Fireworks 1*

* UPDATE: I'd thought there'd be a Fireworks 2, because Frederick has a celebration on the 4th. But after exploring the party during the day, we decided not to go surfing for a parking space and a patch of ground again in the evening.

Joe arrived on Saturday, having left St. Louis on Friday evening and stopped in Dayton for the night - at a pet-friendly Red Roof Inn. Rudy guarded the hotel room all night, so Joe didn't sleep too well. In Frederick, Joe rested a little and then we drove to Antietam National Battlefield, where the Maryland Symphony played patriotic music and there were fireworks.

This was near where we sat. We had to walk quite a ways from the roadside where we parked the car, carrying chairs and anticipating a picnic, imagining men who'd walked nearby 143 years before, carrying guns and anticipating gunfire.

We had a vague sense that the battle on this site had been bloody and significant, but we weren't sure of the details. Turns out this was the first of two places where the Union Army stopped the Confederates from moving northward. The second place was Gettysburg. Around 23,000 people were wounded or killed in one day, here. Between 35,000 and 40,000 people attended the concert. The battle was declared a draw.

Having stopped a Confederate advance, though, President Lincoln found himself on solid enough political ground to proclaim that, as of the upcoming January 1,

all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.

On Saturday there was a huge American flag, hung from a crane and lit as darkness fell. We didn't take any pictures, so I'm relying on these, taken by others who were there and posted on Flickr.