January 2 · This Day in America
For three days near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, two armies have torn at each other in the cedar brakes and frozen fields. On this day the Confederate Army of Tennessee, bled white by a doomed assault across the river, begins to pull back. Of roughly eighty thousand men who fought here, nearly a third are casualties — one of the highest rates of any battle in the war. The Union holds the ground. It is a costly, ugly, hard-earned thing, and it lands at exactly the moment the North needs it: days after the Emancipation Proclamation, weeks after the catastrophe at Fredericksburg. Lincoln will tell General Rosecrans he can never forget it — that had there been a defeat instead, the country could scarcely have lived over it. Sometimes survival is the whole victory.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1920
In the grip of the postwar Red Scare, federal agents under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer sweep through more than thirty cities in a single coordinated night, seizing thousands of suspected radicals — many citizens, many without warrants, some simply in the wrong meeting hall. Estimates run as high as six thousand detained in one day. The constitutional backlash is swift and lasting. It becomes a hard lesson the country keeps relearning: fear is the easiest thing to deputize.
Source: constitutioncenter.org
“God bless you and all with you. I can never forget... you gave us a hard earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the country scarcely could have lived over.”Abraham Lincoln to Gen. Rosecrans, 1863