The Parapet Moment: Leadership, Courage, and the Duty to Stand

159 years later, reflecting on the Battle of Fort Stevens and the leadership lessons we still need

I have an Abraham Lincoln-related photograph not unlike the one I've shared before of my children at Gettysburg that captures the VI Army Corps Monument, a commemorative stone and marker at Fort Stevens in Washington, D.C. The earthworks at the fort are modest now, hemmed in by suburban streets and the ordinary rhythm of modern life. But standing there, you can almost feel the weight of what happened on this sweltering July day in 1864, when Lincoln became the only sitting president to face enemy fire.

VI Army Corps Monument

Today marks 159 years since that remarkable moment, and I've been thinking about it more than usual, particularly as we approach the 160th anniversary next year and head into another presidential election season. The story of Fort Stevens isn't just about bullets and bravery; it's about leadership under pressure, the courage to stand when others might flee, and the delicate balance between personal risk and public duty. In a political climate where leadership often feels performative rather than principled, Lincoln's example on that parapet feels both distant and urgently needed.

When Leaders Must Stand

On July 12, 1864, Abraham Lincoln stood on the parapet of Fort Stevens, five miles north of the White House, watching Confederate forces under General Jubal Early probe the defenses of the nation's capital. The stakes could hardly have been higher. Early's raid represented a last-ditch Confederate attempt to disrupt Union supply lines, weaken Northern morale, and potentially capture Washington itself.

When a Confederate sharpshooter's bullet struck an officer standing near the president, those around Lincoln urged him to take cover. Whether it was General Horatio Wright who politely asked him to withdraw, or a young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who allegedly shouted "Get down, you damn fool!", the message was clear: the president's life was in immediate danger.

But Lincoln had come to Fort Stevens for a reason. As historian Charles Bracelen Flood observed, "It became a remarkable scene: the commander-in-chief at the head of his marching soldiers and a great crowd of civilians, all headed out of the city along a wooded road toward the thunderclaps of cannon fire." Lincoln understood that leadership sometimes requires physical presence and showing up, even at personal risk, sends a message no speech can convey.

This wasn't recklessness. It was calculated courage. Lincoln knew that his presence at Fort Stevens would inspire the soldiers defending the capital and reassure a frightened civilian population. As one of his closest confidantes, Orville Browning, later recorded, "The President is in very good feather this evening. He seems not in the least concerned about the safety of Washington." Lincoln's calm in the face of danger became a source of strength for others.

As we head into 2024, an election year that promises to test our democratic institutions once again, Lincoln's example feels particularly instructive. In an era when political leadership too often means retreating to safe spaces, echo chambers, and carefully managed appearances, the image of a president willing to share genuine risk with those he leads offers a stark contrast.

The Moral Turning Point

What happened at Fort Stevens went beyond military tactics. Union Colonel John McElroy later called it "the Moral Turning Point of the War," arguing that the successful defense of the capital restored Northern confidence in multiple ways: economically, politically, and spiritually.

The battle inspired Americans' confidence in the Union economy the value of government-backed currency rose from 35 cents to 48 cents after the victory. More importantly, it demonstrated that the Union could protect its most sacred symbols and institutions. As McElroy explained, "The soldiers of the North, while fighting for the preservation of the Union, always had on their hearts the capital of their country, and they fought that the government might live."

The defense of Fort Stevens represented something larger than military victory; it was a defense of democratic governance itself. Lincoln's willingness to share in the danger, to stand with his soldiers rather than retreat to safety, embodied the kind of leadership that democracy requires: present, accountable, and willing to bear the consequences of collective decisions.

The Forgotten Hero

But perhaps the most compelling lesson from Fort Stevens comes from someone who received no official recognition that day. Elizabeth Thomas, a free Black woman whose property was requisitioned by the Union Army for the fort's construction, not only lost her home and livelihood but may have saved Lincoln's life.

According to historical accounts, when Thomas saw Lincoln standing exposed on the parapet, she "yelled to the soldiers standing near him, 'My God, make that fool get down off that hill and come in here.'" Her quick thinking and fearless advocacy shouting at the President of the United States to take cover, exemplifies the kind of active citizenship that democracy depends upon.

Years earlier, when Union soldiers had demolished her home to build the fort, a "tall, slender man dressed in black" had consoled her with the words, "It is hard, but you shall reap a great reward." That man was Lincoln himself. The "great reward" may indeed have been the opportunity to save his life and with it, the future of the nation.

Thomas's story reminds us that citizenship isn't just about voting or holding office; it's about the willingness to speak truth to power, even when that power towers above you. Her courage that day was no less significant than Lincoln's decision to stand on the parapet in the first place.

Leadership Lessons for Today

The Battle of Fort Stevens offers three enduring lessons about leadership and citizenship that feel particularly relevant as we face our own civic challenges:

• First, presence matters. Lincoln could have monitored the battle from the safety of the White House, receiving reports and issuing orders from a distance. Instead, he chose to be where the work was being done, sharing the risk, demonstrating commitment, and inspiring others through his example.
• Second, moral courage is contagious. Lincoln's willingness to stand firm in the face of danger gave strength to others. When leaders demonstrate genuine courage, it creates permission for others to act courageously as well.
• Third, democracy thrives on unlikely heroes. The most important voice at Fort Stevens that day may not have belonged to the president or his generals, but to a Black woman who had already sacrificed her home and still found the courage to protect the man who embodied the Union cause.

Standing on Our Own Parapets

We may not face Confederate sharpshooters, but as we approach both the 160th anniversary of Fort Stevens and the 2024 presidential election, we face our own version of Early's raid challenges to democratic norms, institutions under pressure, and a citizenry that sometimes seems more interested in retreating to safety than standing firm for shared principles. The question isn't whether we'll face moments that test our civic courage, but whether we'll be ready when they come.

The lesson of Fort Stevens isn't that leaders should seek out unnecessary danger, but that they should be willing to share in the risks that democracy entails. That means showing up for difficult conversations, defending unpopular but necessary truths, and remaining present even when it would be easier to retreat to the safety of like-minded communities. As we evaluate candidates and platforms in the coming election cycle, perhaps we should ask not just what they promise to do, but whether they demonstrate the kind of leadership that shows up when it matters most.

And for the rest of us, those who may never hold high office but whose voices matter just as much, Elizabeth Thomas stands as a powerful reminder that speaking up isn't just a right; it's a responsibility. Democracy doesn't preserve itself. It requires ordinary people doing extraordinary things: running for school board, speaking at town halls, volunteering for campaigns, or simply refusing to stay silent when they see something that threatens the common good.

The Unfinished Work Continues

Today, Fort Stevens remains a humble earthwork that once hosted the only moment in U.S. history in which a sitting president faced direct and purposeful gunfire from an enemy. It's a quiet place now, visited more by joggers than pilgrims. But as we mark the 159th anniversary of that July day and look ahead to next year's milestone and the choices that await us in 2024, the lessons it offers about leadership, courage, and active citizenship remain as relevant as ever.

Lincoln's decision to stand on that parapet and Elizabeth Thomas's decision to yell at him to get down remind us that democracy isn't a spectator sport. It requires leaders willing to share in the dangers they ask others to face, and citizens willing to speak truth even to the most powerful among us. As we approach an election that will test these principles once again, we might do well to ask ourselves: Are we prepared to stand on our own parapets when the moment demands it?

The parapet moment comes for all of us eventually, that moment when we must choose between safety and service, between retreating and standing firm. When it comes, may we find the courage that Lincoln and Thomas showed on that July day in 1864: the courage to stand where we're needed, to speak when silence would be safer, and to remember that the work of democracy is never finished it just passes from one generation to the next, one choice at a time.

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The lessons of Fort Stevens remind us that courage isn't the absence of fear—it's the willingness to act in spite of it. As we mark 159 years since that remarkable day and prepare for both the 160th anniversary and another presidential election, we need more leaders willing to stand on the parapet and more citizens brave enough to tell them when they're making dangerous mistakes. The republic they defended that day in 1864 still depends on both.

The Unfinished Work: Civic Understanding and the Fragile State of American Democracy

Abraham Lincoln has been one of my heroes for as long as I can remember, second only to my parents. My earliest memory of a family vacation is a cross-country road trip that included a stop at Gettysburg, not long after the Civil War Centennial. I was four years old, standing on those hallowed grounds. At that age, I couldn’t grasp the full weight of history in a place where so many had given their lives for the idea of a more perfect union. But that visit sparked a lifelong fascination with Lincoln, the statesman, the writer, the moral compass of a divided nation. I’ve been a Lincoln buff, a fan, maybe even a nerd ever since.

His Gettysburg Address, just 272 words long, remains to me one of the most powerful expressions of American ideals ever written. More than a dedication of a cemetery, it was a recommitment to democracy, equality, and national purpose. Today, as we navigate a political landscape marked by division, disinformation, and declining civic understanding, Lincoln’s words are more than a historical artifact; they are a call to action. The erosion of civic education threatens our ability to live up to them, and the “unfinished work” of democracy must remain at the center of our national consciousness.

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth..

Civic Illiteracy

In just 272 words, Lincoln distilled the moral foundation and political aspiration of the American experiment: that a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” must continually prove its capacity to endure. Delivered in the blood-soaked shadow of the Civil War, his address transcended its moment to articulate a timeless challenge, one that feels especially urgent in today’s divided political climate.

While we are not engaged in civil war, we are experiencing a profound erosion of trust in democratic institutions, rising polarization, and a drift away from shared civic understanding. One of the less discussed but deeply consequential causes of this crisis is the long-term decline of civics education in American schools. Without a firm grasp of how our government functions or why democratic participation matters, citizens are ill-equipped to take up the "unfinished work" Lincoln called us to continue.

Lincoln’s speech reminds us that democracy is not self-sustaining it must be nurtured, practiced, and defended. He avoided partisan rhetoric, choosing instead to elevate principles of unity, sacrifice, and shared responsibility.

Yet in recent decades, we have allowed our civic muscles to atrophy. Civics, once a core part of American education, has been marginalized or dropped entirely in many school systems. As a result, generations have come of age without a meaningful understanding of the Constitution, the rule of law, or their responsibilities as citizens.

This civic illiteracy has real and dangerous consequences. Without an understanding of the electoral process, misinformation spreads more easily and undermines confidence in election outcomes. Without knowledge of the First Amendment, Americans are less equipped to identify and defend against threats to press freedom and free speech. Without an appreciation of checks and balances, they may support authoritarian measures, misinterpreting them as strength rather than erosion.

In Lincoln’s time, the existential threat to democracy was open warfare. Today, it is disconnection, apathy, and extremism born of ignorance. Reinvigorating civic education in schools, communities, and media is not a luxury; it is essential to national stability. A democracy cannot thrive on instinct or symbolism alone. It demands active, informed participation.

Lincoln concluded his address with a hope: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Whether that government endures depends not only on elections and laws, but on education, on equipping every new generation with the knowledge, habits, and values necessary for self-government.

Postscript

The kids at Gettysburg, Nov. 2003

Today, the 155th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, I found myself reflecting on a moment from years earlier when I stood with my children at the Gettysburg National Cemetery. We paused in front of the simple granite marker believed to mark the spot where Lincoln delivered his immortal words. I’ve had the Address memorized since I was a boy, and I recited it for them while imagining what it must have felt like to hear those words for the first time.

I took this photo that day, my children, much younger then, standing where Lincoln once stood, surrounded by the headstones of the soldiers whose sacrifice gave his words such meaning. That photo sits framed in my office today. I often find myself looking at it, especially when today’s civic challenges feel overwhelming.

It gives me hope not just that I’ve passed along some of these civic lessons to my own children, but that their generation may be ready to carry forward the legacy of Lincoln’s 272 words. The unfinished work, as Lincoln reminded us, belongs to each new generation. And in that image, I am reminded that there is still reason to believe they will be up to the task.

A Fierce Glory: Antietam (REVIEW)

A Fierce Glory: Antietam--The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery
by Justin Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s something uniquely American about standing on a Civil War battlefield and trying to make sense of what happened there. The ground itself holds secrets: subtle rises and depressions that meant life or death to the men who fought over them, stone walls and creek beds that became the hinge points of history. I’ve walked many of these fields over the years, from Gettysburg to Manassas to Lookout Mountain, but Antietam feels different. Maybe it’s because September 17, 1862, remains our nation’s bloodiest single day. Maybe it’s because the battle’s outcome was so consequential yet so uncertain. Or maybe it’s because Antietam represents something uniquely American: a moment when individual choices, political courage, military hesitation, and desperate gambles combined to reshape the nation's entire trajectory.

Justin Martin frames the whole thing in his author’s note with a line that cuts right to it: “Had its outcome been different, there would have been no Gettysburg.” That single sentence, blunt and irrefutable, is the spine of the book. Everything else flows from it.

A Fierce Glory captures this quality better than any Antietam book I’ve read. Rather than delivering another tactical military history focused on troop movements and regimental positions, Martin weaves together the human stories of individuals touched by the battle: Abraham Lincoln in the White House, Clara Barton on the battlefield, Robert E. Lee’s audacious strategic gamble, and Alexander Gardner’s revolutionary war photography. It reads less like a military study and more like a meditation on how ordinary people, thrust into extraordinary circumstances, can alter the course of history.

More Than a Battle

Martin’s central thesis is embedded in his subtitle: Antietam was “The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery.” This framing immediately lifts the book beyond conventional battlefield studies. Yes, Martin covers the fighting: the desperate struggle at Burnside’s Bridge, the horrific carnage at Bloody Lane, the missed opportunities that allowed Lee’s army to escape. But he’s more interested in how twelve hours of combat rippled through American politics and society.

He explains his approach directly in the author’s note: “I’ve chosen to tell this story in a different way, avoiding minutely detailed descriptions of troop movements (a standard feature of so many battle accounts) in favor of rendering a larger picture.” It works. The book shows how Antietam became a turning point not just militarily, but politically, medically, technologically, and morally.

Lincoln needed a Union victory to issue the Emancipation Proclamation from a position of strength rather than desperation. Secretary of State Seward had urged exactly that caution in July 1862, warning that without a battlefield win, Lincoln’s edict might be viewed as, in Seward’s own words, “our last shriek on the retreat.” So, Lincoln folded a two-page handwritten draft into a pigeonhole in his White House desk and waited. Army Medical Director Jonathan Letterman used Antietam to debut the three-tiered battlefield evacuation system (dressing station, field hospital, general hospital) that is still in use today. Alexander Gardner’s photographs of corpse-strewn Bloody Lane ended romantic notions about the glory of combat in a way no newspaper account could.

That last piece deserves its own moment. When Gardner’s images went on display at Mathew Brady’s gallery in Manhattan, visitors climbed the stairs in droves to peer into the stereoscopes. What greeted them, as Martin describes it, was “astonishing, like nothing they had ever seen on the pages of Harper’s. Here were dead soldiers in full 3-D, rendered with stunning clarity.” The New York Times observed that Brady had “brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards.” Martin sees the moment clearly: a cultural line crossed, with no going back. “So, this is what war looks like,” he writes. “So, this then is what is happening on those faraway fields.”

The approach puts Martin in the same territory as James Burke’s late-70s mini-series Connections, which is right up my alley. Burke’s thesis was that you cannot consider the development of any element of the modern world in isolation, that interconnected events drive history. Martin’s narrative works from the same premise. The battle becomes a case study in leadership under pressure, necessity as the mother of invention, and in how a single day’s fighting could determine whether America would emerge from its greatest crisis as one nation or two.

Lincoln at the Center

Lincoln at Antietam - October 1862

Martin’s most significant contribution may be how thoroughly he integrates Lincoln into the Antietam narrative. Too many battle histories treat Lincoln as a distant figure waiting for telegraphed reports. Martin shows how deeply the president was involved in every aspect of the Maryland Campaign, and how much was riding on it personally.

This was a man carrying enormous private grief alongside the weight of a nation at war. As Martin puts it, Lincoln’s daily commute from the Soldiers’ Home cottage to the White House was a refuge from “excruciating personal grief, the recent loss of their son, Willie.” He’d slipped the Emancipation Proclamation draft into a desk drawer and was waiting for his reluctant general to deliver the military win that would give the document credibility. Everything depended on what happened in a valley in Western Maryland on a September day.

Martin portrays Lincoln summoning the political acumen necessary to transform a tactical draw into a strategic victory. The Emancipation Proclamation emerges not as an inevitable moral pronouncement but as a calculated political gamble by a leader who understood that the war’s meaning would be determined as much by presidential proclamations as by battlefield victories. Martin calls it Lincoln’s “last card.”

This focus on Lincoln’s political genius helps explain why Antietam, rather than Gettysburg, deserves recognition as the war’s true turning point. As Martin argues: “Antietam was a more critical battle than Gettysburg. Yes, Gettysburg receives more glory…. However, the case for Antietam is simple and irrefutable. Had its outcome been different, there would have been no Gettysburg.” Confederate victory in Maryland might well have ended the war on Southern terms, inviting European recognition of the Confederacy and allowing a Democrat-controlled Congress to negotiate a settlement with slavery intact. The stakes in September 1862 were nothing less than the survival of the United States as a single nation.

The Human Cost

Martin never loses sight of what made all of it possible. His portraits of individual soldiers are where the book earns its keep.

The book opens with Lieutenant John Mead Gould of the 10th Maine, who fought at Antietam and spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of it. In a matter of minutes at the battle’s opening, a quarter of his regiment (seventy-one of two hundred seventy-seven men) went down. The field was shrouded in smoke. The air, in Martin’s description, “swam thick with projectiles.” General Mansfield stumbled past Gould “with his coat flapping open to reveal a crimson bloom spreading across his abdomen.” Gould helped him from the field. The general died soon after. As Gould would recall for the rest of his life: “how mighty easy it was to get killed or wounded that day.”

The Burnside Bridge scene is equally vivid. On one side: twelve thousand five hundred Union soldiers under a general who, Martin suggests, was “simply paralyzed.” On the other: a small force of Georgia farm boys who had converted “the steep bluffs on their side into a formidable natural stronghold.” Among them were elite sharpshooters hiding in the branches of elms and sycamores or kneeling behind farmers’ bales of hay on the bluffs above. The math was brutal: a twelve-foot-wide bridge, enough to squeeze maybe five soldiers shoulder to shoulder, funneling an army into what Martin calls “a narrow chute” under withering fire.

The Bloody Lane section doesn’t dwell on gore, but it doesn’t look away either. Martin’s description is spare: “In the road, the Confederate dead were so thickly strewn that it was hard to discern any of the ground beneath them. Forever after, the sunken road would be known as the Bloody Lane.”

The medical scenes round out the picture. Letterman’s reforms weren’t theoretical work; they were responses to immediate human suffering, hammered out in the weeks before the battle and tested under fire. At previous engagements, the wounded had often been left to regimental musicians and civilian teamsters who, under battle duress, frequently “drank the medicinal spirits—or simply bolted.” After Shiloh, thousands of wounded lay untended for days, peach blossoms fluttering down to cover them. Letterman wasn’t going to let that happen at Antietam. Clara Barton wasn’t, either. She arrived at a farmhouse aid station in a canvas-covered wagon loaded with bandages, bread, wine, chloroform, and lanterns, and got to work removing a minie ball from a soldier’s cheek with her pocketknife. No credentials required. “In such a state of emergency, any help was welcome, no questions asked.”

Contemporary Resonance

A Fierce Glory arrives at an unusually charged moment. Martin published it in September 2018, with the midterm elections six weeks away and the country more divided than it had been in a generation. His portrait of a nation on the brink, torn by fundamental disagreements about identity, values, and the role of government, doesn’t require much imagination to place against the current backdrop.

The parallels aren’t perfect, and Martin is too good a historian to force artificial connections between 1862 and today. But his portrayal of Lincoln’s patient political maneuvering, his willingness to wait for the right moment to act decisively while looking like weakness to critics, carries obvious weight for anyone watching the current spectacle in Washington and wondering whether steady, principled leadership still has a place in it.

There’s also something specific about this particular autumn that makes the book resonate. The 2018 midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on the soul of the country, not so different in structure from what Lincoln was navigating in the fall of 1862. Martin reminds us that the Confederates timed their Maryland invasion deliberately, hoping a Union defeat would sweep anti-war Democrats into Congress and force a negotiated settlement. Politics and the battlefield were inseparable then. Martin’s book doesn’t offer easy comfort, but it does offer something more useful: evidence that the republic has survived this kind of fracture before, when the right people made the right choices at the right moment.

Minor Criticisms

A Fierce Glory isn’t perfect. Readers seeking detailed tactical analysis may find the approach occasionally frustrating. For that level of military detail, D. Scott Hartwig’s comprehensive two-volume treatment, To Antietam Creek and I Dread the Thought of the Place, remains unmatched. The maps in Martin’s book, while adequate, pale next to Hartwig’s detailed battlefield cartography.

Martin’s writing style, while generally engaging, occasionally drifts toward the novelistic. His technique of getting inside characters’ heads, imagining what Lincoln was thinking as he waited for battle reports, or what Lee felt as he realized his invasion had failed, is dramatically effective but historically speculative. In his own author’s note, Martin acknowledges this directly, flagging certain passages as “battle is informed speculation.” That honesty helps.

These are minor quibbles. Martin is a narrative nonfiction writer by background, and he has the storyteller’s instinct for finding the human drama in historical events without sacrificing rigor. Hartwig provides the tactical foundation that serious students of the battle require; Martin builds the interpretive superstructure that helps general readers understand why Antietam mattered beyond the immediate military consequences. The two approaches complement each other. Hartwig gives you the facts. Martin tells you what they mean.

A Different Kind of Civil War Book

A Fierce Glory stands apart in the crowded field of Civil War literature because Martin grasped that Antietam’s importance extends far beyond military history. This is a book about how democracies survive existential crises, how individual choices can have generational consequences, and how the meaning of historical events often becomes clear only in retrospect.

Martin has written the kind of Civil War book that might actually change minds. It’s accessible enough for general readers and sophisticated enough for serious students of the period. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, politically sharp and humanly compelling. It doesn’t just tell you what occurred on that terrible September day. It makes you feel why it still matters.

Standing on the Antietam battlefield, I can still feel the weight of what happened there. Martin’s book sharpens that feeling. In an era when American democracy again faces serious challenges, it’s a reminder that the work of preserving our ideals will never be finished. Each generation has to take it up anew.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Civil War history, Lincoln scholarship, or the broader question of how democratic societies navigate existential crises.

I visited the Antietam battlefield with my son this past June, during a cross-country road trip that wound through Little Bighorn, Mount Rushmore, and a genuinely strange afternoon at a circus museum in Wisconsin. That visit is the subject of a companion post: “When History and Present Collide.”

When History and the Present Collide

The cross-country road trip with my son this past June was a lot of things: long stretches of highway, late-night hotel check-ins, and a mutual discovery of roadside diners. For both of us, it was also a pilgrimage through history, adding another chapter to our long list of battlefield and museum visits. We walked the grounds of Little Bighorn, stopped at Mount Rushmore, and spent a genuinely odd morning at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. On June 12, we found ourselves on a quiet ridge in Maryland, standing over the ground where America nearly broke in two.

Ted was a year out of college, getting ready to move to New York and begin his new career. I was in full dad mode: proud, a little anxious, acutely aware that this kind of trip wouldn’t come around again easily. For me, there’s something about being at a Civil War battlefield with one or more of my kids that makes the distance between 1862 and right now feel very small.

Standing on Sacred Ground

Burnside's Bridge - 2018

September 17, 1862, remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men fell in twelve hours, more casualties than America suffered on D-Day. The numbers are hard to hold in your head when you’re standing on grass that looks like any other grass, under a sky that looks like any other sky.

We made two stops that demanded longer than the others.

The first was Burnside’s Bridge, known at the time as Rohrbach Bridge. It’s a low stone span, twelve feet wide, with three graceful arches, built in 1836. Twelve feet. Standing on it, you can touch both walls without fully extending your arms. For hours that September morning, a small force of Georgian sharpshooters held it against repeated Union assaults, picking men off as they funneled onto the bridge. When the 51st New York and 51st Pennsylvania finally charged across in the afternoon, they paid for every inch. The bridge is beautiful now, quiet, a little mossy, the creek running below it exactly as it did that day. It’s easy to forget what it cost.

Bloody Lane - 2018

The second stop was Bloody Lane. What had been a sunken farm road became a Confederate defensive position, and then a killing ground when flanking movements collapsed the line. The men who died there were close to Ted’s age, many of them far from home, fighting their first and last battle on the same day.

Gardner's photo of Union troops inspecting piles of
Confederate bodies at Antietam's “Bloody Lane.” 

Walking that lane in the June heat, I kept thinking about Alexander Gardner’s photographs taken here in the battle’s aftermath. His images of the corpse-strewn road went on display in Manhattan weeks later and drew enormous crowds. For the first time, ordinary Americans could see what the war actually looked like: not paintings, not illustrations, but photographs of real men who had been alive that morning. It shattered any romantic notion of battle as something glorious. Ted and I walked the lane quietly, not saying much. Sometimes you don’t need to.

The Divided Present

It’s hard to stand on a Civil War battlefield in October 2018 without feeling the pull of certain parallels. We’re weeks from a midterm election that feels, to a lot of people, like something more than a normal election. The political conversation this fall has been defined by what feels like irreconcilable differences: fierce debates over immigration, a public discourse that leaves little room for nuance, and a sense that we’re not just arguing about policy anymore but about who gets to define the country.

The Confederate invasion of Maryland was timed deliberately to fracture Northern resolve before the 1862 midterms, a calculated attempt to swing Congress toward a negotiated peace. Reading Justin Martin’s account of that strategy over the past few months, the echo is hard to miss. Much of our current political rhetoric feels built the same way: designed to mobilize through fear rather than appeal to anything shared.

The polling this fall describes a nation more polarized than at any time since the Civil War era. We’re not just disagreeing about tax policy or healthcare. We no longer seem to agree on basic facts. Lincoln observed that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Standing on the ground where that division nearly became permanent, it’s hard not to wonder how much strain a house can take before the framing gives.

Gardner’s photographs shattered illusions about warfare in 1862. What shatters illusions now is social media and round-the-clock news, doing something similar to our politics: stripping away the comfortable distance between what we’d like to believe and what’s actually happening. Gardner’s photographs were meant to show the truth. I’m not always sure what our current media environment is meant to do.

The Continuing Work

Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg about “the unfinished work” that each generation must take up. The soldiers at Antietam didn’t choose the moment history handed them. They had no idea whether dying in a Maryland cornfield would change anything. They couldn’t see past the smoke and noise to whatever came next. They just kept going.

Whatever happens in November, I suspect we’ll end up in roughly the same place Antietam left the country in 1862: somebody will claim victory, and then the harder, slower work of actually governing together will resume, no matter who ends up with more seats in Congress. That work isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t have a monument. But it’s the work that keeps the house standing.

Ted has settled into his new life in New York now, and I find myself thinking about what his generation is inheriting. The summer road trip, the quiet walk down Bloody Lane, the bridge that cost so much to cross. Those things stay with you. I hope they stay with him.

The conversation between the past and the present keeps going. So does the unfinished work. Standing on that Maryland battlefield with my son, I had every reason to believe his generation will be up to it.