The Cruelest Mistress

This year has made me think a lot about death. For example: one of the more interesting, though lesser known, figures in the Civil War, I think, was Major General Israel B. Richardson of the United States army. Evidently, he was quite a character. Called “Fighting Dick” by his fellow officers, he was known to be one of the most profane yet aggressive men in the Army of the Potomac. There was talk that he would surely be promoted to higher command. From accounts, he was a solder’s general and respected by this troops.

Most know the facts of the Battle of Antietam, how Robert E. Lee led a largely unsupplied army into Maryland, falsely assuming the populace would embrace and succor it. We know how members of the Union army discovered a copy of Lee’s battle plans and how the northern army outnumbered the southern. We know how General McClellan refused to believe facts and mishandled a battle full of mistakes and unsecured opportunities, allowing Lee to escape back to Virginia. It turned into a horrible fiasco, Lee’s army being saved only by decisive and courageous actions by its generals and the incompetence of some Union generals like Ambrose E. Burnside.

Oh and one other thing. There was this division commanded by Major General Israel Richards. It was about to cut the Confederate army in half, near what is known as “Bloody Lane.” We’ve all seen the horrific photograph of the bodies laid like chord wood along a picket fence along that infamous lane. It was there that it almost happened. Had the division succeeded, Lee’s army may have been divided and destroyed.

It was not to be. On that day, September 17^th, 1862, a bullet from the Confederate corps of Richardson’s close friend James Longstreet ended Richardson’s career and the aggressive charge that might have changed the course of history. Confused and slowed by the loss of its leader, the Union men faltered and the Confederates drove them back.

They took Richardson from the field, reportedly after saying, “Tell General McClellan I have been doing a Colonel’s work all day, and I’m now too badly hurt to do a General’s.” He lived until November 3, 1862. On October 4, 1862, President Lincoln visited Richardson in the house where he lay. According to a member of Richardson’s staff who was injured and present in the room, the president told Richardson that if he recovered, he would be selected as General McClellan’s successor.

That’s how history turns, a bullet here, a shell fragment there, a step in the wrong direction and the tape of history plays a different track. They say that General Douglas MacArthur, later in different wars, would knowingly walk into danger, seeming to understand that he was protected from the vicissitudes of normal mortals.

September 17^th, 1862 proved to be the bloodiest day in American history. The Battle of Antietam would constitute, though, enough of a “non-loss” that Abraham Lincoln used it as a support for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. History sometimes turns that way, despite the efforts of the likes of Israel B. Richardson, men once destined for greatness and now largely forgotten by history, their good “interred with their bones.”

America could use citizens like Israel B. Richardson again.

Bone spurs could not
have stopped his man.