Free Republic

Late in the afternoon of September 17, roughly an hour before the sunset that would mark the close of the bloodiest day in U.S. history, a Maine regiment met with a wholly unnecessary fate. Just when the regiments’ soldiers thought they’d made it through the battle relatively unscathed, they got pulled back in with disastrous consequences. At Antietam, due to Union commander George McClellan’s piecemeal strategy, the fighting was conducted sector by sector. (General Phil Kearny once described McClellan as “fighting by driblets.”) The severe topography of the Antietam Valley, featuring a field carved into discrete sections, contributed further to...

Bill Styple and time have a peculiar relationship. He lives in the present, writes about the past and wants to save both the present and the past for the future of his town. "I just want to preserve for our children a little of what I and my parents had in the past," says Styple, 46, who, with others from Kearny, is about to give the Hudson County town, its residents and its children a gift: A statue of a Civil War soldier. A replica of a statue that, for nearly 50 years until 1933, stood mute guard before the...