Antietam & Emancipation : Fourth Level Victory

Antietam was a bloodbath

The greatest number of American military deaths in a single day - ever - occurred at the battle of Antietam during the American Civil War.

Technically the Confederates lost because they left the field and stopped their invasion, but the cost to the Union side made it a pyrrhic victory.

Britain & France were itching to hobble their commercial rival in the North by declaring support for the South at the first sign of Northern weakness and Antietam, where a vastly superior Union force at best fought the Confederates to a bloody draw, seemed as good an excuse as any.

Lincoln quickly forestalled them, basically assuring he’d win the war in the long run - at no immediate cost in lives - by simply issuing a ideological proclamation, freeing the slaves (sort of - the devil is in the details).

Because France & Britain had already abolished slavery, their publics would now never accept their governments going to war on behalf of a slave-owning nation. When they were forced to sit out the fight, the Confederates’ fate was sealed.

Rather like FDR’s proclamation of the Four Freedoms in 1941, this exercise in ideology-proclaiming was a low cost way to win wars - maybe not in one day, like the military’s beloved ‘decisive battlefield victory’ but in the long run, more certain and at a reduced cost in human lives....