Wrong on Gettysburg and Civil War importance

I get the drama of Gettysburg because it's had more military history books written about it, as well as countless historical novels, and been the crux of Chinese-food filling documentarian Ken Burns' miniseries.

But, contra a canned package page in my nearest formerly daily newspaper, noting the upcoming 160th anniversary of Gettysburg, it was NOT, NOT, NOT the most important battle of the Civil War.

Antietam was.

Without Antietam and its strategic minor victory for the Union, we don't get an Emancipation Proclamation. Now, it is almost certain that Great Britain wouldn't have entered the war without that. But, if Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia get a strategic as well as tactical draw with McClellan, and he uses that to maraude around Maryland and maybe southeastern Pennsylvania for another week or two, the UK surely grants belligerency status to the Confederacy, even if not full diplomatic recognition. (Arguably, by proclaiming a blockade of Southern ports rather than an enforced closure, in the early weeks of his administration, Lincoln himself, with Seward's help, granted some sort of belligerency status, but that's another story.)

Combine this with increased Northern war weariness from continued marauding by Lee, and Lincoln faces pressure to negotiate. And, he's not in a position to release a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. If he does so in, say, early September after an orderly, non-forced, non-retreating withdrawal by Lee, he's laughed at.

AND?

Had whatever orderly or adjutant for Harvey Hill not lost Lee's now-infamous Lost Order, a strategic draw against General The Slows would have been the minimum level of his likely success.

With all that in mind, plus taking the war out of Virginia for another month and replenishing his troops better, Gettysburg probably doesn't happen as it actually did.

Note that Meade wanted to withdraw after July 2. That's one of the reasons he called his council of war, or so it seems clear to me — he was looking for backup to make that call. And, he didn't get it.

Arguably, Gettysburg isn't even No. 2.

WHAT?

Shiloh is.

Shiloh was the first "real" major battle of the war. It showed the level of carnage that could and would be committed by rifled muskets in the hands of troops who by now had a certain degree of training. (This was a lesson that Lee didn't learn from Shiloh and didn't fully learn from his own defense at Antietam, to his own alleged everlasting grief at Gettysburg on July 3. The "oh what fine boys" type exclamations don't all appear to have been written down immediately and they strike me as hagiographic, hence the "alleged.")

Speaking of Lee in another way? While he had been calling for a CSA draft for months, it's quite arguable that Shiloh was the immediate provocation, as the first Confederate draft law was passed by the CSA Congress just a week later.

That, in turn triggered draft resistance acts, the biggest of which, as part of larger Unionism in the Red River counties of North Texas, was the resistance in Cooke County that led to the Great Hanging, the largest single mass lynching in American history; see my highly detailed blog post. The CSA draft also gave the US the room to start its own draft.

Without all of this, general publics North and South don't accept that this is a "total war," either, and with everything that followed for three years after Shiloh.