlawed just as it was a year later in order to break residual power of the South and to appease working voters in the Northeast states. Maybe the constitutional admendments wouldn't have happened. After all, the American Indians got a raw deal from the begining that still keeps on giving.