PRAISE GOD FOR ANTIETAM!

PRAISE GOD FOR THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM, MARYLAND Thursday, August 22, 2019 By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman EARLIER today, August 22, 2019, I read where President Abraham Lincoln in August 1862 had met with five black ministers to tell them of his plans to relocate already “free” Africans in the United States of America to Central America for the “mutual benefit of both races”, the “white” and “black”. He said that the blacks were “half-responsible” for the disastrous Civil War. He had invited them there to the White House “to listen, not to speak”, so that they could rally free blacks to his relocation project. President Lincoln also signed, authorized some contracts in pursuance of his Central America “Chiriqa” project. Then up jumped the devil! The pivotal Battle of Antietam, Maryland! (Or Sharpsburg!) in September 1862, the very next month. Antietam was the bloodiest battle in United States History, more bloody than even the more heralded one, fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1863. Antietam had over 22,000 casualties. Antietam ended in a draw. But it had strategically turned back Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia away from Union-held Maryland, back into Virginia. Antietam gave sufficient political cover for President Abraham Lincoln to issue his “preliminary Emancipation Proclamation” a week later, September 22, 1862. It warned the Confederate States of America (CSA) that if it had not surrendered, lain down arms, and returned peaceably to the Union before January 1, 1863, he would free the slaves by Executive Order and he would arm them to fight for the preservation of the Union against the CSA. Had I known the significance of Antietam/Sharpsburg, I would have visited the battle site when I was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., or later as I have visited other “Freedom War” battle fields. “Freedom War” is my term, which I have prudently adopted from the former slaves’ parlance. Slaves were always crystal clear in understanding that the “Freedom War” was over them, about them, because of them, and was more meaningful to them, and their progeny, than to either North or South! Fortunately, Facebook reposts my prior years’ writings for me to read of Lincoln’s meetings with the ministers, and from it to follow the chronology through: Antietam, Emancipation Proclamation, arming of the former slaves, recruitment of millions of “contraband slaves’” labor, away from the Confederate States of America to the United States of America ; replacement of cowardly, incompetent, General George McClellan with better generals, surrender at Appomattox. Virginia, preservation of the Union, amendments to the Constitution, 13th, 14th, 15th; “Reconstruction,” white racism’s national legislative, judicial, economic, political, cultural, legal, reconciliation in the 1870’s forward; “Black Codes” and Jim Crow segregation, migrations from the South to North, West, Midwest; NAACP litigation victories; Civil Rights-Black Power Movements and victories; busing and school integration movements and difficulties; disorientation of the drug and mass incarceration campaigns; the political advancements of blacks on national, state, local levels, including the election of President Barack Obama, 2008-20016. Now we have the camouflaged, attempted, retrenchment of “white supremacy” racism under Donald Trump. The point here is that Lincoln, though himself, a “white supremacist”—per the book by the late Lerone Bennett, Jr, as were practically all of the whites, including most white abolitionists--was wise enough, was perspicacious enough, to finally recognize that the black slave, “sable arm” held the winning sword. That it took Antietam, Maryland, for Lincoln to recognize the national peril, give thanks to God Almighty! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam