The Union General Lincoln Visited on His Deathbed | Bloody Lane, Antietam 1862

00:00 Opening: One Afternoon From Ending the War 01:15 Vermont Boyhood to West Point 1841 02:30 Fighting Dick — Two Brevets in the Mexican War 03:45 Pontiac, Michigan — The Farmer Years 06:00 Act 2 — Antietam Dawn, September 17, 1862 08:15 The Cornfield and the West Woods Disaster 09:45 Ordered Into the Confederate Center 12:30 The Irish Brigade Charges the Sunken Road 13:45 Barlow's Flanking Maneuver at Noon 15:00 John B. Gordon Shot Five Times 17:45 Bloody Lane Falls — Richardson Gains the High Ground 19:00 Franklin's Reserves Denied — McClellan's Fatal Order 20:15 The Shell Fragment That Changed the War 22:45 Act 3 — The Pry House 24:45 Lincoln at the Deathbed, October 4, 1862 26:00 Pneumonia and Death, November 3, 1862 27:30 Act 4 — The Counterfactual 29:30 The Forgotten Grave in Oak Hill Cemetery 30:30 Reflection: What the Shell Fragment Cost September 17, 1862. Twelve-thirty in the afternoon. The bloodiest single day in American history is more than half over. At a sunken farm road on a low ridge west of Sharpsburg, Maryland, the Confederate center of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia is about to crack. One Union division commander is at the very front of the assault — walking his line with sword drawn, no hat, roaring orders through smoke so thick men cannot see their own colors. His name is Israel Bush Richardson. His men call him Fighting Dick. In the next thirty minutes, Richardson will drive D.H. Hill's Confederates out of the sunken road that history will remember as Bloody Lane, gain the high ground overlooking the rear of Lee's line, and stand one afternoon away from destroying the Army of Northern Virginia and ending the American Civil War in 1862. Then a spherical case shell will burst above his shoulder near a farmhouse belonging to a family named Piper. Forty-seven days later, on November 3, 1862, he will die at the Pry House with President Lincoln having personally visited his bedside. His replacement in command of the Army of the Potomac will not be Israel Richardson. It will be Ambrose Burnside — and Burnside will lose more than eight thousand men in a single afternoon at Marye's Heights five weeks later. This documentary walks minute by minute through the seven hours between dawn and one o'clock in the afternoon at Antietam that put Israel Richardson at the center of American history — and through the forty-seven days of dying that took him back out of it. We open the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series one, volume nineteen. We read John B. Gordon's *Reminiscences of the Civil War*, the memoir of the Confederate colonel who took five bullets standing in that sunken road. We open Jack C. Mason's definitive 2009 biography *Until Antietam: The Life and Letters of Major General Israel B. Richardson*, and we set it beside Ezra Carman's manuscript study at the Library of Congress. Sources cited: Jack C. Mason, Until Antietam: The Life and Letters of Major General Israel B. Richardson, U.S. Army (2009, Southern Illinois University Press); Ezra Carman, The Maryland Campaign of September 1862*; John B. Gordon, *Reminiscences of the Civil War (1903); the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; the American Battlefield Trust biographical profile of Israel Bush Richardson; the National Museum of Civil War Medicine feature 'As he lived for others, so did he die: The Life of Israel B. Richardson'; the National Park Service Antietam National Battlefield historical resources. Companion episodes on this channel: John Buford at Gettysburg, day one (   • 3,000 Cavalry, 5 Hours, One Ridge — How Jo...  ) and George Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga (   • 3 Corps Broken, 1 Ridge Held — The Rock of...  ). Subscribe to Forgotten American Chronicles for a new documentary every week on the overlooked figures and forgotten moments that shaped America. #CivilWar #USHistory #Antietam #BloodyLane #IsraelRichardson #FightingDick #Documentary #ForgottenHistory #Lincoln