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September 17,
1862, was the bloodiest single day in U.S. history. An estimated
6,300 Union and Confederate soldiers died at Antietam, Maryland,
in a savage battle that took place nearly a year and a half
into the Civil War. It was one day in a war that raged from
1861–65 and cost some 623,000 lives. In a total national
population of twenty-seven million in 1860, that number would
be proportionately equivalent to losing more than five million
today. That bloody day marked the seventy-fifth anniversary
of the signing of the Constitution.
At stake in the Civil War was the survival of the United
States of America as a single nation. Eleven Southern states,
invoking the spirit of 1776, seceded from the Union in 1861
to form a nation they named the Confederate States of America.
The Federal Government refused to allow it. Massive armies
representing the Union and the Confederacy squared off in
a conflict that tested the experiment in self-government as
never before. At the end of the Civil War's carnage, the primacy
of the Federal Government over the states was indisputably
upheld.
Americans had been wrestling with the fundamental question
of nationhood since the earliest days of the Revolution. In
1774, as the British colonists struggled to unite in the cause
of American liberty, Patrick Henry rose to address the Continental
Congress in one of its earliest sessions: "The distinctions
between Virginians, Pennsylvanians and New Englanders are
no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American." It took
the Civil War to make it so.
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President Abraham
Lincoln’s Message to Congress on the State of the
Union, December 1, 1862, selected pages learn
more...
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