A Field Guide to Antietam: Experiencing the Battlefield through Its History, Places, and People

Introduction

The Maryland Campaign of 1862

An Overview

The newspaper report filed on September 20, 1862, from the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac finally resolved a bit of confusion about the bloody clash of September 17: The name given to this battle is the ‘Antietam.’ ¹ Few had ever heard the name before, so one newspaper spelled it Antietum, while the New York Tribune included a map that traced the course of Antistam Creek. Most Southerners followed their accepted practice of naming battles after the nearest town, so from the start they called this fight Sharpsburg.

Except in direct quotations, this guide will call this battle Antietam, not from any partisan sentiment but simply to follow the National Park Service’s official name for the battlefield through which this guide will take you.

When war came to western Maryland, it arrived unwelcome and unbidden. What brought General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and Major General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac to the rolling hills around this small town in the waning summer of 1862?

The second year of the war had started well enough for Union arms. In February, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and then, in short order, hemmed in and captured a Confederate garrison of 15,000 men at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. A Union flotilla sailed down the Mississippi River and took Memphis, while a much larger combined army-navy venture captured New Orleans, the Confederacy’s largest city. Grant won a bloody two-day battle at Shiloh in April and opened the way for deeper advances into the western Confederacy. In the eastern theater, McClellan had emerged as the Union’s young Napoleon with a plan to take the Confederate capital at Richmond and end the war.

By midsummer, however, the North’s dreams of military victory disappeared. After Shiloh, Grant’s forces bogged down in northern Mississippi around Corinth. Confederate General Braxton Bragg had organized an army in Middle Tennessee to reassert control of that agriculturally rich area and perhaps move north into Kentucky. Most worrisome, McClellan’s grand plan to capture Richmond ended in failure on the very outskirts of the Confederate capital after the Seven Days Battles from June 25 through July 1. McClellan insisted he had not given up on his campaign—he had merely changed his base—but a frustrated President Lincoln recalled the Army of the Potomac to Washington in August. It arrived just as Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia quit its own advance upon Richmond through central Virginia and fell back to Washington in headlong retreat after Lee’s forces routed Pope on August 28–30 on the old Bull Run battlefield of July 1861.

The 1862 Maryland Campaign’s Area of Operations and Preliminary Military Actions

Brigadier General Robert E. Rodes’s Alabamians led the vanguard of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River into Maryland. (LOC)

The Maryland Campaign of 1862 began immediately after the Union debacle at Second Bull Run. On September 3, General Lee wrote to President Jefferson Davis, The present seems to be the most propitious time since the commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to enter Maryland. With the Union forces in Washington demoralized and disorganized and new troops raised in response to Lincoln’s July call for 300,000 more recruits still entirely raw, Lee believed that the time had come for the Confederacy to give material aid to Maryland and afford her an opportunity of throwing off the oppression to which she is now subject.²

Over the past 150 years, historians have compiled a list of factors to explain why Lee suggested his move into Maryland, and—just as important—why Jefferson Davis approved it. The reasons include a number of elements clearly designed to improve the Confederate military situation in the eastern theater. Other factors touched on the Confederacy’s strategic requirements with social, political, or diplomatic implications well beyond their military advantage to Lee’s forces. The list includes such notions as the Confederacy’s desire to carry the war into territory loyal to the Union and exact retribution for depredations on Southern civilians; its wish to encourage Maryland to join the Confederacy and its young men to join Lee’s army; its need for Lee’s army to exploit the disorganization of the defeated Union armies; its hope to enter Pennsylvania to cut important railroads and bridges that facilitated the movement of troops and supplies between the eastern and western theaters; its desire to win victories on Northern soil to improve prospects for improved diplomatic relations with France and England when the potential for success seemed especially promising; a belief that the presence of Confederate troops on Union soil might inspire supporters of the Northern peace party in the fall elections; and its need to refill the empty Confederate quartermaster and commissary stores.³ This guide will focus primarily on those points that most clearly influenced Lee’s operations directly or those factors the actions of his army might have immediately influenced.

Lee did not articulate at the start of his campaign a clear and comprehensive commander’s intent—that is, his army’s goal—for this northward thrust. In his initial correspondence with President Davis, Lee set forth only a few fairly modest aims. First, he wanted to force Union troops to leave the Shenandoah valley—one of the South’s primary breadbaskets—and make them pursue him into central Maryland. If it worked, it may have the effect of carrying the enemy north of the Potomac and out of that key part of Virginia, but, if the plan did not work, he believed it would not result in much evil. He did not plan to invest or besiege Washington or Baltimore; he readily admitted his men were not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory. It lacks much of the material of war, is feeble in transportation, the animals being much reduced, and the men are poorly provided with clothes, and in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes. Still, he believed it to be imperative to harass if we cannot destroy the Union army around Washington. To that end, Lee sent his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac at White’s Ford on September 3.

Lee made it clear early on that he truly wished to encourage Maryland’s citizens to use the arrival of his army as an opportunity to join the Confederacy. He issued General Order No. 102 to prohibit his soldiers from stealing from civilians or destroying their property, lest they exasperate the people … and enlist the populace on the side of the Federal forces in hostility to our own. Few of Lee’s men saw any sign of a popular uprising against the Union, however. As one soldier noted, The majority have so long been under the heel of oppression, that they seem afraid to make any demonstration against the Federal government. Even Lee admitted that notwithstanding individual expressions of kindness that have been given, and the general sympathy in the success of the Confederates States, situated as Maryland is, I do not anticipate any general rising of the people in our behalf.

President Davis refused to be dissuaded so easily. He encouraged Lee to issue a public proclamation to the people of Maryland to explain the motives and purposes of your presence among them at the head of an invading army. Thus, Lee immediately announced, The people of the Confederate States have long watched with the deepest sympathy the wrongs and outrages that have been inflicted upon the citizens of a commonwealth allied to the States of the South by the strongest social, political and commercial ties. They have seen with profound indignation their sister State deprived of every right and reduced to the condition of a conquered province. He encouraged Marylanders to throw off the foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen, and restore independence and sovereignty to your State. Lee assured residents that no constraint upon your free will is intended; no intimidation will be allowed. … Marylanders shall once more enjoy their ancient freedom of thought and speech. We know no enemies among you, and will protect all, of every opinion.

The reception Lee’s army received when it entered the thriving central Maryland town of Frederick on September 6 did not reassure him. While a Georgian reported that ladies waved handkerchiefs and small Confederate flags, a Virginia cavalryman more accurately assessed that "The sentiment of this place is deep Union."⁴ The legendary Barbara Fritchie, regardless of whether or not she actually waved the Stars and Stripes at Stonewall Jackson, clearly belonged to that large faction.

While in Frederick, Lee became increasingly distracted by the growing problem of straggling in his ranks. As he admitted to Davis on September 7, the personnel composing the Army of Northern Virginia is the best in the world, and, if properly disciplined and instructed, would be able successfully to resist any force that could be brought against it, but he conceded that there are individuals, who, from the backwardness in duty, tardiness of movement, and neglect of orders, do it no credit. Although he had no short-term solutions, he determined to push on.

Thus, Lee laid out for his subordinates the next phase of his operation. He had decided to move west from Frederick across the Blue Ridge Mountains into western Maryland. Lee explained to Davis that he had hoped that by crossing the Potomac east of the ridge, the threat his presence posed both to Washington and Baltimore would have forced the withdrawal from Virginia of the Union garrisons at Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry. But those troops had not pursued him as he expected. If Lee planned to remain in Maryland much longer, he needed to eliminate those forces to secure the base of supplies he hoped to establish at Winchester. To accomplish this, he laid out the specific assignments for his subordinates in Special Orders 191. In a plan that illustrated his willingness to accept risk, Lee divided his army into five columns and assigned to each an individual mission. Major General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson’s column took on the critical assignment of forcing the surrenders of the Union garrisons at Harpers Ferry and Martinsburg. The divisions of Major Generals Lafayette McLaws and Richard Heron Anderson, plus that of Brigadier General John G. Walker, would cooperate with Jackson to reduce Harpers Ferry. Major General James Longstreet headed toward Boonsboro, where he could press on to Hagerstown and then perhaps even north into Pennsylvania. Major General Daniel H. Hill’s men served as the army’s rear guard.

Beyond a desire to secure his supply lines, a second important reason for Lee’s change of plan centered on Washington’s response to his presence in Maryland. Calls for action came from every corner of the Union. No one benefited from the crisis more than General McClellan. On September 3, General in Chief Henry W. Halleck told him, A movable army must be immediately organized to meet [Lee] again in the field and ordered him to identify the army corps near Washington that would be ready to take the field in two days. A journalist later wrote, The army and fear cried for McClellan again.⁵

So, Little Mac got his army back. As one chronicler wrote, the soldiers’ idol, General McClellan, is here among them, where they can see him almost daily, and if they will not fight under him they would not fight under Gabriel, if he should blow his trump[et], descend from above, and offer to lead the Yankee host in their last extremity.⁶ All he had to do was create a viable force from the most ready elements of the various Union commands encamped around Washington.

Somehow, by September 5, McClellan put a new army, including a number of units that had never served under his command before, on the road toward Frederick. Some anxious Northerners deemed his pace snail-like, but the New York Tribune admitted that the uncertainty which envelops the Rebel plans remained a legitimate reason for caution. Indeed, the correspondent added, The Rebel mask is complete. I believe it to be literally true that our Generals know neither position, strength, nor purpose of the Rebel leaders.⁷ Speculations on the size of Lee’s army also raised concerns; rumors circulated that Lee had brought at least 200,000 troops with him.

While McClellan showed great satisfaction with the speed of his army’s advance, he—like Lee—remained concerned about Harpers Ferry. When he first considered the military situation early in September, he had recommended the withdrawal of the garrison there, but Halleck gave no such order. On September 12, when McClellan finally received authority to issue commands to the troops there, he found that all communication with the garrison was cut off.

As he considered his options on September 13, McClellan received an astounding piece of news. Two of his soldiers had stumbled across a copy of Lee’s Special Orders 191 at a recent Confederate bivouac site near Frederick; as McClellan described it, I obtained reliable information of the movements and intentions of the enemy, which made it clear that it was necessary to force the passage of the South Mountain range … before any relief could be afforded to Harpers Ferry. Union staff officers questioned the authenticity of the document, and others openly wondered if it might be a ruse. In the end, McClellan determined the order was genuine.

Indeed, McClellan believed he needed only to move quickly to act on this new information. Up to now, McClellan had deemed his army unprepared to move swiftly and aggressively. During the advance from Washington to Frederick, McClellan explained, he refused to require long marches in order to give some little rest to troops worn down by previous long-continued marching and severe fighting. Even with the knowledge that Harpers Ferry required succor, McClellan did not rush his army forward. In the end, it did not matter much. By the time McClellan moved, Jackson’s multiple columns had converged on the Union garrison and prepared to take it by storm if it did not surrender.

Still, McClellan caught up with Lee, just not at Harpers Ferry. On Sunday, September 14, elements of the two armies clashed in three separate mountain gaps in the Blue Ridge. At Turner’s Gap and Fox’s Gap—generally considered together as the Battle of South Mountain—McClellan caught up with D. H. Hill’s rear guard, stormed the heights, and sent the Confederate defenders and their reinforcements into headlong retreat down the opposite side of the ridge. Approximately six miles south of Fox’s Gap, McClellan ordered Major General William B. Franklin’s VI Corps to clear the roads through Crampton’s Gap, the most direct practicable route for the relief of Harper’s Ferry. McLaws commanded the Confederate division nearest to the gap, and when apprised of Franklin’s approach, he sent forward Brigadier General Howell Cobb with a brigade to hold it if it cost the life of every man in [your] command, and it almost came to that. Franklin’s men shattered Cobb’s line, too.

The Army of the Potomac did its commander proud on September 14. The fighting at the three gaps cost the two armies a combined 5,000 men—Fox’s Gap alone took the lives of Union Major General Jesse L. Reno of the IX Corps and Confederate Brigadier General Samuel Garland Jr.—but for the first time in months, Northern newspapers could boast of decisive Union victories. The events of the day forced Lee to make a tough decision. With his army divided in the face of a victorious foe that outnumbered him, he had every reason to consider abandoning his campaign and pulling back to Virginia. He had not collected great numbers of Maryland recruits or massive amounts of supplies. He had begun to run short on maneuver room and had to consider fighting with the Potomac River behind him, making impossible a ready escape if disaster befell his army. Initially, he determined to withdraw across the river to Virginia and gave the order about 8:00 P.M. on September 14. Overnight, however, Lee changed his mind and decided to accept the risk; early on September 15, he ordered his division commanders to concentrate at Sharpsburg, a small Maryland town just a few miles from the river.

By now, McClellan had learned that the garrison at Harpers Ferry and its 12,500 men, 13,000 small arms, 200 wagons, and 73 cannons had surrendered to Stonewall Jackson. But he also heard from Union sympathizers that Lee was retreating in the greatest haste and in disordered masses to the river. If McClellan attacked before Lee’s army concentrated—if he hit before Jackson could join Lee from Harpers Ferry—victory still could be his. He admitted as much: My instructions [for September 15] were that if the enemy were on the march they were to be at once attacked. But, if they were found in force and in position, the corps were to be placed in position for attack, but no attack was to be made until I reached the front. No attack took place on September 15 because, in part, Lee had decided to make a stand.

Your tour will begin with the position Lee chose to defend and with the preliminary actions as the two armies probed each other’s lines on September 16, the day before the Battle of Antietam. The tremendous clash of arms that exploded across this landscape on September 17, 1862, became the single bloodiest day in American military history. But the events that swept over these fields left a legacy far more important than that. Lee’s return to Virginia and the abandonment of his campaign into Maryland gave Lincoln the victory he required to issue one of the most important pronouncements in national history, the Emancipation Proclamation.

How to Use This Book

To explore the Battle of Antietam’s rich history, you must spend time on the battlefield itself. This field guide is designed to help you discover for yourself the heroism and the tragedy that unfolded on this landscape.

Each stop begins with an orientation to the landscape. It identifies—often with a photograph—a specific location in which to stand for the best view of the action described in the accompanying narrative. The orientation section also identifies the most prominent battlefield landmarks to help you understand how the action at that stop fits into the battle as a whole. Become an active learner and follow the easy instructions in the What Happened Here? sections to discover where to look, which way to turn, and how to find the essential visual cues to help you place the battle action on the ground around you.

Orientation

To prepare for your tour, begin by learning about the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, itself. Before the armies arrived here, few people knew much about this small town bounded by two waterways. The Potomac River ran west and then south of the town. Just to the east ran Antietam Creek, the name allegedly coming from an Algonquian phrase meaning swift-flowing stream.

In July 1763, Joseph Chapline, owner of nearby Mount Pleasant, divided a 300-acre parcel of land into 187 small lots that became the settlement of Sharpes Burgh, named after colonial governor Horatio Sharpe. Sharpsburg developed a stable and diverse local economy, based initially on agriculture and the Antietam Iron Works that began operations in the 1750s. The arrival in 1836 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal changed the pace of life in town. It introduced a new era of commerce and trade and increased the use of both black slave and white immigrant labor. A growing road network, including toll roads called turnpikes, linked Sharpsburg to Boonsboro to the east, Hagerstown to the north, and, over a handsome bridge, Shepherdstown across the Potomac in Virginia. Despite the popular notion that the peculiar institution in Maryland thrived mainly on the tobacco plantations of the Eastern Shore, western Marylanders used slave labor. At least 150 slaves lived in the Sharpsburg District in 1860. Even the pacifist Dunkers, whose original rules prohibited slaves, had amended them to permit slavery under specific circumstances. According to the research of Kathleen A. Ernst, in 1860 Sharpsburg also supported a free black population of 203.¹

The Tour Stops Explored in This Field Guide

Many residents of the Sharpsburg area evacuated their homes as the rival armies concentrated for battle. (LOC)

The Six Questions

Each stop may consider up to six important questions. The questions appear below, followed by answers to introduce the Battle of Antietam, the kinds of information in each section, and the most productive sources of information.

Question 1: What Happened Here?

This section provides a basic narrative to explain the events that took place at each site. You will find at least one map at each stop to help you understand the specific action that took place at that location. To inject a sense of immediacy, this section draws heavily—but not exclusively—upon a wide variety of Civil War–era eyewitness sources written before, during, and soon after the battle itself, especially the after-action reports written by officers in both armies shortly after the battle, most of them later published in volume 19 of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (OR).

Additionally, excellent descriptions—as well as enduring inaccuracies—flowed from the pens of correspondents who worked for Northern and Southern newspapers. As one journalist reminded his readers just after Antietam, The public do not appreciate the debt they owe to the war correspondent of the newspapers. They do very often a soldier’s duty without one iota of a soldier’s reward.² Soldiers often accused the newspapermen of open favoritism, demanding that some conscientious not-to-be-bought correspondent … give faithful accounts of the part taken in the different battles by the different regiments, brigades, divisions and corps. That was the only way that other regiments than those who have to buy their glory from penny-a-liners could get the honor and praise they so justly merit.³ To fill such gaps, soldiers sent their own firsthand accounts to their hometown newspapers; excerpts from a number of them are included here.

Unfortunately, the soldiers and correspondents of 1862 did not reveal everything. Thus, the Antietam Studies Collection from the National Archives helps to explain what happened at each stop. This file contains the voluminous correspondence from 1890 to 1905 relating to the work of the Antietam Battlefield Board charged with marking the battle lines, much of it between Ezra A. Carman, who served at Antietam as colonel of the 13th New Jersey Infantry, and Union and Confederate veterans of all ranks and commands who fought here. Other repositories, most notably the New York Public Library, also contain substantial primary source collections concerning the 1862 Maryland Campaign and the Battle of Antietam.

Question 2: Who Fought Here?

The organization of armies and the various component units often confuse visitors to Antietam, especially those just starting their study of the Civil War. You should take heart in realizing that the Civil War generation shared those feelings. As one Virginia journalist explained even a year after Antietam, Military nomenclature is so strange to me, and the repetition of brigades, of divisions, and the regiments of brigades, with the names of their several commanders, hurried through by the reciter who is familiar with them, confuses my attention.⁴ Nonetheless, you will find it useful to familiarize yourself with basic army organization, just as this reporter ultimately did.

Both armies used the same basic table of organization. A Civil War army’s smallest building block, the company, numbered about 100 soldiers commanded by a captain. A cavalryman might call his company a troop; an artilleryman called his company a battery. More typically, ten or twelve infantry or cavalry companies served together in the next higher level of organization, the regiment. A majority of the monuments on the Antietam battlefield salute the service of regiments. Nearly all Civil War soldiers considered their regiment to be their military home. A regimental designation contained a number, a state name (or, simply, United States to designate a unit from the U.S. Regular Army), and its branch of service. Thus, the 124th Pennsylvania Infantry was the one-hundred-twenty-fourth regiment raised in the Keystone State for Federal service, and its members served as foot soldiers.

A regiment with full ranks and commanded by a colonel contained a little over 1,000 men. At Antietam, however, deaths in battle and from disease, losses through capture or desertion, and medical discharges reduced many regiments to far less than half that number; indeed, some regiments in both armies brought fewer than 100 men onto the field at Antietam. At the same time, some regiments—mostly Northern—brought 650 or more troops into the battle. These new Union regiments had formed in answer to President Lincoln’s call in July 1862 for 300,000 more men, most of whom had just entered Federal service in mid- to late August. Antietam became their first test under fire.

In Major General George B. McClellan’s Union Army of the Potomac, typically four regiments—but sometimes more—comprised a brigade, commanded by either a colonel or a brigadier general. Union brigades usually contained regiments from different states; for instance, Brigadier General Nathan Kimball’s brigade that fought at the Bloody Lane included regiments from Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. A brigade in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia generally contained four or five regiments from a single state, usually commanded by a brigadier general with strong ties to that state. Thus, Brigadier General Harry T. Hays, a Tennessean who became a prominent New Orleans attorney before the Civil War, fought in the Bloody Cornfield in command of a brigade made up of five regiments from Louisiana.

In General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the division—comprising two to five brigades and commanded by a major general—was the next highest level of organization, and, until after Antietam, it was the largest military unit authorized by the Confederate Congress. Lee had grouped together several divisions into an informal arrangement he called commands that divided his army into two halves. Major General James Longstreet commanded three divisions, while Major General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson commanded three more. In addition, as historian Joseph L. Harsh has shown, Lee entered Maryland with several unattached divisions that cooperated with either Longstreet or Jackson without officially being assigned to them during the battle.⁵ A weak leader might face contentious command relationships from this unconventional organization; Lee, however, made it work.

McClellan’s Army of the Potomac used the division level of organization, too, but it also combined two or three divisions into a larger grouping called an army corps, a Napoleonic innovation that combined three divisions of infantry with supporting commands of cavalry and artillery, all under the command of a major general. Northerners used both Roman numbers and words to designate an army corps. Thus, Major General Joseph Hooker’s command might be designated as the I Corps or the First Corps. At Antietam, the Army of the Potomac included six corps—I, II, V, VI, IX, and XII—plus an infantry division from the IV Corps and an independent cavalry division comprised of five small brigades.

When McClellan received orders on September 3 to cobble together a force to resist the incursion, he selected a number of corps-sized units around Washington that had never served together. The II, IV, V, and VI Corps came from his own Army of the Potomac that had fought in the unsuccessful Peninsula Campaign to take Richmond. To these troops, McClellan added two newly renumbered corps—the I and XII—that had served in Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia and recently suffered major defeats at Cedar Mountain and Second Bull Run; Hooker came from McClellan’s own III Corps to lead the new I Corps, while Major General Joseph K. F. Mansfield left a distinguished career as a senior army engineer and staff officer to take his first-ever combat command at the head of the XII Corps. Only the IX Corps under Major General Ambrose E. Burnside came to Antietam with a record of success; its victories along the coast of North Carolina in the spring of 1862 produced a steady stream of good news for supporters of the Union cause. Taken together, large elements of McClellan’s army at Antietam had never fought beside each other before September 17, 1862.

In addition to identifying the units that fought at each stop, this question addresses the issue of relative numbers engaged in the action under consideration. From the outset, understand that this topic remains one of the most contentious questions relating to this battle. As Carman rightly warns, No battle of the Civil War has given rise to more discussion of the number of combatants engaged than Antietam. Since no single source provides reliable information on this question, the numbers in this section draw most heavily upon the OR, volume 19, and Carman’s own compilations of unit strengths found in the text and appendices of Thomas G. Clemens’s outstanding 2012 edition of The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. For now, though, according to Carman, it is sufficient to say that the Union force engaged numbered 46,146 infantry, 3,828 cavalry, 5,982 artillery and 301 guns, an aggregate of 55,956. The Confederate army engaged numbered 29,222 infantry, about 4,500 cavalry, including the horse artillery, and 3,692 artillery, with 219 guns, an aggregate of 37,351.⁶

Question 3: Who Commanded Here?

Success or failure depended heavily both on the sound decisions made by senior commanders and on the ability of their subordinates to execute them. This section includes thumbnail biographies of some of the more interesting leaders featured at each stop, mostly drawn from such standards as Ezra J. Warner’s Generals in Blue and Generals in Gray. Since Antietam offers a full range of examples of sound and poor leadership, commentaries on command style from contemporary observers also provide important insights. Let us begin with the rival army commanders:

Major General George Brinton McClellan (1826–85), a native of Philadelphia, showed great intellectual promise as a child. By age sixteen, he attended the University of Pennsylvania but withdrew in 1842 to accept an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He graduated second among the fifty-nine members in the Class of 1846 and served with distinction on the march to Mexico City. During the Crimean War, he served as the junior member of the three-man U.S. Army observation team. In 1857 he resigned his commission to become chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad and, soon thereafter, president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad.

Major General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. (LOC)

At the outbreak of the Civil War, McClellan reentered military service as a major general of Ohio volunteers. He worked so hard to organize the state’s troops that Lincoln appointed him a major general in the U.S. Regular Army in May 1861. Only Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the general in chief of the entire U.S. Army, outranked him. A few minor victories in western Virginia—especially coming at about the same time as the first major Union defeat at First Bull Run in July 1861—quickly gave him command of the Army of the Potomac. When Scott retired in November 1861, McClellan succeeded him. Little Mac, as he was known, did not agree with President Lincoln on the war’s aims and its conduct, and the president disdained the general’s slowness, stubbornness, and insubordinate streak. Finally, in mid-March 1862, well before he deemed his army ready to undertake such an operation, he began his Peninsula Campaign to take Richmond. When the effort ended in failure, and as his army lost over 16,000 men during the Seven Days Battles of June 25–July 1, his star seemed to be in decline, but after regaining command of the Army of the Potomac again on September 3, 1862, McClellan wrote to his wife, Again I have been called upon to save the country.⁷

McClellan has become one of the most polarizing figures of the entire Civil War era. Where one saw him as a modest man who rarely speaks of himself or his acquirements, others saw only arrogance and egotism. Where some saw the contour of the head to be intellectual, indicating a great firmness and self-possession, others saw weakness and moral cowardice. While some praised him for never forgetting the comfort of his soldiers or subordinates … and [taking] especial care of the sick and wounded, others saw only his unwillingness to send them into battle, even to carry out his own plans.⁸ As you will learn, McClellan’s performance at Antietam won him ardent supporters and vehement critics well beyond the war generation.

General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. (LOC)

General Robert E. Lee (1807–70), born in Virginia to Revolutionary War hero Light-horse Harry Lee and Ann Hill Carter Lee, followed his father into military service, starting as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy in 1825. He graduated four years later, second in the Class of 1829, without a single demerit remaining on his record—it was possible then for cadets to be awarded merits to cancel out demerits against them—and received a brevet commission as a second lieutenant of engineers. Two years later, he married Mary Ann Randolph Custis and began a family that ultimately included seven children, including three sons who followed him into Confederate military service. During the Mexican War, he served with distinction as an engineer on General Scott’s staff for the march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, often conducting reconnaissance at high personal risk. He served as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 1852 through 1855, when he transferred from the engineers to accept a promotion as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry posted in west Texas. He held that rank in late 1859 when, on leave at Arlington, Lee received orders to secure the Harpers Ferry arsenal and capture abolitionist John Brown, a mission he accomplished with a detachment of U.S. Marines and a young cavalry lieutenant named J. E. B. Stuart.

After Fort Sumter, Scott—with President Lincoln’s approval—had tendered to Lee the command of the field forces of the U.S. Army. Lee, however, refused; on April 20, 1861, he resigned his commission and soon after accepted the command of the military forces of Virginia and became a general in the Confederate army on June 14, 1861. Lee did not enjoy much success during his first year in Confederate service, but President Davis assigned him to command the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862, after General Joseph E. Johnston fell seriously wounded at Fair Oaks outside Richmond. He quickly eliminated all doubts about his aggressiveness and energy by pushing away McClellan’s army from the capital’s gates during the Seven Days Battles. After soundly thrashing the Union forces at Second Bull Run in late August 1862, he entered Maryland.

As you will see, Lee’s performance during the Maryland Campaign also generated considerable debate. As E. Porter Alexander, his best artilleryman, wrote in admiration of Lee’s willingness to take audacious risks, The more that one studies the situation [at Sharpsburg], the more amazed he must be at the audacity [with] which [Lee] deliberately sought a pitched battle in the open field, without a yard of earthworks, against a better-equipped army of double his force, and with a river close behind him, to be crossed by a single ford, peculiarly bad and exposed, in case he had to retreat. A defeat would certainly involve the utter destruction of his army.⁹ When Lee died in October 1870, his last words brought him back to a crucial event at Antietam, the site of which you will visit at Stop 17: Tell [A. P.] Hill he must come up.

Question 4: Who Fell Here?

After only twelve hours of combat, the names of approximately 23,000 soldiers found a place on long casualty lists, and families waited with dread in homes across the North and South. Neither army had developed a system for delivering such sad tidings to families back home. Many discovered their loved ones’ fates from long lists printed first in big-city newspapers and then reprinted a few days later in smaller communities. Others learned from letters written directly to small-town newspaper editors by a regimental adjutant or some other responsible correspondent who sent the news directly to the source they knew family and friends most likely would read. Still others heard through personal letters written by surviving officers or family friends. Some never learned anything at all.

This section provides a numerical summary of the losses suffered by the units that fought at each stop. In most cases, the numbers will reflect brigade or regimental losses. In certain cases, a further breakdown of regimental casualties into the individual categories of killed, wounded, and missing better illuminates the nature of the struggle. In any case, all casualty numbers simply provide estimates and are not to be considered the final word. The numbers in this section reflect those found in volume 19 of the OR and Clemens’s 2012 edition of Carman’s The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. Curt Johnson and Richard C. Anderson Jr.’s Artillery Hell: The Employment of Artillery at Antietam offers the best compilation of artillery casualties.

After the numerical summary, each stop features an individual vignette or two to personalize the experience of death in ways that numbers simply cannot convey. The Compiled Service Records of Union and Confederate soldiers held at the National Archives, the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion compiled by the U.S. Army Surgeon General’s office, and regimental histories written by the veterans themselves all contain treasure troves of information about the individual fates of thousands of Antietam’s neglected fallen; some of their stories can be found here.

Antietam’s tragic story reached well beyond the battlefield. The U.S. Congress had just authorized the widow’s pension system in July 1862; Antietam would provide an early test of the efficiency of the burdensome and complicated application process to obtain long-term financial support, and much of the paperwork is still preserved at the National Archives. The best that surviving family members of a fallen Southern soldier might do was to submit a claim to the Confederate War Department for any back pay or allowances still owed to their fallen soldier. Compiled Service Records of thousands of Confederate soldiers at the National Archives show that the convoluted claims process for bereaved mothers, fathers, and widows provided just as many unsatisfying results as those their Northern counterparts faced.

Question 5: Who Lived Here?

The fighting at Antietam swept across the open fields and woodlots of family farms. Still, every resident in the region felt the impact of the passage of the armies in some way, and their experiences, too, add to the Antietam story.

This section identifies the owners of properties visited by the battle’s greatest carnage and explores the families’ post-battle efforts to return to life as they once knew it. Many residents in the Sharpsburg area filed damage claims, most with little success. An owner of property damaged as a consequence of the actual fighting rarely received direct compensation because no one could prove that the Union army—and only the Union army—caused the destruction. Those few fortunate individuals who held receipts to prove that Union troops took certain supplies—usually hay to feed horses—and used them specifically in the conduct of military duties were the most likely to win any compensation at all. This opportunity to explore one aspect of the challenges facing the residents of the Sharpsburg area who endured the legacy of battle long after the armies marched away offers a generally underappreciated element of the Antietam experience.

Question 6: What Did They Say about It Later?

We view past events through two sets of interpretive lenses: the objectivity that seeks the truth of history and the seductive, sanitizing, sentimentalizing, selective, and self-serving pull of memory. As time passed, more than a few veterans gave in to the pull of memory to construct a version of the past that expressed their justifiable pride in their accomplishments as they chose to remember them. Errors of omission, errors of commission, or exaggerations of fundamental truths mattered little to Union veterans of all ranks who filled columns such as Fighting Them Over in the National Tribune, the Grand Army of the Republic’s weekly newspaper, or to Southerners who submitted to Confederate Veteran magazine their own cherished versions of the Antietam story. Former Confederate Lieutenant Colonel S. D. Thruston had such men in mind when he thanked a fellow survivor for using every effort to put truth on record concerning that most bloody day and not blot the pages of history with the hearsay of every would-be hero.¹⁰