So, you say you want a “civil war”? In the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk, Republican elected officials and members of the Trump administration have led or followed denizens of right-wing social media in using the language of “civil war” to respond to what they immediately deemed an attack by the “radical left.” President Trump has kept up a steady drumbeat of blaming the “radical left lunatics” as Kirk’s real killers, as he expects the country to forget his own felony convictions, his pardoning of 1,500 convicted members of an insurrectionary mob that violently invaded the U.S. Capitol in his name, his threatening of American cities with military force, and his relabeling the Defense Department the “War” Department.
All the while, the president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, spread vicious propaganda about a vast conspiracy of people working in “child services, as hospital nurses, and teachers” who “have been deeply and violently radicalized.” A ministry of propaganda and truth, by definition, needs no evidence. It exploits the shock of events for constant partisan revitalization and the sharpening of conceptions of the “enemy” who must be destroyed.
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.
At Antietam, there was no “far right” or “radical left” contending for the life of the nation and its democratic experiment. There were firmly held, irreconcilable ideologies in the minds of these soldiers and the leaders who sent them to their dutiful deaths and to bear their hideous wounds. The “Union” and its many meanings, the struggle for Southern independence and creation of a slaveholders’ republic, and the fight over the future of slavery animated the minds of young soldiers.
But most probably they thought only of survival or endurance or home on that terrible day. They witnessed the bodies of their comrades and foes blown into pieces by short-range artillery. They saw bullets smash apart bones and blow off heads. They feared most being shot in the torso; that often meant no recovery. A shattered arm or leg might be survivable with an amputation (approximately 60,000 were conducted in the whole of the Civil War). They all knew the horrifying thud sound of bullets hitting bodies, theirs and their comrades’. They faced impenetrable smoke and the terrifying noise of thousands of muskets and dozens of cannon all firing at once. They saw blood everywhere; as it dried on bodies, the ground, or abandoned weapons, it turned black.
A Pennsylvania soldier at the end of the day described “a truly sickening and horrible sight.” “No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed this morning.” A member of McClellan’s officer staff tried walking across the fields near sunset after Confederates had retreated. He found dead bodies everywhere, hideously swollen and blackened. “Many,” he gasped, “were so covered with dust, torn, crushed and trampled that they resembled clods of earth and you were obliged to look twice before recognizing them as human beings.” Sometimes the dead rebelled, swelling up and exploding fluids all around, or even bursting inside makeshift coffins.
You say you want a civil war because you hate liberals?
Descriptions of such horrors on a September 17 in the nineteenth century may not dissuade many Americans from their convictions and hatreds in today’s social media–fueled hostility. But we have to begin somewhere. Real civil war is never something to invoke rhetorically, much less welcome with expectant violence. Our republic is in peril, but it could die altogether if we give in to violent urges and ignorant accusations that lead to further shootings or targeted assassinations in our gun-saturated society.
We will not prevent further violence merely by saying we must. We have to find ways to fiercely disagree about ideas and not play loosely and dangerously in the realms of conspiracy, facile ignorance, and lethal propaganda.
The battle of Antietam had extraordinary consequences in the course of the Civil War and American history. Lee’s invasion of the North was thwarted; he and his army retreated across the Potomac River and back into Virginia. Five days after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, promising to profoundly change the meaning of the war in 100 days if the Confederacy would lay down their arms and cease the war (which he knew they had no intention of doing).
More than two and a half additional years of bloodshed on an even greater scale lay ahead in this war for national existence and “new births” of freedom. But on that day at Antietam, the war’s meaning for thousands of American households and farmsteads was slaughter; deaths from which millions of mourners never found reconciliation. Antietam was an American mass killing of the largest scale ever.
So you say you want a civil war? The United States will never face a civil war with large formal armies of the kind amassed in 1862. But we are witnessing the ingredients of civil conflict. Even when we believe our opponents have become enemies, and even if we think them essentially evil in the stories they covet, we need to think of Antietam and see a Brady photograph of the dead. We should rather debate now, however loathsome the result, than die later.
In his 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” the great American philosopher William James, a pacifist at heart, acknowledged that much is to be gained in discipline, honor, and training to service from the military. And he fully understood the impulse to violence in a human history drenched in “blood.” But he insisted that humans must try to “inflame the civic temper as history has inflamed the military temper.” Can an America awash in guns and hatreds channel our woes into a civic temper? We have to, or we could face an Antietam of our own making.
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What One Looks Like. appeared first on New Republic.
