Today marks the eighth anniversary of 9/11. The attacks on September 11, 2001 claimed the lives of 3,056 people:

• 2,823 were killed the World Trade Center or aboard the two jetliners that hit the Towers;
• 189 were killed in the Pentagon and aboard American Flight 77;
• 44 met their end in Pennsylvania as a result of the crash of United Flight 93.

By comparison, approximately 2,500 Americans lost their lives during the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944.

But 9/11 is not the bloodiest day in American history. The holder of that dubious distinction was September 17, 1862. It was on that date that Union and Confederate forces clashed on the cornfields, meadows and streams of a little crossroads town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Before the day was done, 3,654 Americans lay dead—2,108 Union, 1,546 Confederate.

But this conflict, known as the Battle of Antietam, is a dramatic demonstration of the potential for good to emerge from bloodshed. For it was the Battle of Antietam that delivered the Union victory President Abraham Lincoln had been waiting for to publish the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves.

Let us all recognize the opportunity represented by tragedy and hope that history will one day record that the losses of September 11, 2001 did as much as to advance human freedom as those of 1862 and 1944.

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