September 18, 1862.

As dawn breaks, a blood-red sun edges upwards over the horizon, casting its light on a killing ground.

Residents of nearby Sharpsburg, Maryland, carefully picked their way across the field where, just yesterday, a vicious battle ensued between Union and Confederate troops.

Now, what was once a peaceful and prosperous farm has been reduced to three brick structures smoldering in the morning haze.

Here lie the men who fell, casualties whose numbers will eclipse any other single day of this four-year war, never mind those beyond.

No matter the uniforms they wore, these are all soldiers who were brought to this place and to this end by orders of the men ranked above them,

themselves answerable to the general who planned the day,

and who, knowingly or not, dispatched so many to their deaths.

So the question.

Does the bloodiest day of war define who was the bloodiest general in U.S. history?

Music define who was the bloodiest general in U.S. history. Good day American History hit listeners.

Glad to be with you.

I'm Don Wildman.

It is often said of history's great generals,

they possessed strategic brilliance, seeing the battle before it unfolded, tactical ingenuity,

flexibility in the fight, unshakable decisiveness, calculated certainty, and engineers' command

of logistics and supplies. But there's another measure of these men, which,

to my mind, is more basic and defining than all the rest. It's called the moral weight of command,

the capacity to send others into mortal danger, to trade lives for military advantage, and then

carry forever the price of those decisions. All generals in combat must contend

with this factor and nonetheless stand resolute. So today in this episode, we'll explore a few of

those American generals who most famously fit this bill, whose legacies tell the tale of those

...