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BATTLE OF ANTIETAM
A History From Beginning to End
Copyright © 2016 by Hourly History Limited
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Maryland, My Maryland…
McClellan’s Army
The Opening Gambit
Harper’s Ferry
Dunker Church & The Woods
The Cornfield
Bloody Lane
Burnside’s Bridge
The End of the Fight
The Aftermath
>>BONUSES<<
Introduction
In the fall of 1862, the entire world had its attention on what
General Robert E. Lee was doing. Over the summer he’d
proven that the Confederacy had some serious chops, and now,
hard on the heels of victory, he was about to make a daring
move - one that would take the Southern war from the
defensive to the offensive.
The next steps would be crucial. Victory would mean
recognition for the Confederacy from the European nations.
Should that happen, then there was a distinct possibility that
Great Britain and France would join the war on their side. Such
an alliance would change the face of the United States of
America forever.
Antietam, though, would change all of that. What transpired
in those fields and along that creek would become a tragedy
that would be remembered for years to come.
Dunker Church.
The Cornfield.
The West Woods.
Bloody Lane.
Burnside Bridge.
More than the individual people, the places would become
immortalized, with a memory of wholesale slaughter attached to
each. It’s hard to think about individuals when the dead and
wounded number in the thousands.
There were some individuals who stood out, some in
infamy, others more heroically. Had it not been for the actions of
two particular men, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy
and Major General George McClellan of the Union Army, the
entire war might have ended differently.
Let’s start out with General Lee, at the end of a very
successful summer.
Chapter One
Maryland, My Maryland…
“The present seems to be the most propitious time since the
commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to
enter Maryland.”
—Gen. Robert E. Lee
In September of 1862, fresh from the victory at Second Bull
Run, General Robert E. Lee thought to take his army into
Maryland, bringing the fight into the enemy’s lands.
It was a good time of year for an invasion. Being late
September, a fresh harvest would be coming in. What better
plan than to deplete the enemy’s resources rather than your
own?
It was a strange invasion. While the troops were starving,
the orders were to take nothing. General Lee not only forbade
his troops from looting or pillaging, but they were ordered to
pay for any provisions they took – right on down to the wood
from one farmer’s fence that was taken for campfire fuel. Of
course, they were paying in Confederate currency, but the
thought behind it was good.
Moreover, the Southern army was tired and hungry from
their battles at Bull Run. Still, they were in high spirits. The
Confederacy had just won both recent engagements, and Lee
now was taking them within fifty miles of Washington.
They entered Maryland feeling that victory would soon be
theirs. They expected a hero’s welcome. After all, they had
come to free the state from “Northern domination.” They
arrived singing and enjoyed the confidence that comes from
knowing that men would flock to their cause by the thousands.
It did not take too many miles of marching to find out
otherwise;
the welcome they got was downright chilly.
The people of Maryland (at least in this region) were
staunch Union supporters. With more than a year having gone
by since the start of the war, most of the men of Maryland who
were supporters of the South were already soldiers somewhere,
having long since joined. Moreover, while Marylanders were
farmers like themselves, the actual Maryland farm was quite
different from the Southern counterpart. Here there were no
slaves working vast plantations. Maryland was made up of
family farms, with very few individuals owning slaves at all. So
while rumors might have told of a large number of Southern
sympathizers just waiting to join the Confederacy, the reality
was that the Southerners were just plain not welcome in most
parts of the states, and in fact, Lee lost more troops than he
gained when he crossed the border.
The initial optimism of the army died away with each weary
mile into enemy territory. There was still plenty of enthusiasm to
focus on the task at hand. Lee’s troops had successfully
invaded the North - now it only remained to pick a site for the
battle to come.
As tempting a target as Washington might have been, the
road between Antietam and the Union capital was choked with
wounded Northern soldiers in retreat, and the fortification
around Washington was tough. Also, the number of troops
stationed there would have been twice the size force that Lee
commanded. Also, Lee had to keep in mind that a ship stood
on standby to whisk President Lincoln and his Cabinet to safety
should a Washington invasion occur. All these factors made
Washington a less than desirable choice.
Lee was not the only Confederate general in enemy
territory.
The Confederate forces in Kentucky, under Major General
Edmund Kirby Smith, also had had a successful battle at
Richmond, and was now poised outside of Cincinnati. Truly it
had to feel as if Southern domination was near.
There were others thinking along the same lines.
Lee was well aware of the scrutiny of England at this time.
The Confederacy had sought to create a treaty with Great
Britain all the way back at the beginning of the war when they’d
sought their assistance when the North had blockaded Southern
shipping. Thus far, England had shown hesitancy in becoming
involved, instead opting for a position of neutrality. This “wait
and see” attitude had continued over the next year, as those
who decided such things watched to see how the South fared in
their struggles before committing to their side in anything.
However, could support be gained off of such a
questionable act?
Lee’s orders thus far had been to defend the borders of the
Confederacy, and not to invade enemy territory. Lee justified his
action by pointing out that this was simply a foray into the north,
with no intention of keeping any possible land gained in such an
invasion. Regardless, Lee was there without permission and
hoping that a bold move would not only strike a blow straight
into the heart of the Union but would also gain that international
support that was so important to winning the war.
This was the situation as Lee marched his army into
Maryland. Singing no less.
It was not an impressive sight. The men had little to eat but
dried corn and green apples. They were feeling “hollowed out”
according to one private’s memoirs. Their clothes were torn and
disheveled, most of them had lice, and thousands of the
Southern troops had no boots. Marching in rags, dirty, with
bare feet and gaunt from hunger, fifteen hundred men deserted
the army on the march. Some from the conditions, some from
being in the service without any possibility of leave, some
because they’d “signed on to defend the Confederacy, not to
invade.”
A point needs to be made here: while they looked a wreck,
these were a tough force of fighting men. These kind of brutal
conditions have a way of whittling out the weak, so as much as
they came in with nothing, looking like an army of beggars more
than an invading force, they would fight fiercely when the time
came, with every confidence that they could win this thing.
Lee was not doing much better than his men. He’d recently
suffered an embarrassing injury. While reading a map a week
prior, a sudden gust of wind caught the paper, sending it flying
into the face of Lee’s horse, Traveler. The horse shied and
panicked. When Lee attempted to grab his bridle, he had been
injured. As a result, he had both of his hands bandaged, one for
a broken bone, one for a severe strain. Now he was unable to
ride, and for the time being was confined to leading the invasion
by riding in an ambulance.
To make matters worse, two generals immediately under
him had a conflict over the possession of captured Federal
ambulances. Brigadier General Nathan Evans had Brigadier
General John Bell Hood arrested for insubordination.
Two other generals, Major General Ambrose Paul Hill and
Major General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, were also
embroiled in a dispute. Jackson accused Hill of neglect of duty
and placed him under arrest. Hill’s men had been a half hour
late to start on the road to Leesburg, and Hill rode well in
advance of the column, heedless of stragglers. When confronted
on the matter, Hill held out his sword in a gesture of resignation.
Jackson refused, instead telling Hill to “consider himself under
arrest” and made the General ride in the back of the formation.
With all this conflict from within, and several of the troops
straggling further and further behind, Lee’s men numbered
barely 50,000 by the time they arrived at the river. While the
men themselves had a kind of cocky bravado in regards to the
fight itself, they were a ragtag bunch in sore need of a meal and
time to rest.
This was not an auspicious force with which to begin an
invasion.
Chapter Two
McClellan’s Army
“I will send you trophies”
—General McClellan’s message to President Lincoln
The Army of the Potomac did not seem very enthusiastic to
meet the enemy. As they rode out on September 7th , it was
with a certain feeling of pessimism. To be fair, they were not the
only ones feeling as if disaster was imminent.
All the way up into Pennsylvania, there was a certain panic
setting in. In the southern part of the state, residents were taking
family and livestock north in great numbers. The newspapers
were full of dire warnings and prophetic messages of doom and
gloom.
“Jeff Davis will proclaim himself pres’t of the U.S. at
Harrisburg! The last days of the republic are near,” wrote one
rather vocal New Yorker.
Even if morale was lacking in regards to victory, the soldiers
themselves had confidence in their commander.
Major General George McClellan had proven himself in the
Mexican-American war as an able commander. As promotions
during peace were slow, McClellan left for the army for an
executive appointment in the railroad. When the Civil War
broke out, McClellan was reappointed by President Lincoln,
and for a brief time was named General-in-Chief of the Union
Army.
McClellan was loved by his men, who called him “Little
Mac.” A rousing cheer rose up from the ranks when the men
found out who would be leading them. McClellan was a man
who would walk through the troops and salute and show his
respect to every man he met. He had a way about him of
making others feel important. For this reason, his men would
follow him anywhere.
Now if only McClellan would lead.
When Lincoln recommissioned him, McClellan was ordered
to “defend Washington.” He quickly merged General John
Pope’s Army of Virginia into McClellan’s Army of the
Potomac. McClellan left two corps under Major Generals
Samuel Heintzelman and Franz Siegal to defend Washington
and took the remaining 84,000 troops to Maryland to confront
Lee.
In a very short amount of time, he’d managed to reorganize
the army into an effective, even if somewhat unpracticed,
fighting force. The drawback was that many of the men under
his command were new volunteers with no battle experience;
some hadn’t even fired a gun at more than a few targets.
However, it was not the lack of experience that made the
men doubt the outcome of the battle. Instead, it was their track
record; in the last several engagements – and for that matter in
the course of the war thus far – there had been few victories.
Especially when it came to tackling Lee’s army.
Add to that McClellan’s perfectionist nature. The General
was a very cautious man and was not one to move into action
unless he was certain of victory. Also, he had a very poor idea
of the numbers he was facing. Was he misinformed or was it
pessimism that led him to inflate the numbers whenever he
reported back to Washington? Whatever the case, McClellan
felt that he was vastly outnumbered – estimating Lee’s numbers
to be twice or even three times what they were.
To be fair, getting information was difficult. McClellan was
having a hard time getting scouts in near enough to count
(though again, there’s some debate over whether he was
making enough effort in this regard). Moreover, as always,
when prisoners were questioned, they invariably lied about their
numbers.
Whatever the cause, this sure belief would lead to many
decisions in the coming days that would make him far less
maneuverable.
In the end, though, the mood of the army would gradually
change. The welcome that had been denied Lee was there for
McClellan and his men. When the Army of the Potomac
marched through the various towns, they were welcomed with
jubilant celebration. People hung out of windows to watch and
cheer on the army. Women would stand by the roadside,
offering refreshment and encouragement. It has even been noted
several times that the excitement was such that even
McClellan’s horse was hugged.
Suddenly the Union soldiers were hopeful again. They were
the heroes of the piece again, and success was imminent.
The stage was set. Two opposing armies with every
confidence of being able to win were about to meet.
Chapter Three
The Opening Gambit
“I think Lee had made a gross mistake, and he will be
severely punished for it…I have the plans of the rebels, and
will catch them in their own trap.”
—General McClellan to President Lincoln
On September 2, 1862, Lee took his men to the town of
Frederick, Maryland, 25 miles from the Union outpost. Though
the mayor was a Southern sympathizer, most of the town’s
residents were fiercely loyal to the Union.
Lee, always a risk-taker, decided to divide his forces. This
was a tactic that had worked well for him in the past, and so he
decided to try it again. He had confidence in part to his own
enemy’s tactics. So far he had seen McClellan’s hesitation to
act. He was counting on that now to work in his favor.
The first division was sent out under Longstreet. This was to
be made up of three divisions and the reserve artillery. They
were to cross into Pennsylvania to Boonsboro, halfway to
Hagerstown.
The greater bulk of the army, all six remaining divisions,
would be split further into three groups, and separately engage
Union outposts before converging on Harper’s Ferry. The plan
was that once Harper’s Ferry fell, the army would reunite with
Longstreet and await further orders. Noting that General Hill
would be detached from his unit to follow Longstreet, Jackson
re-wrote Lee’s order for Hill, not knowing that Lee had already
sent a copy of those orders to Hill himself.
These orders would become the lynchpin that would change
the course of Army of the Potomac.
Longstreet memorized his copy of the orders and chewed
the paper to a pulp to preserve the secrecy. While not as
extreme as Longstreet, most of the other recipients of those
orders, likewise destroyed them after reading, through burning
or other means.
However, one set of Hill’s orders never materialized at all.
The set sent from General Robert E. Lee himself never made it
into his hands.
While the details of what happened next are rather unclear,
the popular theory is as follows. Somehow, that set of orders
wound up in the possession of an unidentified Confederate
officer, presumed illiterate given what happened next. That
paper wound up being used to wrap up three fresh cigars, and
then was placed into a pouch and presumably forgotten. This
would become a very important detail a little later in the story.
On September 10, Lee marched his army out of Frederick
and headed them north toward Pennsylvania. Lee even had
some of his officers search out local maps and ask directions for
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. So great was the secrecy that
none of these officers had been informed that the true goal was
Harper’s Ferry.
Lee’s counterintelligence and Jeb Stuart’s Confederate
horsemen’s blockade against Union cavalry probes were so
effective that McClellan was not even aware that Lee was in
Frederick until after the Army of Virginia had pulled out again.
At this point, McClellan was working blind. It was no
wonder he was cautious.
McClellan’s tendency to wait until he was sure of all the
facts was not being helped by his immediate superior, General in
Chief Henry Halleck sent fretful dispatches from Washington,
cautioning McClellan that Lee’s presence in Maryland may be a
feint. Halleck warned McClellan that Lee might be trying to
draw off Union forces to make way for the real attack from
Virginia.
McClellan was also getting some disturbingly contradictory
reports on Lee’s strength. Brigadier General Alfred Pleasanton,
head of McClellan’s cavalry and the vanguard of the march to
Frederick, assured his commander that Lee had invaded
Maryland with no less than 100,000 men. McClellan’s chief
intelligence man, Allan Pinkerton, ranged the count more than
200,000.
Deciding the number to be somewhere between, and
always ready to assume the worst where numbers were
concerned, McClellan asked Washington for reinforcements to
properly face Lee’s force of “120,000 men.”
McClellan’s forces reached Frederick three days after Lee
had been there. They were treated like a liberating army, though
the occupation of Lee’s men was less onerous than McClellan’s
would soon prove to be. While Lee and his army had seen fit to
pay for what they used, the Union forces were less concerned
with niceties and were soon living off the land and raiding
livestock.
On Saturday morning, the 27th Indiana stopped at a
meadow for a rest break. That particular meadow must have
been a popular resting spot for the soldiers of the Confederacy
as well because Sergeant John M. Bloss and Corporal Barton
W. Mitchell of company F found three cigars wrapped up in a
scrap of paper lying in the grass. That selfsame paper penned
only three days previous that gave the entire battle plan of the
Confederate army. It was in fact that missing communique from
General Robert E. Lee to General Hill.
Recognizing that they had something important in their
hands, they rushed it to their superiors, who wasted no time in
getting this information to General McClellan.
The whole thing seemed suspicious and was regarded as a
possible trap until the authenticity of the handwriting was able to
be verified by a former friend of Lee’s Adjunct General, who
had penned the copy. Suddenly all those confusing reports of
Lee’s strength and destination that he had been getting made
sense to McClellan.
Still, McClellan did not move. Had McClellan taken action
immediately he would have caught Lee’s forces scattered, and
could have easily defeated the entire army. Instead, for
whatever reason, he waited.
It was six hours before he decided a course of action, and
another twelve hours before the Union troops first started to
move out from Frederick. This was all the time that General Lee
needed.
Chapter Four
Harper’s Ferry
“You will not abandon Harpers Ferry without defending it
to the last extremity”
—Orders to Colonel Dixon Miles at Harper’s Ferry
Already the Confederates had overwhelmed the small garrison
at Martinsburg, sending the men stationed there in a fast retreat
to Harper’s Ferry, with Jackson’s men in close pursuit. While
these men would swell the ranks of those stationed there, poor
command would finish what the Army of Northern Virginia had
started
Colonel Dixon Miles had been left in charge at Harper’s
Ferry. The placement was meant as a punishment –Colonel
Dixon had led a small unit at Bull Run — which had ended with
a court of inquiry where he had been found drunk and
incompetent. Having been given command of a small unit out of
the action, and denied any chance of promotion, Miles now
spent much of his time in being bitter. His garrison had inflated
to 13,000 men with the influx of Martinsburg forces.
Harper’s Ferry might have been a little backwater fort, but
it had supplies and food enough to re-equip Lee’s army,
including a stockpile of uniforms and boots (which would come
in handy later, as we will see in a bit). It was not easily
defended, however. Jackson said he would rather “take the
place forty times, rather than undertake to defend it once.”
The Union forces knew well the shortcomings of the
location. Harper’s Ferry was located at the confluence of two
rivers and was surrounded by a network of high ridges. Anyone
with artillery placed upon those heights could take the place
with no effort whatsoever. As one defender said, “We were at
the bottom of a bowl, even the dullest soldier could see the
inevitable result.”
Miles sent a plea for assistance to McClellan’s
headquarters, stating that the besieged town could hold out for
48 hours, but after that, he would be forced to surrender.
McClellan, mistakenly believing that Lee’s major forces were
ensconced at Boonsboro, ignored Miles completely. Instead, he
took the bulk of his men through Turner’s Gap in the Catoctin
and Mouth Mountains. He then sent 12,000 men stationed in
Buckeystown and led by Major General William Franklin to
Crampton’s Gap, followed by 7,000 men stationed in Licksville
and led by Major General Darius Couch.
Back at Harper’s Ferry, the situation was fairly dire. The
troops under General Miles were mostly untrained. With the
Confederates on the Heights, there would be but little recourse
other than to surrender in the morning.
That night, while Miles was still holed up at Harper’s Ferry,
and McClellan was sending troops anywhere but there to
relieve him, a Confederate sympathizer from Frederick arrived
at Lee’s camp. He told the General about the set of orders
recently discovered by Union soldiers and handed over to
McClellan. At the same time, scouts reported seeing campfires
from Turner’s Gap.
Lee sent warnings to McLaws and Jackson at Harper’s
Ferry, warning them that McClellan was coming, and then
ordered a full-scale defense of Turner’s Gap.
The next morning, Brigadier General Jacob Cox led his men
up the two-mile slope at Turner’s Gap and found 200
Confederate cavalry and 1000 soldiers defending the ridge. At
9:00 AM, both sides opened fire. One of Cox’s commanders,
Colonel Eliakim Scammon, moved the 23rd Ohio to flank the
Southerners. The 23rd’s commander, Lt. Colonel Rutherford B.
Hayes, took them through the woods and up the slope. He was
wounded in the arm and fell faint, still issuing orders.
The Ohioans gained the ridge and opened a new front on
the Confederate soldiers. When General Garland, commander
of the Confederate troops, was killed, the Southerners lost spirit
and retreated down the slope, giving up 200 prisoners to the
onrushing Ohioans.
When word of the battle reached McClellan, still in
Frederick, he rode to Burnside’s headquarters on a knoll at the
foot of South Mountain. There, to the ringing cheers of his men,
McClellan sat on his horse and pointed to the gap through
which the men would cross the mountain. One soldier said, “It
was like an intermission had been declared in order that a
reception might be tendered to the general in chief.”
In the meantime, Confederate troops were cheering Robert
E. Lee, who was once again astride his horse, Traveler. Hood’s
men began shouting for their former commander, who was still
under arrest over the incident with the Union ambulances. Hood
was released for the duration of the battle, and so took his men
into the Gap to stop the Union advance.
When the fighting ended, the Union held the high ground at
a loss of 1,800 out of 28,000 men. The Confederacy had
18,000 men engaged and lost 2,700, which included 800
missing.
At this point, the Battle of Antietam might never have
happened. Lee had decided to leave Maryland and go back to
Virginia. However, a message from General Jackson changed
his mind. Jackson had taken Harper’s Ferry and captured 73
pieces of artillery, 13,000 small arms, and 12,500 men. Leaving
the garrison under the command of A.P. Hill, he led his men out
immediately to converge with Lee at Sharpsburg.
It was September 15th , 1862.
Chapter Five
Dunker Church & The Woods
“The rebels are too many for us, but I would rather face
them than Hooker.”
—Union Colonel
Retreating west from South Mountain, Lee’s 18,000 men
numbered less than a third of the pursuing Union army. Near the
Maryland town of Sharpsburg, Lee placed his men along a
four-mile stretch of the river, Antietam.
Lee’s selection of terrain looked to be a good one. There
were wooden fences, natural rock ridges, and a road that had
been so eroded with constant use it had sunken into a natural
trench. The downside of the fortification was that the
Confederates had their back to the Potomac, leaving little room
for retreat if the battle should turn.
With the land chosen, it was only a matter of waiting on the
rest of the troops to catch up and get into position. The bulk of
the army was still with Jackson, twelve miles away, but Lee
knew his opponent well, and was confident that McClellan
would not attack that day, nor likely the next.
Although the Union trooped arrived a few hours later, Lee’s
prediction proved to be true: McClellan’s army did not attack
that evening, nor even the next day.
It was a strange time of waiting, nerve-wracking in the
extreme.
Two young horsemen, challenging each other in a highspirited race, broke through the front lines, ignoring orders to
stop. They came within rifle range of the Southerners who
watched the race, cheering them on.
This delay was all Jackson needed to reinforce Lee.
Although still outnumbered, Jackson’s arrival evened the odds
considerably and all the Confederates were now seasoned
veterans of many battles.
In contrast, the Union army was largely staffed by
volunteers who had been stationed in and around Washington.
Other than those troops who fought at the mountain passes,
they were largely inexperienced.
McClellan’s delay while the soldiers readied themselves to
his specifications would prove costly.
It was late Tuesday before McClellan had an attack plan for
the next day, but the plan meant completely restructuring his
entire army and adding in another division recently arrived from
Washington under Major General Fitz-John Porter, as well as
William Franklin’s VI currently seven miles away.
McClellan chose General Joseph Hooker’s I corps to
spearhead the attack. Hooker moved his men into position that
evening, but as they neared the woods, they were fired upon by
Confederates hiding in the trees. Twenty of Hooker’s men died
before they were able to bed down for the night behind a
farmyard.
Notified of Hooker’s move, Lee sensed the new front and
moved his men to face north to meet it. He also dispatched
urgent messages to Hill and McLaws to bring their divisions to
reinforce him. With their men, Lee would now have 40,000
troops to McClellan’s 70,000.
It should be noted here that McClellan still firmly believed
that Lee had over 100,000 men in the field.
In the pre-dawn mists, Hooker spotted a landmark by
which to guide his troops – a single-story whitewashed building.
Although Hooker originally thought it was a school, in actuality
it was a place of worship that the locals called “Dunker Church”
due to the practice of immersion baptism held there.
At 5:30AM Hooker began his charge. If McClellan was
cautious, Hooker was rash. He was also hard-drinking, toughtalking, and by all accounts a hell of a fighter. Hooker had split
his men into three parts, one division commanded by Abner
Doubleday, the man later credited for inventing the game of
baseball. He and his men took the right flank, though the North
Woods.
On the left, Brigadier General James Ricketts led a division
and one of McClellan’s brigades through the East Woods. This
left George Meade to the center and slightly rear. Hooker’s
forces created a front a half-mile wide.
As Doubleday’s men marched through the woods,
Confederate cannons opened fire on them. So accurate was the
aim that the second volley tore through the ranks, killing two
men and wounding eleven more.
Federal guns answered, pouring their fire into the
Confederate artillery. Soon these were joined by the Union’s
big guns, the twenty-pounder cannons.
The advancing Union front faced fierce resistance. In a
cornfield ahead, Hooker spotted Confederate bayonets, called
a halt to the advance, and summoned fire from the artillery.
Union artillery roared over the heads of Hooker’s men and
saturated the cornfield, leveling the crops and leaving the slain
laying “in rows, precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few
moments before” as Hooker noted in his official report.
Ricketts’ left flank emerged from the woods and went on
into the cornfield, stepping over the Confederate dead. Scarcely
200 yards away, both sides dug in and exchanged fire. As both
sides were reinforced, the volley continued for another half
hour.
At 6:45 AM the Confederate reinforcements withdrew,
having lost more than 50% of their total. Suddenly, the Southern
line was bolstered by five regiments from New Orleans who
charged and drove the Union back through the cornfield and
into the woods.
To counter the attack, the Union brought up a battery of
three-inch guns to point blank range and decimated the
Southern troops as they charged.
The last division of Ricketts’ men were delayed because
they lost their commander. When the cannon attack began, he
simply dismounted and scurried to the back, muttering in fright
about cannon charges. He resigned two days later.
The division finally arrived at the battle. When the color
bearer on the Union side was killed, and the flag fallen, a group
of ten Federal troops engaged in hand-to-hand combat to
retrieve it. Seven of the ten men were killed before the flag was
recaptured.
By 7:00 AM, the 12th Massachusetts had lost 224 of 334
men and the Confederate reinforcements under cannon fire had
lost 323 of 500.
While Ricketts’ men were fighting in the cornfield,
Doubleday’s spearhead, a brigade who referred to themselves
as the “Iron Brigade” under Brigadier General John Gibbon,
pushed through a pasture to the northwest corner of the
cornfield and encountered withering fire from the front and from
the West Woods. Gibbon set up a couple of guns to cover his
men, but the gunners quickly became targets from
sharpshooters. In a matter of minutes, half the gunners were
killed.
Gibbon ordered up six more guns with greater range, and
they laid down fire with case shot - scrap metal in an iron case.
This kept the Confederates occupied until a section of the Iron
Brigade took the West Woods.
The rest of Gibbon’s men pushed forward to a rail fence
separating the cornfield from the pasture. A regiment of
Georgians rose from the fence line and the two sides unloaded
into each other’s ranks at near point blank range. The Iron
Brigade charged the fence, leaping over it and scattering the
Georgians, but not without heavy losses.
They pushed on, but suddenly there were under fire from
their right flank. Two fresh Confederate brigades burst through
the West Woods and lay down fire from a rail fence only thirty
yards from the spearhead.
The Union vanguard wheeled to meet the new threat of
fresh troops. Additionally, a battery company rained down case
fire on the Confederates.
After fifteen minutes, the Southerners retreated into the
woods, leaving men scattered, dead and dying, along the
ground and hanging from the fence.
Chapter Six
The Cornfield
“Whole ranks of brave men…were mowed down in heaps
to the right and left. Never before was I so consciously
troubled with fear that my horse would further injure some
wounded fellow soldier, lying helpless on the ground. This
most deadly combat raged until our last round of
ammunition was expended.”
—John B. Hood
Throughout the war, many battles were fought in cornfields, but
only one bore the name “The Cornfield.”
It was a small patch of land, roughly 250 yards wide and
400 yards deep. It was estimated that by the end of the day, the
North and the South went back and forth over the same ground
more than 15 times, and the bodies there were piled high.
As the North pressed on to Dunker Church, Jackson’s men
were shredded, leaving and the front line of the Army of Virginia
with a large gaping hole in it. They were on the verge of
collapsing when Jackson sent in his final reserve, the 2,300-man
division under the command of John Bell Hood.
Hood’s men had been held back because they were
exhausted from skirmishing the night before in the East Woods.
Although they’d had a chance to rest, they had not had a
chance to eat, with no rations issued for several days. This
morning they had received rations for the first time in three days,
and were settling in to cook their breakfasts when the call came
for them to stiffen the line.
Angry and resentful, they nonetheless rose and formed a
new front against the attacking Union army. The opening volley
from Hood’s men went through the Federals like a “scythe
running through our lines” as Rufus Dawes later recalled.
The Federals fell back to The Cornfield, losing in moments
what took over and hour of bloodshed and hundreds of lives to
gain. Dawes stopped the retreat north of the field.
The Texas Brigade charged The Cornfield under heavy fire
from the retreating Federals. After three successive standard
bearers were shot dead, Major Dingle grabbed the flag and
yelled, “Legion, follow your colors” and led the Texas Brigade
within 50 yards of Federal troops before he too was shot dead.
The Texans rushed the Union front line, becoming separated
from the rest of the army by 150 yards. A brigade of Federals
lay on the ground, rifles balanced on the lowest rail of the fence.
The smoke of the battlefield was so thick, the Federals had to
look for the legs of the Texans to shoot.
The Texans ran into a trap as the Union brigade under
Meade opened fire. At the same time, more Union soldiers
opened up from the pike. Of the 226 Texas attackers, 186
were killed. This was a loss rate of 82.3%.
Union cannons were loading and firing as fast as they could.
The smoke from the black powder was so thick often the
gunners could not see the enemy they were firing on, even
though the Confederates were within 30 yards.
Of 100 gunners, 40 were killed. Men swarmed in to take
over as each one fell. The gunners now used double canister
shot, metal containers holding round iron balls similar to large
shotgun shells. These were incredibly effective. One Union
officer reported seeing a Confederate arm flying thirty feet in the
air.
After 20 minutes of rapid fire, the cannon batteries were
nearly depleted. Gibbon found enough hale horses to hook up
the guns. He dragged the artillery back up the road, followed by
the surviving Iron Brigade.
It was only 7:00 AM and the death toll was already
incredible. Of the 9,000 men Hooker used in the opening
attack, it is estimated that 2,600 were either killed or wounded.
Nearly that many again had become lost or separated from their
units or had limped back injured.
Hood’s men had pushed the Federals back, but the
exhausted troops could not pursue them because a new threat
had arrived. 7,200 fresh troops under Joseph Mansfield burst
onto the field, sending the surviving Confederate troops back
into the West Woods for shelter.
Mansfield’s troops, however, were inexperienced, most of
them raw recruits with minimal training. Mansfield himself,
though a 40-year veteran, had never commanded so large a
force and in fact had spent most of those 40 years in
engineering and staff work. Afraid his raw recruits would bolt
under fire, Mansfield marched them in a tight clustered
formation, ten ranks deep instead of two, thus presenting a
target “almost as good as a barn.”
Mansfield made another horrifying mistake when he
ordered his men to stop firing into the woods because he was
afraid some of Hooker’s men were still in there. When the gray
uniforms were pointed out to him, he acknowledged his
mistake, just as a musket ball tore into his chest and took him
out of the fight permanently. He died later that day.
Mansfield’s replacement, Brigadier General Alpheus
Williams, was a capable commander with battle experience. He
took over from Mansfield only an hour into the fight and would
thus lead the XII Corps for the remainder of the battle (and in
several after that).
The battleground itself though was held almost exactly as it
had been earlier that morning, with neither side gaining or losing
any ground. The scattered corpses that littered the ground were
the only indication that a battle had happened there.
At the center of the line, the 27th Indiana fought the
Georgians and North Carolinians from one of Hill’s brigades.
The Confederates were using buck and ball, three pieces of
shrapnel with the standard ball. This was also rather effective,
as for every man killed, eleven more were sure to be wounded.
Among those wounded was Corporal Barton Mitchell, who had
found Lee’s missing orders wrapped around three cigars.
Two more of Hill’s brigades joined the fight. However, as
they settled in behind a rock ridge in the East Woods, Captain
T. P. Thompson spotted Federals and cried out an alarm.
Though his commander tried to quiet that alarm, the damage
was done. Panic flew through the regiment, and then through the
brigade.
In moments, the entire brigade was in mass retreat. This
opened a gap in the Confederate line. The Northern troops,
under the command of Brigadier General George Greene,
poured through the opening.
1,700 men slammed into the Confederates, who then
retreated from the field. One private, seeing plenty of men in
gray around him was certain he was in amongst friends and held
his ground, up until another man proved those men were all
dead by firing into one of the corpses.
Greene’s other brigade swung left and came through the
East Woods, flanking the southerners. The Federals had to be
reined in while Greene maneuvered his guns into position for
support.
They drove the South back, and the Union army was within
200 yards of their goal, the high ground of Dunker Church, but
the momentum was lost. Greene’s guns were out of ammunition;
the chaos of the battlefield had left men confused and lost.
Hooker was recognized by his white horse and was shot in
the right foot. He was dragged off the line in shock from pain
and blood loss. Without their commander, the men were
disheartened. With Hooker out of action, there was no
commander with authority enough to gather the men. Greene
stopped his men short of the goal when they came under heavy
fire, and soon a lull settled over the battlefield.
More than 8,000 men lay dead or dying on the field, and no
ground had been won or lost.
Chapter Seven
Bloody Lane
“The shrieks of the wounded and dying was terrible, but
they rallied and came at us again and our men again
awaited until they come in range and again arose and
mowed them down the second time, but they came again.”
—James C. Steele of the 4th NC
At the beginning of the battle, Lee had stayed near the front
lines, whereas McClellan established command from a nearby
building. McClellan and his best friend, Major General FitzJohn Porter (commander of the V Corps) commanded the
battle through two telescopes mounted on stakes pounded into
the ground.
The thick smoke made it difficult to see, so McClellan relied
on signal fires and couriers for information, thus slowing his
reactions to movements upon the battlefield. His plan of having
Burnside’s men create a distraction on the Confederate left had
yet to materialize, and the assault on the right had degenerated
into skirmishes and disorganization.
McClellan, however, created his own delays as well. When
General Sumner came to McClellan, ready to attack an hour
before sunrise, McClellan made the General cool his heels for
an hour and a half before seeing him. After Hood’s
counterattack, Sumner got the orders to advance, but not with
all of his troops. McClellan insisted on holding back a division
until it could be replaced with a division of V Corps.
Anxious to get into the fight, Sumner bristled at the caution
of his commander and led his men toward where he understood
the battle to be. He passed Hooker, but Hooker was being
carried off the field in pain and had significant blood loss, so the
two men did not confer.
So ready to fight was the old general that his men quickly
outdistanced their reinforcements, weakening Sumner’s troops
by 5,400 men. Sumner’s vanguard, under the command of
Brigadier General Willis Gorman, burst from the West Woods
300 yards north of Dunker Church into heavy resistance fire.
The enemy was made up of a few hundred bedraggled
survivors of earlier skirmishes, but the attack was so perfectly
timed and the fire so withering, it felt like walking into an
ambush.
Gorman had been on an intercept course with Lee’s
reinforcements, and the Federals were now outnumbered. The
few hundred had pinned down the Federals until help could
arrive.
The attacking Confederates slammed into them from west
and south. The Woods was now littered with bodies. Sumner
tried to wheel one of the brigades around to face the new
threat, but by the time he rode to the rear, the men bolted and
ran.
Of the two brigades remaining, their commanders tried to
get them reoriented to face the attacking division, but they were
too close. The three divisions were so near that a single shot
from a rifle could tear through three or four men. The Federals
were afraid to fire for fear of hitting their own men. This was a
valid concern; the 59th New York were firing wildly, not
realizing that thy were firing into the backs of the 15th
Massachusetts. The 15th suffered a loss of 344 men that day.
The Confederates had worked their way around the
besieged Northerners, and now Sumner’s men were facing fire
from all sides. Also, Stuart worked his guns around, and they
too began to fire into the Union forces.
The 20th Massachusetts did not run. They shouldered their
arms and formed an orderly withdrawal, forming a new
defensive line in an empty field.
After twenty minutes of fighting, almost half of Sumner’s
men were dead, a staggering 2,255 men. Confederate losses
were relatively light, but they pursued the retreating North into
cannon fire. The Confederates lost more than a third of their
men before retreating into the woods.
Meanwhile, D. H. Hill’s two brigades under Robert Rodes
and George B. Anderson occupied a superb strategic position
on a nearby hill. At the base of the hill, a narrow country road
ran a third of a mile south of Dunker Church, ran east for about
500 yards, then bent southeast to zigzag to Boonsboro Pike.
The road had seen years of use and the wear of wagons and
natural erosion had sunken the road several feet below the
surrounding fields. It made a natural trench. It was here Hill’s
2,500 men waited while almost twice that number of Union
soldiers mounted the crest of the hill 100 yards away, paused to
redress the line, and then continued. With the enemy that close,
and most of Hill’s men still reeling from the earlier fight, it would
have been natural to open fire, but the men lay dormant in the
sunken road.
With the natural slope of the land leading up to the road and
the nature of the road itself, both sides were just about invisible
to each other until they hit that last rise.
The Confederates waited until the Federals came into view
at point-blank range and then opened fire. The first volley
cleared the entire Union front rank. The Southerners rose from
their positions and continued to pour fire into the advancing
enemy.
The Union men were mostly raw recruits, and they were
facing battle-hardened Confederates. The North stood their
ground for five minutes before breaking and running for cover.
The losses were devastating; the brigade suffered 450
casualties.
While they took cover, another brigade crested the ridge
and were immediately fired upon. When they also faltered,
French had to commit his last brigade, composed of three
veteran regiments and one filled with fresh recruits. Even the
Union veterans were astonished at the sheets of fire coming
from the road. One private noticed that “every blade of grass”
was moving and discovered it was due to the Southern rounds
falling around them like hail.
On the far side of the ridge, the men of the 108th New York
lay prone. Kimball had his adjunct, a Lieutenant Frederick
Hitchcock, order their commander, Colonel Oliver Palmer, to
get the men moving. Palmer simply looked at the young
lieutenant without comment and without any indication of having
heard a word he said.
Kimball told Hitchcock to repeat the order – at gunpoint. If
the colonel did not respond, Hitchcock was to shoot him.
Whether or not Hitchcock would have had to shoot did not
come up. Palmer’s subordinates bypassed the colonel and got
the men moving into the fray.
Federal troops were falling at an alarming rate. It did not
help that the Southern soldiers were reinforced with 3,400 fresh
troops. The Confederates prepared for an assault, but at 10:30
AM the Union army was likewise reinforced with troops that
had sat out of the fighting thus far. These were the men
McClellan had held in reserve until the V Corps could replace
them.
One of the best-known brigades of the fresh Union troops,
the Irish Brigade, spearheaded the charge. They marched
toward the sunken road with banners flying and were met with a
rain of bullets. They hunkered down and returned fire until the
ammunition was spent and they were ordered to retreat, leaving
more than 500 of their number dead on the field.
The Irish were replaced by more of Richardson’s men, who
charged within thirty feet of the road. The Confederates there
had been in close-quarter fighting for more than two hours, and
the strain was beginning to show on the defensive line. The toll
on the officers was devastating, as one commander after
another was killed or wounded and then removed from the
field. George B. Anderson took a hit on his right foot that
seemed minor and later proved to be fatal. Colonel John
Gordon took two balls in the right leg, one in the left arm, and
another in his shoulder and still refused to go to the rear. He
was still giving orders with another musket ball tore into his
face. Amazingly he survived despite all of this.
As their leadership diminished, the organization of the
Confederates began to fall apart. The deciding crack came from
Union Colonel Francis C. Barlow, who took two understrength regiments to the bend in the road where it was not so
deep. Mounting a knoll that looked down into the bend, his 350
men poured fire into the pass, turning the natural shelter into a
death trap.
General Rhodes ordered Lt. Colonel James Lightfoot to
wheel left to face the new threat. Instead of yelling “left face”
however, he called out “about face; forward march!” One of his
subordinates who heard the original order asked if Lightfoot’s
order meant the entire brigade. When Lightfoot said “yes” all
five regiments turned and climbed out of the trench and headed
for the rear.
Much as Lightfoot tried to reverse the command, the
Confederates were more than ready to retreat despite the fact
that this exposed them entirely to unfriendly fire.
The Federals were certainly not about to pass up the
chance to do some serious damage. They took the road and
knelt on the dead Confederates, piled in some places two or
three deep. From this position they fired on the retreating army,
causing heavy losses.
In all, they took 300 Confederate prisoners.
Longstreet was not ready to give up. He reorganized the
line along Hagerstown road. From here, in order to hold the
advance of the North, General Longstreet ordered up two
twelve-pounders that opened up on the Union with canister.
Hill gathered up 200 men and defended the gap while
Longstreet put 20 more guns into place. The sustained fire
stopped the Union troops.
Things were in chaos, and when Captain Graham rode to
the rear to speak to General Richardson, Richardson was
mortally wounded by canister fire.
By this point, the fighting in what later came to be called
“Bloody Lane” was pretty well over. The final toll of just this
segment alone was as follows:
The Confederates lost somewhere around 2,600 men on
the road. The Union lost 3,000. Longstreet had virtually no
defenses left other than the cannon. If McClellan had brought
the V reserve to the front at this time, Lee’s forces would have
crumbled and the incursion into Maryland would have been
turned into a rout.
McClellan did not call the reserves forward.
Chapter Eight
Burnside’s Bridge
“…but they discharged their duty most heroically —
Regiment after regiment, and even brigades were brought
up against them; and yet they held their ground, and the
bridge too, until they had fired their last cartridge.”
—Unknown Southerner at Burnside Bridge
As the fighting in The Cornfield wound down, attention shifted
to a 125-foot long elegant bridge which spanned the Antietam.
It was then called the Rohrbach Bridge, named for the family
that farmed the area. After today it would become known as
Burnside’s Bridge.
Major General Ambrose Burnside was by nature a jovial
man. He was also modest and not prone to ambition. He had
twice turned down President Lincoln’s offer to command the
Army of the Potomac. In pre-war years, “Burn” and “Mac”
were closer friends, and when Burnside left the army to try and
patent for a breech-loading rifle that he had invented, McClellan
got Burnside a job at the railroad when that patent came to
nothing.
Just now, however, McClellan was giving Burnside the cold
shoulder. Burnside had lost control of Hooker and his troops
when McClellan reorganized the army, which Burnside took as
a personal affront. The usually jovial general now awaited
orders to advance, unwilling to take any initiative. That morning
he moved his 11,000 men and 50 cannon to the hills east of the
bridge and waited. But McClellan had intended for Burnside to
create a diversion.
Burnside refused to take command of the IX Corps,
professing to be a “wing commander” and leaving overall
command to General Cox. Cox offered to step down in favor
of Burnside, but Burnside would hear none of it.
Thus the IX Corps effectively had two commanders.
Burnside’s decision left Cox in a difficult place. Both Cox and
Burnside knew that marching 1,100 men across a 12-foot
bridge under enemy fire would be impractical at best.
Four drastically understrength Confederate divisions
guarded a front a mile long, from Sharpsburg to the bridge. One
of these, under Brigadier General Robert Toombs, guarded the
west bank back at the bridge. Toombs was a Georgian
politician who was looking for a battle in which to make a name
for himself, with the goal being retirement from the army the day
after that battle, presuming he survived.
Toombs had 550 men against Burnside’s 1,100, but
Toombs had an enormous advantage. There was a steep
wooded bluff rising 100 feet high, with a slope riddled with
boulders to hide behind and covered in oak trees for snipers to
sit in the branches.
At about 10:00 AM, Burnside and Cox received the longawaited orders to advance. Cox and Burnside had decided to
attack Toombs by fording the Antietam a half mile downstream
where the water was only waist deep.
The 11th Connecticut drew the job as skirmishers. They
were to hold the Confederates so that Brigadier General
George Crook’s Ohioans could cross over. The 11th ’s
commander was a young colonel named Henry W. Kingsbury,
the son of a friend of Burnside’s. Kingsbury’s sister was married
to a Confederate general.
The Connecticut over on the right was pinned down by
enemy fire, but two companies on the left made it to the river
bank and inched toward the bridge.
The 11th finally had to withdraw, as the enemy barrage
proved too much for them. In 15 minutes, the company lost
one-third of its strength, including the young Colonel.
Crook’s charge went bad from the start. For the two days
they had sat idle, Crook had not examined the terrain he would
be fighting on, and instead of charging down the hill to the
bridge, he blundered into a strip of woods and emerged a
quarter mile upstream from it. Instead of carrying on the attack,
he had his forces lay down on the bank and exchange fire with
the Confederates on the opposite side of the creek.
Downstream, Brigadier General Isaac Rodman found that
the crossing McClellan’s engineers had recommended had
banks so steep as to make it unusable. Rodman sent scouts
ahead to search for a passage some locals had mentioned.
In the meantime, Cox and Burnside arranged another
assault on the bridge, two regiments lined up in ranks of four
and pointed towards it. The marching order made them
vulnerable to sniper fire, and the assault failed far short of the
bridge.
McClellan was growing exasperated. He sent five
messengers to Burnside with the same orders: “Take the
bridge.” One dispatch said, “even if it takes 10,000 men, he
must go now.” Burnside was getting angrier as well, telling
McClellan’s Inspector General, “McClellan seems to think I am
not trying my best to carry this bridge.”
For the third attempt, Burnside chose the 51st New York
and the 51st Pennsylvania, under the command of Colonel
Edward Ferrero. Ferrero was an inexperienced commander,
and not a particularly able one. Before the war, he was a
dancing master at West Point and had used his military and
political connections to achieve his rank.
The men under his command were still angry at him for
being denied their nightly shot of whiskey, so when Ferrero
brought his horse around and loudly proclaimed, “It is General
Burnside’s special request that the two 51st s take that bridge,
will you do it?” he was met with an uncomfortable silence
A corporal finally piped up, “If we do sir, will you give us
our whiskey?”
Ferrero replied, “Yes, by God, as much as you want!”
At 12:30 pm, finally set in motion by the promise of drink,
Ferrero’s men marched down the hill under the cover of Union
artillery. The withering fire from the defenders scattered the
ranks, and the men dropped to find cover behind rocks and
fencing. Ferrer’s men were less than twenty-five yards from the
enemy.
Suddenly the fire slackened. Toombs’ men were running
low on ammunition, and Toombs himself had word that Rodman
had found the passage through the stream. Toombs withdrew
his men.
The Georgians cost the North 500 men, themselves only
losing 160 Georgians. They had also delayed the North for two
hours.
If McClellan was to press against Lee, he would have to
use the bridge, but another issue arose. In their eagerness to
take the bridge, no one had considered supplies. The men were
nearly out of ammunition and were too exhausted to use what
they still had. Reinforcements were available but they were an
hour out, and sending thousands of men across the bridge
would create a bottleneck. Ironically, no one thought to use the
ford Crook had discovered.
Lee made no move to strengthen the defenses from the
bridge, using his men on the front lines and counting on Hill’s
men to come from Harper’s Ferry. Hill’s men, after two days of
grabbing Northern, stores would be well rested and well fed.
Hill was pushing them relentlessly to the battlefield, going on
ahead himself to report to Lee.
In the meantime, Burnside was ready to move again. He
managed to get 8,000 fresh troops and 22 cannons moving to
Sharpsburg to cut off Lee’s retreat. It was now 3:00 PM and
Hill’s men were still on their way.
The Union advance soon understood that every rock and
haystack concealed skirmishers. Then a brigade swooped
down on them from Cemetery Hill, where the south had set up
artillery.
Two hundred yards from Sharpsburg, the Union called a
halt. Ammunition was almost spent. Here they waited for
resupply.
Chapter Nine
The End of the Fight
“Toombs, cool in the hour of danger, but impetuous in the
charge, seemed to court death by the exposure of his person
and the intrepid manner in which he rushed at the head of
the column, apparently, into the very jaws of death.”
—Newspaper Reporter for the “Federal Union”
Lee would have met with complete disaster, but it was at this
propitious time that Hill’s forces returned from Harper’s Ferry.
The advancing Union men had separated when only one
brigade heard the order to advance and the rest failed to keep
up. This left a large gap in the Union front. Hill split his men into
two parts, sending one section of 2,000 men straight into the
opening.
The Confederates attacked without so much as redressing
their lines. General Maxcy Gregg ordered them to “fire and
form the line as you fight.”
In The Cornfield, the 16th Connecticut had never seen
action, in fact, until the night before. Most had never loaded
their muskets before. When the fire erupted from the cornfield,
185 of them died almost immediately and the line broke.
They were reinforced by the 4th Rhode Island, but the
smoke from the black powder made it difficult to tell friend from
foe. To make matters worse, some of the Confederates had
swapped out their gray rags for Union blue uniforms taken from
Harper’s Ferry.
The Connecticut and Rhode Island troops fled, leaving the
8th Connecticut far in advance and cut off. These men were
driven back down the hill and to the creek.
Burnside pleaded for reinforcements, but McClellan would
only send a single battery. He had two divisions in reserve for
the counterattack he was sure would come. Had those divisions
been committed to the battle, Lee would have been vastly
outnumbered. They never were.
It was during this part of the battle that night fell. The battle
ended, with the expectation that it would begin the following
morning again.
The next day McClellan did nothing. With two lines facing
off, he gave no orders to advance. Instead the task of dealing
with the wounded and dead commenced, while in the meantime,
considerable fresh troops arrived from Washington. Again, had
McClellan ordered an attack at this point, they would have
completely wiped Lee’s army out.
Instead the day passed uneventfully. That night, the Army of
Virginia slipped quietly away. McClellan was overjoyed, as to
him, this meant a clear victory for the Union.
He chose to not pursue Lee’s battered troops though, with
little more than a handful of men and even that was given up
quickly. As he had throughout the battle, he still clung to the
sincere belief that Lee’s men outnumbered his own. Obviously
such a move would be disastrous. Better instead to end the
battle here, at Antietam. To him, this was a solid victory, one to
be proud of. As McClellan later wrote:
I feel some little pride, in having with a beaten and
demoralized army defeated Lee so utterly, & saved the
North so completely. Well—one of these days will I trust do
me justice.
Chapter Ten
The Aftermath
“Alas I cannot. Words are inadequate to the task. Piles of
heads, arms, legs and fragments of other portions of
humanity all thrown together promiscuously. It is over now,
and we laugh at our fears, that is human, so am I.”
—William Relyea, a member of the 16th CT
At the end of the battle, the loss of life was unprecedented.
Nearly one out of every four soldiers was either killed or
injured. In rough terms, this means that more than 22,000 were
listed as casualties.
And for the first time the world was invited to view the
carnage.
Two days after the battle, Alexander Gardner and his
assistant traveled to Antietam and visually recorded what they
saw there. These photographs were later used in an exhibition in
New York City, allowing the citizens to see, for the first time,
what the results of a battle of this nature looked like.
The world was shocked and appalled. While morale for the
soldiers and the Union as a whole had rebounded with the
victory, a growing outrage blossomed that paved the way for
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and also for his re-
election.
World opinion also changed after Antietam. England and
France had been thinking about stepping into the war on the
side of the South, and had only needed a good excuse to
acknowledge the Confederacy as a fledgling country. This
defeat decided the matter for them, and when England resolved
to not become involved, so too did France.
Back at home, the focus was on the casualties. The dead
needed to be buried; the wounded, tended. The death toll
would rise by another two thousand by the end of the month, so
terrible were the conditions of medical care at the time. As a
side note, the burial of bodies was done so hastily, and so
overwhelmed were the survivors, that several of the mass
graves were too shallow. When troops marched through the
area again months later, they told of horrors of decomposed
dead rising out of the earth and being devoured by local wildlife.
Even without the grisly reminders of the battle, there were
plenty still left to raise questions. A lot of them.
Why hadn’t McClellan acted sooner? Why had waited so
long to reinforce areas that were falling, or to move when the
battle changed? This battle would mark the beginning of the end
of his career in the military. Even the Southerners criticized
McClellan’s handling of the affair and took it as a good sign that
he hadn’t pursued Lee after the battle. As was written in the
Dispatch on September 30:
If we have been thus badly beaten, why is no use made
of the victory? Why has McClellan not crossed the river
and destroyed the army of General Lee? Why has the latter
been allowed to refresh and recruit as his leisure? The truth
is this: The victory, though not so decisive as that at
Manassas, was certainly a Confederate victory.
Indeed, the Battle of Antietam might have been called a
“draw” more than a victory. Whichever it was, it cannot be
argued that this was, in fact, a turning point in the Civil War.
Conclusion
Such an extreme loss of human life had rarely been seen in the
world before or since the Battle of Antietam. The mistakes
made were many; one could go over and over the details
second-guessing the decisions made and make predictions how
the war would have gone if only things had gone differently.
…If only McClellan had acted a lot quicker on the
information he’d gotten.
…If only Lee had turned back when he had resolved to.
…If only all the Northern forces had been engaged in the
battle.
…If only there had been more of a pursuit of the Lee’s
army afterwards.
Regardless, for whatever the reason, each General
approached the war in the method he thought best.
McClellan, who feared making mistakes, wound up making
many with his hesitation to act and commit the troops.
Lee, who was rash and a risk-taker, would take one risk
too many in confronting the Union forces on their home turf.
Maybe there are lessons here for ourselves as well. It is
surely something to think about.
The Battle of Antietam brought about significant change on
many levels. With the Emancipation Proclamation coming only
two weeks later, the entire tenor of the Civil War changed. This
point here gave a new direction and a new purpose to the
Union, and redefined everything.
Could these things have been accomplished without
Antietam? This question is a little harder. Had it not been
immortalized so graphically for the public to see, had there not
been so many people dead, maybe the outrage would not have
been enough to make such a sweeping statement in regards to
slavery. Perhaps though, it was only a matter of time. Another
place, another battle might have done much the same.
In the long run, does it matter?
To the men who fought at Antietam, their world changed
one September day in 1862. To those who lived in slavery, this
would be the day where their world began to change as well.
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