"The Bloodiest Day" - September 17, 1862 - Antietam

Almost 23,000 soldiers were killed, 

wounded or missing during twelve hours of combat on September 17, 1862.

It is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. More Americans died in battle on September 17, 1862, than on any other day in the nation's military history. 

The Union had 12,401 casualties with 2,108 dead. Confederate casualties were 10,318 with 1,546 dead. This represented 25% of the Federal force and 31% of the Confederate. 

More than twice as many Americans were killed or mortally wounded in combat at Antietam that day as in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.

The highest single day total of American casualties in World War II was June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion of Normandy: the Allied casualties figures for D-Day have generally been estimated at 10,000, including 2,500 dead. The US National D-Day Memorial Foundation has verified 2,499 American D-Day fatalities and 1,914 from the other Allied nations, a total of 4,413 dead (much higher than the traditional figure of 2,500 dead). The total German casualties on D-Day are not known, but are estimated as being between 4,000 and 9,000 men.

The 15th Massachusetts Infantry went into the Battle of Antietam with 606 soldiers. 318 were killed or wounded, the highest number for any Union regiment in the battle. One of the men who survived "the Cornfield" was Corporal. Lewis Reed of the 12th Massachusetts

Lewis Reed

Regiment. He wrote about that day in a letter years later. He remembered all the men around him screaming for help:

I found myself on the ground with a strange feeling covering my body ... My shirt and blouse filled with blood and I supposed it was my last day on earth. I had the usual feelings of home and friends and thousands of thoughts ran through my mind at once.

Reed, who had been shot through the shoulder, managed to stagger to the cover of nearby woods. He would live to the age of 83. As for his fellow soldiers, 2 of every 3 men in his unit would be dead or wounded by nightfall.

In addition to these losses, an untold number of soldiers and civilians died from disease following the battle. Every house, barn and church was turned into a hospital. Dead men and horses lay out in the open for days, adding to the unsanitary conditions.

 Robert E. Lee

Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia — about 55,000 men —entered the state of Maryland on September 3, 1862, following their victory at Second Bull Run on August 30. The Confederate leadership intended to take the war into enemy territory: the invasion of Maryland was intended to run simultaneously with an invasion of Kentucky. It was also necessary for logistical reasons, as northern Virginia's farms had been stripped bare of food.  

President Jefferson Davis and General Lee hoped that a victory before the November elections in the North might persuade the north to negotiate a peace settlement that would end combat and allow the South to continue independently, with slavery intact in their country. Confederate leaders assumed that Maryland would welcome the Confederate forces warmly. Troops sang the tune "Maryland, My Maryland!" as they marched, but by that point in the war, pro-Union sentiment was winning out, especially in the western parts of the state.

Private Alexander Hunter of Virginia, a Confederate soldier in the 17th Virginia Infantry,

Alexander Hunter

wrote published his memoirs of the Maryland campaign in 1903:

Our men were so hungry that they gathered the crackers and meat from the haversacks of the dead Federals and ate as they fought. . . . In all these weeks we had no change of clothing and we were literally devoured by vermin. We had no tents and slept on the ground, and slept soundly even though the rain was pouring in torrents. A prize fighter trains about two months to get himself in perfect condition, but we had been training in a more vigorous manner for nearly two years, and the men were skin, bone and muscle.

We lived on apples and green corn all of the time, and the soldiers began to drop out of the ranks at every halt. Then an order came for the barefooted men to remain behind and report in Winchester, and some thousands threw away their shoes. Every step our army made northward it became weaker.   At last we stood on the long-dreamed-of banks of the Potomac. It was near Shepherdstown, and Maryland, my Maryland, met our gaze at last. . . 

Up the dusty broad pike northward to Hagerstown, where the people received the ragged "Rebs" as if they were belted knights, with victory on their plumes. Here every soldier got as much as he could eat. Then there came the long roll and we fell into ranks and sorrowfully turned our faces southward . . on the morning of the 14th of September halted on the fields of Boonsboro, tired—and oh, so hungry. Apples and corn, corn and apples, were our only fare; eating them raw, roasted, boiled together and fried, they served to sustain life, and that was all. . . 

I have often been asked about the rebel yell. I have always answered that we Rebs were savage with hunger, and men always "holler" when hungry.

On Saturday, September 13, while Union General George McClellan's 75,500-man Army of the Potomac was moving to intercept the Confederate army, two Union soldiers, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell and First Sergeant John M. Bloss of the 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, discovered a mislaid copy of Lee's detailed battle plans, Special Order 191, wrapped around

George McClellan

three cigars. Mitchell realized the significance of the document, and it was taken to the corps headquarters. There, an aide to General Alpheus Williams recognized the signature of R. H. Chilton, the assistant to Lee who had signed the order. Williams forwarded the dispatch to McClellan.  The order indicated that Lee had divided his army and dispersed portions geographically, making each subject to isolation and defeat if McClellan could move quickly enough. McClellan waited about 18 hours before deciding to take advantage of this intelligence and reposition his forces, thus squandering an opportunity to defeat Lee decisively.

Clifton John interviewed residents of Sharpsburg in 1913, including Teresa Kretzer, who told him:

We were all up in the Lutheran Church at Sunday school on the Sunday before

Lutheran Church, Sharpsburg, after the battle

the battle when the Rebel cavalry came dashing through the town. The whole assembly flocked out, and there was nothing but excitement from that on. We just imagined something was going to happen, and the children ran home from church in terror. There was no dinner eaten that day. The people were too frightened. We'd go out the front door and stand waiting to see what would be next to come.

I was twenty years old then. My father was a blacksmith, and we lived in this same big stone house on the main street of the town. I suppose the house was built a hundred and fifty or more years ago.  Most of us in this region favored the Union, and the ladies had made a big flag out of material that the townspeople bought. For a while we had it on a pole in the square, but some of the Democratic boys cut the flag rope every night. So we took the flag down and hung it on a rope stretched across from our garret window to that of the house opposite. In pleasant weather it was out all the time. But when we heard that Lee had crossed the Potomac Pa began to be uneasy, and he says, "Girls, what you goin' to do with that flag? If the Rebels come into town they'll take it sure as the world."  He thought we'd better hide it in the ground somewhere. So a lady friend of mine and I put it in a strong wooden box, and buried it in the ash pile behind the smokehouse in the garden.

When the Rebel cavalry went through that Sunday we had no idea what they were up to, and we couldn’t help being fearful that we were in danger. We expected trouble that night, but all was quiet until the next day. Then more Rebels came, and they nearly worried us to death asking for something to eat. They were half famished and they looked like tramps — filthy and ragged.

By Tuesday there was enough going on to let us know we were likely to have a battle near by. Early in the day two or three Rebels, who'd been informed by some one that a Union flag was concealed at my father's place, came right to the house, and I met 'em at the door. Their leader said: "We've come to demand that flag you've got here. Give it up at once or we'll search the house."  "I'll not give it up, and I guess you'll not come any farther than you are, sir," I said.
They were impudent fellows, and he responded, "If you don't tell me where that flag is I'll draw my revolver on you."  "It's of no use for you to threaten," I said. "Rather than have you touch a fold of that starry flag I laid it in ashes."
They seemed to be satisfied then and went away without suspecting just how I'd laid it in ashes.

Sketch by Alfred Waud of Civilians Fleeing Sharpsburg before the Battle of Antietam

Tuesday afternoon the neighbors began to come in here. Our basement was very large with thick stone walls, and they wanted to take refuge in it if there was danger. There were women and children of all ages and some very old men. Mostly they stood roundabout in the yard listening and looking. The cannonading started late in the day, and when there was a very loud report they scampered to the cellar.  A lot of townspeople run out of the village to a cave about three miles from here near the Potomac. The cave was just an overhanging ledge of rocks, but shells and cannon balls would fly over it and couldn’t hurt the people under the cliff. I reckon seventy-five went to that cave. 

Before day, on Wednesday, a cannon ball tore up the pavement out in front of our house. Oh my soul! we thought we were gone. There was no more sleep, but most of us were awake anyhow. After that, you know, we all flew to the cellar. Very little was stored in there at that time of year. We carried down some seats, and we made board benches around, and quite a number of us got up on the potato bunks and the apple scaffolds. We were as comfortable as we could possibly be in a cellar, but it's a wonder we didn’t all take our deaths of colds in that damp place.  We didn’t have any breakfast — you bet we didn’t — and no dinner was got that day, or supper — no, indeed! We had to live on fear. But a few of the women thought enough to bring some food in their baskets for the children. The battle didn’t prevent the children from eating. They didn’t understand the danger.  A number of babies were there, and several dogs, and every time the firing began extra hard the babies would cry and the dogs would bark. Often the reports were so loud they shook the walls. Occasionally a woman was quite unnerved and hysterical, and some of those old aged men would break out in prayer.

Leslie's Illustrated Magazine later published this engraving showing Sharpsburg residents taking shelter in the Kretzer basement.

In the height of the fighting six Rebel soldiers opened the basement door and said, "We're comin' in, but we're not a-goin' to hurt you."  We had a spring in the cellar. The water filled a shallow tank, and that was where our family got what water was used in the house. Those refugee soldiers went back in a little nook right next to the spring. There they stood like sardines in a box, and every once in a while one would slip down into the water.

We had two cows and a horse in our stable, and at dinner time Mother and I went to feed 'em. We climbed up to pull down some hay and found the haymow just full of Rebels a-layin' there hiding.  "Madam, don't be frightened," one of 'em said to Mother. "We're hidin' till the battle is over. We're tired of fightin'. We were pressed into service, and we're goin' to give ourselves up as soon as the Yankees get here."  And that was what they did, When the Yankees rushed into town these Rebels came through the garden and gave themselves up as prisoners.  There were deserters hid in every conceivable place in the town. We had a lot of sacks of seed wheat on our back porch, and some of the skulkers piled the sacks up on the outside of the porch three or four feet high, as a sort of bulwark, which they lay down behind to shelter themselves. How they did curse their leaders for bringing them into this slaughter pen. They said they hoped the hottest place in hell would be their leaders' portion.

Some of the townsmen in the cellar would come up and venture out under the porch, but they were afraid to stay out; and the danger wasn’t just fancied either. A shell exploded right out here at our front gate and killed or wounded seven men.

And yet, mind you, on Wednesday afternoon, another girl and myself went up to the attic, and though the bullets were raining on the roof, we threw open the shutter and looked out toward the battleground. We were curious to know what was going on. The bullets could have struck us just as easy, but we didn’t seem to fear them. On all the distant hills around were the blue uniforms and shining bayonets of our men, and I thought it was the prettiest sight I ever saw in my life. Yes, there were our men, advancing cautiously, driven back again and again, but persistently returning and pushing nearer. My! it was lovely, and I felt so glad to think that we were going to get them into town shortly. We stayed up there I suppose a couple of hours at that little window, and then old Dr. Kelsey came hunting for us and made us come down. I shall always remember what we saw from that window, and many times I go up to the attic and look out, and the view brings it all back.

In the evening mother and I slipped down to the stable and did the milking. But afterward we went back to the cellar, for the firing kept up till ten o'clock. Then we came up and snatched what little bit we could to eat. We didn’t cook anything but took what was prepared, like bread and butter and milk. Our neighbors who had been in the cellar didn’t attempt to go home. Some of the older ones we accommodated in beds, others lay on the floors, but the best part of the people sat up all night and watched, for we didn’t know what was going to come on us.

About midnight we heard the Rebels retreating. Oh! the cannon just came down the hill bouncing. And the cavalry — my! if they didn’t dash through here! The infantry, too, were going on a dead run, and some of the poor, hungry fellows were so weak they were saying to their stronger comrades, "Take hold of my hand, and help me along." A lot of 'em were drownded in going across the Potomac.

We were overjoyed to know that our men had won — yes, we certainly were happy. Well, the next morning everything was quiet. It was an unearthly quiet after all the uproar of the battle. The people who had taken refuge with us saw that the danger was over, and they scattered away to their homes. Father and I went out on the front pavement. We could see only a few citizens moving about, but pretty soon a Federal officer came cautiously around the corner by the church. He asked Father if any one was hurt in the town and said they had tried to avoid shelling it, and he was awful sorry they couldn’t help dropping an occasional shell among the houses.

I lost no time now in getting our flag from the ash heap so I could have it where it would be seen when our men marched into the town. I draped it on the front of the house, but I declare to goodness! I had to take that flag down. It made the officers think our house was a hotel, and they'd ride up, throw their reins to their orderlies, and come clanking up the steps with their swords and want something to eat. So I hurried to get it swung across the street, and after that, as the officers and men passed under it they all took off their hats. Their reverence for the flag was beautiful, and so was the flag.

I had a little flag in my hand, and while I was waving and waving it and cheering our victorious troops some prisoners marched by, and, bless your soul! among them I saw the very men who had demanded the big flag that was now suspended across the street. They looked at the flag and at me and shouted, "You said it was burned!" and they cursed me till some of our men drew their swords and quieted 'em down. "We'll settle with you when we come through here again," they called back, but they never came.

Our men were much cleaner and better fed than the Rebels, and their clothing was whole. The trains soon arrived with the hardtack, and there were baggage wagons and ambulances and everything. We had our men here with us quite a while camped in the town woods, and so constant was the coming and going of troops and army conveyances on the highways that we didn’t get to speak to our neighbors across the street for weeks. Those were exciting times, but we felt safe. Of course there were some common, rough fellows among the soldiers, but as a general thing we found them very nice and we became much attached to them. When they went away it left us decidedly lonely here.

Jacob Cox

On Sunday, September 14, McClellan ordered General Jesse Reno's corps to secure Turner's Gap in South Mountain. Reno called on Jacob Cox's division; Rutherford B. Hayes and the Ohio 23rd were chose to spearhead the assault. During the attack, a musket ball struck Hayes' left arm just above the elbow, fracturing but not splintering the bone, leaving a gaping hole, and bruising his ribs.  Hayes later wrote: 

Just as I gave the command to charge I felt a stunning blow and found a musket ball had struck my left arm just above the elbow. Fearing that an artery might be cut, I asked a soldier near me to tie my handkerchief above the wound. I soon felt weak, faint, and sick at the stomach. I laid down and was pretty comfortable. I was perhaps twenty feet behind the line of my men, and could form a pretty accurate notion of the way the fight was going. The enemy's fire was occasionally very heavy; balls passed near my face and hit the ground all around me. I could see wounded men staggering or carried to the rear; but I felt sure our men were holding their own. I listened anxiously to hear the approach of reinforcements; wondered they did not come.  I was told there was danger of the enemy flanking us on our left, near where I was lying. I called out to Captain Drake, who was on the left, to let his company wheel backward so as to face the threatened attack. His company fell back perhaps twenty yards, and the whole line gradually followed the example, thus leaving me between our line and the enemy. Major Comly came along and asked me if it was my intention the whole line should fall back. I told him no, that I merely wanted one or two of the left companies to wheel backward so as to face an enemy said to be coming on our left. I said if the line was now in good position to let it remain and to face the left companies as I intended. This, I suppose, was done.

Rutherford B. Hayes

The firing continued pretty warm for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, when it gradually died away on both sides. After a few minutes' silence I began to doubt whether the enemy had disappeared or whether our men had gone farther back. I called out, "Hallo Twenty-third men, are you going to leave your colonel here for the enemy?" In an instant a half dozen or more men sprang forward to me, saying, "Oh no, we will carry you wherever you want us to." The enemy immediately opened fire on them. Our men replied to them, and soon the battle was raging as hotly as ever. I ordered the men back to cover, telling them they would get me shot and themselves too. They went back and about this time Lieutenant Jackson came and insisted upon taking me out of the range of the enemy's fire. He took me back to our line and, feeling faint, he laid me down behind a big log and gave me a canteen of water, which tasted so good. Soon after, the fire having again died away, he took me back up the hill, where my wound was dressed by Dr. Joe.  I then walked about half a mile to the house of Widow Kugler . . . 

I omitted to say that a few moments after I first laid down . . .I got up and began to give directions about things, but after a few moments, getting very weak, I again laid down.  While I was lying down I had considerable talk with a wounded soldier lying near me.  I gave him messages for my wife and friends in case I should not get up.  We were right jolly and friendly, it was by no means an unpleasant experience.

Despite his wound, Hayes continued to give commands. He was taken from the battle field to a field hospital where Dr. Joe Webb dressed the wound.  He was then taken by ambulance to Middletown, Maryland, where a local merchant, Jacob Rudy, and his family took Hayes into their home. The next morning, Hayes had telegrams sent to his wife, Lucy and his brother-in-law Will Platt.  

When IX Corps commander Jesse Reno was killed in the battle, Jacob Cox assumed command.  An Ohio attorney, Cox had helped to organize the Republican Party in Ohio and  formed a political alliance with Salmon P. Chase.  At the start of the war, Cox was in poor health and was the father of six children, but he chose to enter Federal service as an Ohio volunteer.  Before mustering out of the service in 1866, Cox was elected governor of Ohio.  Cox sided with President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction plan and was against African American suffrage.He later wrote several books on Civil War campaigns:

When we approached the line of hills bordering the Antietam, we received orders to turn off the road to the left, and halted our battalions closed in mass. It was now about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. McClellan, as it seemed, had just reached the field, and was surrounded by a group of his principal officers, most of whom I had never seen before. I rode up with General Burnside, dismounted, and was very cordially greeted by General McClellan. He and Burnside were evidently on terms of most intimate friendship and familiarity. He introduced me to the officers I had not known before, referring pleasantly to my service with him in Ohio and West Virginia, putting me upon an easy footing with them in a very agreeable and genial way. 

We walked up the slope of the ridge before us, and looking westward from its crest the whole field of the coming battle was before us. Immediately in front the Antietam wound through the hollow, the hills rising gently on both sides. In the background on our left was the village of Sharpsburg, with fields inclosed by stone fences in front of it. At its right was a bit of wood with the little Dunker Church standing out white and sharp against it. Farther to the right and left the scene was closed in by wooded ridges with open farm lands between, the whole making as pleasing and prosperous a landscape as can easily be imagined. We made a large group as we stood upon the hill, and it was not long before we attracted the enemy's attention. A puff of white smoke from a knoll on the right of the Sharpsburg road was followed by the screaming of a shell over our heads. McClellan directed that all but one or two should retire behind the ridge, while he continued the reconnaissance, walking slowly to the right. I noted with satisfaction the cool and business-like air with which he made his examination under fire. The Confederate artillery was answered by a battery, and a lively cannonade ensued on both sides, though without any noticeable effect. The enemy's position was revealed, and he was evidently in force on both sides of the turnpike in front of Sharpsburg, covered by the undulations of the rolling ground which hid his infantry from our sight.

Near the town of Sharpsburg, Lee deployed his Confederate forces behind Antietam Creek along a low ridge. The first two Union divisions arrived on the afternoon of September 15, and the bulk of the remainder of the army late that evening.  George W. Beale of the 9th Virginia Cavalry later wrote in A Lieutenant of Cavalry in Lee's Army:

Our brigade was on the march for several hours, and through the mistake of a blundering guide, was led to a position very close to a line of Federal batteries. Here we slept unconscious of danger until nearly dawn. Before daylight, General Fitz Lee ascertained the situation of the command, and endeavored to extricate us as quietly as possible, going around himself arousing and cautioning many of the men. We had gone a quarter of a mile away, perhaps, and had nearly reached a position of safety beyond the crest of a hill, when we were discovered, and the enemy's guns opened on us. This discharge began the fray on the memorable and sanguinary 17th of September, 1862. One of the first shells fired, striking the earth near us, exploded, covering some of us with dust and inflicting on brave Colonel Thornton, of the Third Virginia Cavalry, a mortal wound. I was near him at the moment, and witnessed the shrugging of his shoulders and quiver of the muscles of his face, as he felt the shock of the piece of shell, shattering his arm close to the shoulder.

A canal boatman told his experiences to Clifton Johnson in 1913:

I followed boating on the canal, but at the time of the battle I was here at Sharpsburg where I had a home on the outskirts of the town. I was a young fellow then, twenty-eight years old.

In the early part of the war, when I didn’t think it was goin' to be much of anything, I felt toward the South because I had a brother in the Confederate army. He liked soldierin' as well as eatin', but he got knocked to pieces pretty well before the war was over. His side was mashed in, and he lost an arm. The doctors never could get his broken ribs into shape so but that he was one-sided, and yet he got through the war sound enough to travel for a firm sellin' goods. Things was very much unsettled in the South where he made his trips, and one time he left us and started on a trip as usual, and we've never heard anything of him since. He had to wear good clothes, and he looked like a prosperous man with money. Maybe he was killed and robbed, or maybe he died of yellow fever in New Orleans.

As I said, I favored the South early in the war, but later I didn’t care which side won if only they put a stop to the fightin', though it did seem to me it would be better to have one country.

The Southern troops began to come in here on the Monday before the battle, and on Tuesday the wagons and artillery and men were goin' back and forth, and there was continual noise all the time. We was havin' a drouth, and the weather was very hot. They didn’t pay any attention to the regular highways, but went across the fields the nearest way to where they wanted to go, and the dust on those roads they made was ankle deep.  There was cannonading all day, and the people was hidin' and gettin' away as fast as they could. But we'd had word that any one who owned a good house had better stay and take care of it because in an army there's always fellows who will plunder houses left unprotected. So I stayed at home.

On Wednesday morning the artillery opened up before day, and it made such a racket you'd think the earth was opening up. I went out to feed my horse, and on the way back a shell come mighty near gettin' me. It bursted over my head and stunned me right smart. My brother-in-law was in the house, and when I got in there he said, "What's the matter, Jake, that you look so pale?"  I took him out and showed him the pieces of shell scattered all around, and he said, "There's goin' to be a fight, and a big one."

The sound of the shells was like wind blowing over the telephone wires. When the cannonade ceased, then I could hear the bullets buzz like bees. Pretty soon the balls commenced comin' in the house, and I thought it was time to get somewhere else. The hotel here belonged to my brother, and I thought I'd go down there. So I run from behind one big house to another till I got to the hotel. I could look right around the corner of it and see the Confederate artillery on the hill. I see one of the gunners drug away from the cannon down in a hollow where the reserves were, but I don't know whether he was crippled or killed. Two other men was with me, and we was the only citizens in sight around the town.  

We hadn’t been there but a very short time when half a dozen Confederates come down a cross street with eleven prisoners. One of the prisoners had his jaw shot off. I shall never forget how he looked.

A shell went into a hogpen near us and killed two hogs. Another shell struck the heel of a soldier in the street and turned him over and over like a wagon wheel.

About one o'clock I started to go back to my own place to look at my horse. But after I'd dodged along a ways the cannonading got so heavy I thought I'd go into a cellar till it ceased a little. I was behind an old log house, and I took hold of the basement door. At the first pull it didn’t come open, and the second pull yanked the door off its hinges. Then I saw that the basement was full of Confederate soldiers. I went down in there, and about that time a shell struck the end of the house and knocked out some logs and bricks. I heard a scuffling in the room above. Another lot of Confederate soldiers was up there, and they came down to the basement for better protection.  One of 'em had a splinter — a piece of a log, you know — in his arm. He asked some of his comrades to pull it out, and they wouldn’t. Then he asked me, and I didn’t dare refuse. I pulled him off his feet before I got it out. The explosion had skun his back from his neck down and tore his clothes pretty near off of him. He must have been lying down on his stomach. He fared worse than some who fought in the battle. There was skulkers on both sides, but I saw only Confederate skulkers in that old house.

I had just one lot to cross to get to my stable, and when the firing slacked up and I went, I didn’t go very slow, I tell you. But I found my horse was gone, and the stable was full of cavalry horses. A fellow was there lookin' after 'em, and I said, "Where's mine?""He's out there hitched to the fence," the fellow answered.

I looked, and I didn’t know the horse at first because he had on a cavalry saddle and bridle. "I've been riding him," the fellow said, "and he's a good horse. Sell him to me."  He seemed to be a gentleman — that fellow, and he offered me three or four times what the horse was worth, but it was Confederate money. The horse was a fine one for any purpose, and only six years old, and I didn’t want to part with him for Confederate money. I told the fellow I'd be back in an hour or so, and then I'd sell the horse to him. That was the only way I could save my horse. I took the rig off, put on a bridle of my own, and rode up an alley to the hotel. The stable there was full of straw, but I pulled out some and got the horse in. Then I tucked the straw around so he couldn’t be seen, and there he stayed till the battle ended. A month afterward, when the straw was being used, a shell was found in it that had come in through the log walls. If that shell had exploded, the straw would have been set on fire, and my horse would have been killed.

Stragglers were running around robbing the houses of people who'd gone away, and they got in my house and just took everything. Besides, they took five mules of mine out of a field where I kept 'em. Them were mules that did my towing on the canal.

Some of the houses in the town were used for hospitals. The doctors would huddle the family all into one little room, or turn 'em out. The house across the way from mine was a hospital, and the family there got what the doctors called camp fever, and some of 'em died.

For three or four days the soldiers was busy out on the battlefield burying the dead. Lots of dead men got pretty strong before they was buried, the weather was so hot; and the stench was terrible — terrible!

On Friday I was engaged in helping drag the dead horses out of town. A farmer with four horses and a black man and myself did that work. We'd hitch a log-chain around a dead horse's neck, and it was all that the four horses could do to drag the carcass over the hills. We burnt what we could on the edge of the town, but fence rails was the only fuel and most of those had been used for campfires. I s'pose we burnt ten or twelve, and we drug nearly as many more out on the farms so as to get the stench away from the town.

One trouble, after the battle, was to get feed for our stock. I had to ride a whole day to buy some hay, and there'd been a lot made, too, but it had been taken for the army horses.

I don't care about ever seein' a war again, but of co'se I wouldn’t stand havin' another country pitch onto us. Why, in that case, if I was a young man, I'd fight as sure as you're born.

Although an immediate Union attack on the morning of September 16 would have had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, McClellan's caution and his belief that Lee had as many as 100,000 men at Sharpsburg caused him to delay his attack for a day. This gave the Confederates more time to prepare defensive positions and allowed General James Longstreet's corps to arrive from Hagerstown and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's corps to arrive from Harpers Ferry.

Henry Kyd Douglas, the youngest staff officer for General Jackson was a native of the 

Sharpsburg area. His family home was just 4 miles west of the battlefield. His father, Reverend Robert Douglas, was taken prisoner and held at Fortress Monroe, suspected of signaling Confederate soldiers across the Potomac River in Virginia, via candlelight from a window in their home. 

Douglas was born in Ireland in 1838; his family emigrated when he was a child, eventually settling in western Maryland at Ferry Hill Place, immediately across the Potomac River from Shepherdstown.  After Virginia seceded, Douglas enlisted as a private in Company B of the 2nd Virginia Infantry. He would later write in his memoirs, I Rode with Stonewall,  

When on the 17th of April, 1861, Virginia passed the Ordinance of Secession, I had no doubt of my duty. In a week I was back on the Potomac. When I found my mother sewing on heavy shirts – with a heart doubtless heavier than I knew – I suspected for what and whom they were being made. In a few days I was at Harpers Ferry, a private in the Shepherdstown Company, Company B, Second Virginia Infantry.

He served in nearly every major campaign of the Eastern Theater, including Stonewall Jackson’s famed 1862 Valley Campaign, and was wounded on no less than six separate occasions during the conflict. Following the war, he made headlines when he flaunted his Confederate uniform in the streets of Shepherdstown, an act which Federal authorities deemed “a badge of treason and rebellion, intended and designed to encourage and incite rebellion.” Ultimately, this act of defiance landed him in a Washington, D.C., jail cell, and consequently led him to serve as a witness in the infamous trial of the Lincoln conspirators. Following his death in 1903, Douglas’s obituary in the New York Times recorded that no less than Varina Davis (widow of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis) once admitted, “With one exception, he was the handsomest man she had ever met.” His colorful memoir, I Rode with Stonewall, was not published until many years after his death.

Elizabeth Piper

On the evening of September 16, Confederate generals James Longstreet and  D.H. Hill made their headquarters at the Piper farmhouse; the Pipers served them dinner, and then the family, along with their slaves, left the area to stay with relatives. Henry and Elizabeth Piper, whose farm was near Sharpsburg, described themselves as Union supporters. However, Henry and his  father Daniel held numerous slaves, some born on the farm as slaves-for-life. According to the census of 1850, Daniel Piper owned five slaves, probably a family. Henry owned four slaves, ages 6  months to 24 years, again probably a family.

Map of the Battlefield of Antietam

Late in the day on September 16, McClellan ordered Hooker's corps to cross Antietam Creek and probe the enemy positions. McClellan planned to commit more than half his army to the assault, starting with two corps, supported by a third, and if necessary a fourth. He issued to each of his subordinate commanders only the orders for his own corps, not general orders describing the entire battle plan. The terrain of the battlefield made it difficult for those commanders to monitor events outside of their sectors, and McClellan's headquarters were

Pry House, McClellan's Headquarters 

more than a mile in the rear, at the Philip Pry house, east of the creek, making it difficult for him to control the separate corps. Therefore, the battle progressed the next day as essentially three separate, mostly uncoordinated battles: morning in the northern end of the battlefield, midday in the center, and afternoon in the south. Lack of coordination almost completely nullified the two-to-one advantage the Union enjoyed and allowed Lee to shift his defensive forces to meet each offensive.

Confederate cavalryman J.E.B. Stuart, checking on his units that night, found  John Pelham's artillery crew asleep near a cornfield; he woke Pelham, saying:

J.E.B Stuart

My dear fellow, don’t you know that the corn field at the foot of the hill is full of Yankees? And that you ought to have your guns in position now, for if you wait until daylight the hill will be swarming with blue coats.

They positioned fourteen guns on Nicodemus Hill to hit the Union army as it advanced.

The battle opened at dawn (about 5:30 a.m.) on September 17 with an attack down the Hagerstown Turnpike by the Union I Corps under Joseph Hooker. Hooker's objective was the area around the Dunker Church, a small white building belonging to a local sect of German Baptists.  

One of the most noted landmarks on the Antietam battlefield was a house of worship associated with peace and love. Samuel Mumma, owner of a nearby farm, donated land in 1851 for the Dunkers to build their church.  "Dunker" was a moniker for a people of faith that originated in 1708 near the village of Schwarzenau, Germany, along the Eder River. They originally  called themselves Neue Taufer (New Baptists) in order to better distinguish themselves from older Anabaptist groups, such as the Mennonites and the

The Dunker Church

Amish. Typical of the derisive labeling experience of many religious groups, they were called "Dunkers" by outsiders because they fully immersed or “dunked” their baptismal candidates in nearby streams, three complete dunkings.  It was a method of baptism that completely distinguished them from the “sprinkling” Lutherans and Methodists, the “pouring” Mennonites, and even the single dunk Baptists.  During its early history the congregation consisted of about half a dozen-farm families from the local area. No steeple adorned its entrance because the Dunkers considered them immodest or worldly. The Dunkers had repeatedly given clear and unambiguous official statements regarding their beliefs over the issue of slavery: it was an “evil” that could not be “tolerated in the church” because the “gospel of Jesus Christ was to be preached in all nations to all races.”

Miller Farmhouse

Hooker had approximately 8,600 Union soldiers, little more than the 7,700 Confederates under Jackson; this slight disparity was more than offset by the Confederates' strong defensive positions. Jackson's men bore the brunt of the initial attacks on the northern end of the battlefield. As the first Union men emerged from the North Woods and into the farmer David Miller's cornfield,  an artillery duel erupted. The conflagration caused heavy casualties on both sides and was described by Col. Stephen D. Lee as "artillery Hell." Over 500 cannons participated in the Battle of Antietam, firing over 50,000 rounds of ammunition. Private Charles Johnson of New York said it was  "a savage continual thunder that cannot compare to any sound I ever heard." 

Union General John Gibbon, leading Wisconsin's "Black Hat Brigade," found most of the

John Gibbon

men around a battery lying on the ground, dead or wounded.  He personally manned an artillery piece in the fighting at the Cornfield. He later wrote to Harry Heth, 

Yes I did do that. I knew the men of my old brigade would fight without me and just at that particular moment that gun needed looking after to make its fire effective.

John Gibbon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fourth of ten children born to Dr. John and Catharine Gibbon. When John Gibbon was nearly 11 years old the family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, after his father took a position at the U.S. Mint.  John Gibbon graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1847 and served in the Mexican-American War without seeing combat. He taught artillery tactics at West Point, where he wrote The Artillerist's Manual in 1859; it was used by both sides in the Civil War. When the war broke out, despite the fact that his father was a slaveholder and three of his brothers, two brothers-in-law and a cousin joined the Confederate military, Gibbon decided to uphold his oath to the Union. In 1862, he commanded the brigade of westerners known as King's Wisconsin Brigade. Gibbon quickly set about drilling his troops , ordering them to wear white leggings and distinctive black Hardee hats, which earned them the nickname "The Black Hat Brigade."

The Miller cornfield exploded into chaos as a savage battle raged through the area. Men beat each other over the head with rifle butts and stabbed each other with bayonets. Rifles became hot and fouled from too much firing. The air was filled with a hail of bullets and shells.  Private George D. Miller with the 124th Pennsylvania felt something hard hit his body; he looked down and saw a hole in the front of his coat, on the left side of his abdomen.  He reached around to his back where there was another hole, and his hand filled with blood: the bullet had passed completely through his body.  

George Miller was a 23-year-old from a Quaker family in Pennsylvania; although the Quakers believed in pacifism, they were also strongly against slavery.  George Miller enlisted in the Union army on August 4, 1862, just 6 weeks before the battle of Antietam.  As his unit had marched to Sharpsburg past the battlefield of South Mountain, he saw a cartload of amputated human limbs, "mostly legs that had been taken off above the knee."    It was his worst fear, more than being killed, that he would be wounded, and an arm or leg cut off.  

Truman Seymour

A friend on the field assisted him to the rear for medical treatment; Miller was in extreme pain for the next month at the field hospital: the bullet had severed his colon, and excrement oozed through the wound for days.  Eventually his condition improved, and he returned home.  Although he lived for another 56 years, the medical records in his pension file show that he suffered continuous pain from his wound for the rest of his life.

Union General George Meade's 1st Brigade of Pennsylvanians, under General  Truman Seymour, began advancing through the East Woods and exchanged fire with Colonel James Walker's brigade of Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina troops. As Walker's men forced the Union soldiers back, aided by Lee's artillery fire, another division entered the cornfield, also to be torn up by artillery. Union General Abram Duryée's brigade marched directly into volleys from Colonel Marcellus Douglass's Georgia brigade. Enduring heavy fire from a range of 250 yards, Duryée ordered a withdrawal.  

Watercolor by Truman Seymour

Truman Seymour was also an accomplished artist who lived in Italy during his final years painting watercolors of Italian villages and landscapes.

John S. McCarthy

Private John S. McCarthy had enlisted in the army a month before Antietam.  A 23-year old farm boy from Pennsylvania, he was the second oldest of nine children.  McCarthy was shot in the head during a Confederate counterattack and probably died instantly.  

Private Frederick C. Foard of the 20th North Carolina Infantry later wrote:

I could see dimly through the dense sulphurous battle smoke and the line from Shakespeare's Tempest flitted across my brain: Hell is empty and all the devils are here. . . .Before I could reload our line broke on both sides of me and it was a sharp run . . . Jimmie Gibson from Concord was shot down . . . Jimmie exclaimed, "Great God, Dan don't leave me!"  Dan ran back in the face of the enemy's fire, took Jimmie on his shoulder the enemy's line being not 10 yards distant and ran out with him . .. I fell sprawling.  Just then the man next to me was shot through the head and fell across me.  I had to roll his dead body off me before I could get up. . . The Chaplain of one of our regiments . . . with a prescience born of more than mortal wisdom quickly discerned it was impossible for us to withstand the enemy's onslaught, insured his own safety by flight. . . McRae who was always facetious exclaimed in a voice that could be heard above the din of battle "Parson - Parson - God damn it, come back here; you have been praying all your life to get to heaven and now that you have a chance for a short cut you are running away from it."

Confederate Colonel Evander McIver Law's brigade defended against the Union attack

Evander McIver Law

through the Cornfield at high cost—454 killed and wounded. Colonel Law's Official Report of October 2, 1862:

Late in the afternoon of the 16th, the enemy's skirmishers advanced into the woods in front of my position. They were held in check by my riflemen and the Texas skirmishers. In the mean time I was ordered by General Hood, commanding the division, to move forward and occupy the edge of the wood in which the skirmishing was going on. This was quickly accomplished, and the enemy was driven, at dark, to the farther side of the wood, toward the Antietam. My brigade was relieved during the night, and moved, with the rest of General Hood's command, to the wood in rear of Saint Mumma's Church (Dunkers' Chapel).

Soon after daylight on the 17th, the attack of the enemy commenced. The battle had lasted about an hour and a half, when I was ordered to move forward into the open field across the turnpike. On reaching the road, I found but few of our troops on the field, and these seemed to be in much confusion, but still opposing the advance of the enemy's dense masses with determination. Throwing the brigade at once into line of battle, facing northward, I gave the order to advance. The Texas Brigade, Colonel Wofford, had in the mean time come into line on my left, and the two brigades now moved forward together. The enemy, who had by this time advanced half-way across the field and had planted a heavy battery at the north end of it, began to give way before us, though in vastly superior force. The Fifth Texas Regiment (which had been sent over to my right) and the Fourth Alabama pushed into the wood in which the skirmishing had taken place the evening previous, and drove the enemy through and beyond it. The other regiments of my command continued steadily to advance in the open ground, driving the enemy in confusion from and beyond his guns. So far, we had been entirely successful and everything promised a decisive victory. It is true that strong support was needed to follow up our success, but this I expected every moment.

At this stage of the battle, a powerful Federal force (ten times our number) of fresh troops was thrown in our front. Our losses up to this time had been very heavy; the troops now confronting the enemy were insufficient to cover properly one-fourth of the line of battle; our ammunition was expended; the men had been fighting long and desperately and were exhausted from want of food and rest. Still, they held their ground, many of them using such ammunition as they could obtain from the bodies of our own and the enemy's dead and wounded.

It was evident that this state of affairs could not long continue. No support was at hand. To remain stationary or advance without it would have caused a useless butchery, and I adopted the only alternative-that of falling back to the wood from which I had first advanced. The enemy followed very slowly and cautiously. Under direction of General Hood I reformed my brigade in the rear of Saint Mumma's Church (Dunkers' Chapel), and, together with the Texas Brigade, which had also retired, again confronted the enemy, who seemed to hesitate to enter the wood. During this delay re-enforcements arrived, and the brigade was relieved for the purpose of obtaining ammunition.

At 1 p. m., having been supplied with ammunition, I was again ordered to the field, and took position in the wood near the church. Here the brigade remained, under an incessant cannonade, until near nightfall, when it was moved [one]half mile nearer the town of Sharpsburg, where it lay during the night and the following day.

The good conduct of my brigade in this battle had not been surpassed by it in any previous engagement. Weak and exhausted as they were, and fighting against fearful odds, the troops accomplished and endured all that was within the limits of human capacity.  Our loss in proportion to the numbers engaged was extremely heavy. 

Houston B. Lowrie

Law was promoted to brigadier general on October 3, 1862, at the age of 26, the youngest brigadier general at that time. Captain Houston B. Lowrie of of the 6th North Carolina Infantry, was killed during Colonel Law's charge through the Cornfield on the morning of September 17.  Houston was one of four sons of Samuel and Mary Johnston Lowrie of North Carolina.  All four of the sons volunteered for service in the Confederate Army: Captain Patrick Lowrie died of yellow fever in Wilmington, North Carolina; Houston died at Antietam; and Lt. James Lowrie died at Gettysburg.  Only Samuel Lowrie survived the war, dying in Florida in 1892.

A soldier in the 4th Texas later wrote:

Legs, arms, and other parts of human bodies were flying in the air like straw in a whirlwind. The dogs of war were loose, and "havoc" was their cry.

Private William Brearley, a 16-year-old who had just enlisted in the 17th Michigan Infantry in August, saw his first combat in September; he later wrote to his father:

It was rather Strange music to hear balls scream within an inch of my head.  I had a bullett strike me on the top of the head just as I was going to fire and a piece of Shell struck my foot - a ball hit my finger and another hit my thumb I concluded they ment me.  . . . I got rather more excited than I wish to again.  I dident think of getting hit but it was almost a miricle that I wasent the rebels that we took prisoners said that they never before encountered a regiment that fought so like "Devils" (so they termed it) as we did - every one praised our regiment - one man in our company was Shot through the head no more than 4 feet from he he was killed instantly . . . 

I saw some of the horidest sights I ever saw - one man had both eyes shot out - and they were wounded in all the different ways you could think of - the most I could do was to give them water - they were all very thirsty . . .  

Robert T. Coles of the 4th Alabama Infantry later wrote in his history of the regiment:

Robert T. Coles

We had now been engaged almost three hours fighting desperately without any intermission, most of the men had exhausted their ammunition, and all had exhausted themselves in their efforts to drive the enemy from his position. . . . General Hood kept his staff and couriers busy going over the field directing the scattered men of the Division to assemble in the rear of Dunker Church.  

Just as we reached the Church, Lieutenant King of F Company . . . had the whole top of his head blown off by a shell. . . . 

As Captain Karsner, Lieutenant Dan Turner and I were slowly wending our way in that  direction, a shell of the enemy from over on the right of the line bursting near us, a fragment struck Karsner's too prominent nose.  The shock was so great it knocked him a severe fall, at full length upon his back.

We ran to him, thinking he was killed.  On examination, as he still remained where he fell, though bleeding profusely, we found the wound very slight.  With the blood running down in his eyes and mouth, he presented, lying there, a most ludicrous sight, so much that it was impossible to avert a smile on our part.

 He imagined that the missile had gone entirely through his head, so great was

John Bell Hood

the shock; and when he observed that we entertained so little feeling for a "dying" comrade, promptly arose and, still quite dazed, abused us soundly for our lack of sympathy.  After being convinced that it was nothing serious, he soon regained his usual merry mood. Just then General Hood  was seen approaching from the rear.  . . . Lieutenant Turner remarked, "Captain, wipe that blood from your face before General Hood reaches us."  "No," he said, "I see see if I can make him sympathize with me."  He then, with his hands, smeared the clotted blood thickly over his face.  General Hood exclaimed as he rode up, "My Good!  Captain, I am sorry to see you so seriously wounded."  "Yes, General," he said, "I came very near getting my face shot off."  General Hood was as sympathetic as a woman.

Phillip A. Work was one of the two delegates from Tyler County, Texas to the Secession Convention in 1861.  He raised a company of Texas militia; when it was mustered into the Confederate Army at New Orleans in May 1861 it became Company F of the 1st Texas Infantry Regiment, Hood's Texas Brigade.  Work was elected lieutenant colonel. In the cornfield, 80 percent of his men were killed or wounded.  He later wrote:

Major Matt Dale, commanding the right wing, came to me at my station at the center and reported that nearly every man of the right wing had been shot down, killed or wounded, and not a man would be left alive unless we withdrew at once.  The roar all about us of nearby small arms and of artillery more distant was so deafening that the Major, in making his report, had to place his mouth to my ear.  Just as he concluded and whilst we still were standing breast to breast, he with his right side and I with my left towards the front, he was stricken by a bullet, straightened, stiffened, and fell backwards prone upon the ground, dead.

George Kimball of the 12th Massachusetts Infantry later wrote in his memoirs of his war

service:

We are now in the famous cornfield. Before proceeding far we strike the enemy's skirmish line and brush it away. As we move forward our brave Lieutenant, tall and as erect as a statue, is a conspicuous figure in the line. He is as cool as he would have been had he been leading his company in review. To us he seems the very embodiment of an ideal soldier. We push our way through the tall corn, which reaches far above our heads and waves as if shaken by the wind. Shells are bursting all about us, and men are falling every moment. My limbs tremble at every step, for fear has taken a strong hold upon me, and it is only by thinking of the requirements of duty and of the ridicule to which I would be subjected from my comrades should I fail that I am able to keep my place in the ranks. Some men never had this fear in going into battle. I confess I never entered one without it.

At last we gain the open ground, and are here met by a perfect storm of bullets, while shells and canister fly about us furiously or go screaming over our heads to the rear. Our Lieutenant is struck in one of his feet by a bullet, it is a bad wound, as two of his toes are cut away, but he halts only a moment while we are pulling down a fence. Major Burbank advises him to go to the rear, but he only smiles and says he is “worth a dozen dead men yet” I am holding a rail above my head in both hands, in the act of throwing it behind me, when a piece of shell or a solid shot wrenches it from my grasp with such violence that my arms are benumbed.

. . . The fire has been increasing every moment until now it is indeed terrible. We start up a slight rise, and our Lieutenant follows, limping. Second Lieutenant Orne advises him to go to the rear. He raises himself to his full height and somewhat scornfully replies: “I shall not leave the company.”

We gain the crest of the little ridge. . . . What a scene is that which opens up about us! Directly in front, not more than one hundred yards away, is "Stonewall" Jackson's whole division moving toward us. With their saucy battle flags gayly floating above them, these gray-clad heroes present a magnificent spectacle . To their left, in more scattered order, behind fences and rocks and trees, are Hood's men. Farther still in the same direction are Stuart's batteries, pouring a heavy cross fire upon the little knoll upon which we are standing. . .  

How terrible is the shock and how our men go down! What screams and groans follow that first volley! Then we load and fire at will as rapidly as we can. . .   There is a pandemonium of voices as well as a perfect roar of musketry and a storm of bullets. Shells are bursting among us, too, continually. In the wild excitement of battle I forget my fear and think only of killing as many of the foe as I can. 

The tall soldier at my side, who had told me on the march that he felt as though he was to be hit in this battle, has already fallen. He lies at my feet with a mortal hurt. His brother drags him back a few paces and then returns to his place in the ranks. A few moments more and my brother, too, is wounded, though not so badly. When I have assisted him to a stump a short distance in the rear he creeps up behind it and tells me to “go back and give it to them.” 

. . . We fight on. Our Second Lieutenant has gone to the rear, his right shoulder being torn from its socket by a piece of shell. Lieut. White remains still. His eyes glow with the joy of battle, and he seems to be everywhere imparting courage and stimulating the efforts of his men. By-and-by he is struck again. A piece of shell has stripped the flesh from the upper part of one of his arms. The shock is severe enough to throw him to the ground, but he quickly rises again . . . I look at his face to see if he shows evidences of pain and am met with a cheery smile. By this time our ranks have become fearfully decimated, and the Lieutenant begins moving those who are yet in line up nearer the colors. “Let us die under the flag, boys!” he cries.

Incidents of the fight are happening every moment. My ramrod is wrenched from my grasp as I am about to return it to its socket after loading. I look for it behind me, and the Lieutenant passes me another, pointing to my own, which lies bent and unfit for use across the face of a dead man. A bullet enters my knapsack just under my left arm while I am taking aim. Another passes through my haversack, which hangs upon my left hip.  I laugh at these mishaps as though they were huge joke, and remark to my nearest neighbor that I suppose I shall soon be relieved of all my trappings.

A man a few paces from me is struck squarely in the face by a solid shot.  Fragments of the poor fellow's head come crashing into my face and fill me with disgust.

. . . My supply of cartridges is exhausted and I seek for more among the cartridge boxes of the dead.  Many others are doing the same, and nearly everybody has had experiences similar to mine.  There are but few of us left now. . . 

A piercing shriek is heard behind us. We look, and find that our brave Lieutenant has been hit again. This time it is a mortal hurt. His hip is shattered and his abdomen torn open in a shocking manner . . . 

Of the 40 men of my company who entered the fight but seven remain. Four of us take up Lieutenant White. We place him on a blanket and start for the rear. We have to pick our way among the dead and dying. The groans of the wounded are terrible. It is hard to disregard the appeals for help that come from every quarter. 

The enemy have been reinforced, and it now seems as if they are bound to annihilate what remains of our brigade. Shot and shell plow the ground about us and go crashing into the troops that are pressing forward to continue the work which we have so well begun. It seems almost a miracle that we are not hit, for the air is full of flying fragments of iron and whistling bullets. But we hurry on with our precious burden, anxious to get our poor Lieutenant to a place of safety where the Surgeons can care for his wounds. . . . 

At last we reach Poffenberger's and lay our dying friend at Surgeon Hayward's 

Poffenberger Barn

feet. The doctor examines his wounds. The Lieutenant talks lightly of his hurts, and with his own hands replaces the torn flesh. This exhibition of heroism is too much even for professional self-control, and the Surgeon turns aside and bursts into tears. 

We take an affectionate leave of our dear friend,  for we must return to the ranks. He thanks us one by one for the service we have rendered him, and whispers a message to those who love him at home.  Those who were with him when he died told us he was brave to the last. He died late in the afternoon. One of his lower limbs was very painful just before he breathed his last.  . . .His body was sent home and buried in the family lot at Mount Auburn. . . . He was 22 years old and a son of Ferdinand White, a Boston merchant. 

Joseph Poffenberger's farm was occupied by the Union Army’s 1st Corps late on September 16 in preparation for the battle the following day, with General Joseph Hooker taking shelter in the barn. During the battle, the barn was used as a temporary field hospital. 

The casualties received by the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, 67%, were the highest of any unit that day. The Louisiana Infantry, known as the Tigers were beaten back eventually when the Federals brought up a battery. Point-blank fire slaughtered the Tigers, who lost 323 of their 500 men.

Captain Robert Gould Shaw of the  2nd Massachusetts Infantry was slightly wounded in the neck at Antietam.  On September 21st he described the battle in a letter to his father, Francis Shaw:

Robert Gould Shaw

At one in the morning of the 17th, we rested in a wheat-field. Our pickets were firing all night, and at daylight we were waked up by the artillery; we were moved forward immediately, and went into action in about fifteen minutes. 

The Second Massachusetts was on the right of Gordon's Brigade, and the Third Wisconsin next; the latter was in a very exposed condition, and lost as many as two hundred killed and wounded in a short time. We were posted in a little orchard, and Colonel Andrews got a cross fire on that part of the enemy's line, which, as we soon discovered, did a great deal of execution, and saved the Third Wisconsin from being completely used up. It was the prettiest thing we have ever done, and our loss was small at that time; in half an hour, the Brigade advanced through a cornfield in front, which, until then, had been occupied by the enemy; it was full of their dead and wounded, and one of our sergeants took a regimental colour there, belonging to the Eleventh Mississippi. 

Beyond the cornfield was a large open field, and such a mass of dead and wounded men, mostly Rebels, as were lying there, I never saw before; it was a terrible sight, and our men had to be very careful to avoid treading on them; many were mangled and torn to pieces by artillery, but most of them had been wounded by musketry fire. We halted right among them, and the men did everything they could for their comfort, giving them water from their canteens, and trying to place them in easy positions. There are so many young boys and old men among the Rebels, that it seems hardly possible that they can have come of their own accord to fight us, and it makes you pity them all the more, as they lie moaning on the field . . .

While we were halted in this field, Sumner's whole Corps swept across, close by us, and advanced into a wood on our right. It was a grand sight, and they looked as if they couldn't be repulsed; but they were received there with a most terrible musketry-fire, and finally had to fall back. In that wood, our dead and wounded outnumbered theirs, as much as they did us in the places mentioned above. Hooker had already been repulsed from the same wood, after driving the Rebels across the field in which our Brigade was halted. All the time the artillery on both sides had been keeping up a steady fire, and I think it was in this arm that we had the advantage. Gordon's Brigade made another advance shortly after Sumner's but had to retire like the rest at this point. . . 

I lost one killed and five wounded from my company. The man who was killed belonged to Harry's company, but was with me. The enemy was not dislodged from that wood at all, but in other parts of the field we decidedly got the advantage of them, after a great deal of doubtful fighting all day. 

I was struck once by a spent ball in the neck, which bruised, but didn't break the skin . . At last, night came on, and, with the exception of an occasional shot from the outposts, all was quiet. The crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight. 

There were twenty dead bodies within a rod of me. The next day, much to our surprise, all was quiet, and the burying and hospital parties worked hard, caring for the dead and wounded. 

 . . . It was the greatest fight of the war, and I wish I could give you a satisfactory account of everything I saw, but there are so many things to tell, that it is impossible to do so without giving more time to it than I have, or being a better writer . . .

I never felt, before, the excitement which makes a man want to rush into the fight, but I did that day. Every battle makes me wish more and more that the war was over. It seems almost as if nothing could justify a battle like that of the 17th, and the horrors inseparable from it. The result of the battle was, that we remained in possession of the field, and the enemy drew off undisturbed. Whether that is all we wanted, I don't know; but I should think not.

Less than a year later, Shaw became commander of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and died at the Battle of Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. 

Wilder Dwight

Wilder Dwight was a lieutenant colonel in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment; on the morning before the battle, he had started a letter to his mother, Elizabeth A. Dwight.  After he was wounded, he pulled out the letter and finished it, laying wounded on the field. The letter was stained with his blood.   He died two days later. 

Near Sharpsburg. Sept. 17th 1862. 

On the field  

Dear Mother,

It is a misty moisty morning. We are engaging the enemy and are drawn up in support of Hooker who is now banging away most briskly. I write in the saddle to send you my love and to say that I am very well so far --

Dearest mother, I am wounded so as to be helpless. Good bye if so it must be

Wilder Dwight's letter

I think I die in victory. God defend our country. I trust in God & love you all to the last  

Dearest love to father & all my dear brothers. Our troops have left the part of the field where I lay --

Mother, yrs Wilder

All is well with those that have faith

His older brother, William, who had been wounded in May and left for dead on the battlefield, was a prisoner of the Confederates. He was released in a prisoner exchange and was able to take his brother's body home for burial. Another brother, Howard, died in battle in 1863. Following the war, William Dwight went into the railroad business in Cincinnati with his brother, Chapman Dwight.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr. of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, was a member of the prominent Adams family; he was the great-grandson of President John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams.  His father, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., was  a lawyer, writer and diplomat who had been appointed Minister to England by President Lincoln in 1861; his son Henry went with him to London as his secretary. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. later wrote about his experience at Antietam:

When we first deployed on the further side of Antietam Creek, it seemed as if we were doomed so deafening was the discharge of artillery on either side, and so incessant the hurtling of projectiles as they passed both ways over us. Every instant, too, we expected to be ordered to advance on the Confederate batteries. The situation was unmistakably trying. But no orders came; and no one was hurt. By degrees it grew monotonous. Presently, to relieve our tired horses, we were ordered to dismount, and, without breaking the ranks, we officers sat down on the sloping hill-side. No one was being struck; I was very tired; the noise was deadening; gradually it had on me a lulling effect; and so I dropped quietly asleep asleep in the height of the battle and between the contending armies! 

They woke me up presently to look after my horse, who was grazing somewhat wide; and, after a time, we were withdrawn, and sent elsewhere. . . .Such is my recollection of that veritable charnel-house, Antietam. . .

A black woman, the slave of a tavern owner in Sharpsburg, spoke of the day to Clifton Johnson in 1913:

I was the cook at Delaney's Tavern hyar in Sharpsburg when the battle was fought. That was a big time, yes, a big time, and I never want to see no such time again.  The day befo' the battle the two armies was jest a-feelin' for one another. That was on a Tuesday. The Rebels was keepin' the Yankees back while mo' of their men was crossin' the Potomac.

In the evenin' the tavern family was all in the kitchen when a young feller come in and asked for somethin' to eat. My old boss said: "We ain't got nothin' fo' our own selves. You soldiers have e't us all out."  The feller went out the do', and it wasn’t ten minutes befo' the barn was a-fire. The men jest had to get up on top of the house and spread wet blankets all over the roof to keep the tavern from burning. We couldn’t save the barn. That burnt down to the ground, and the chickens and everything in it was burnt up. Oh! it was an awful time.

General Lee come to the house early the next morning. He was a fine-lookin' man, and he was the head general of 'em all in the Rebel army, you know. Our old boss was a Democrat, too; so he gave the general his breakfast. But while the officers was eatin' there in the dining-room a shell come right throo the wall and busted and scattered brick and daubin' all over everything. There was so much dirt you couldn’t tell what was on the table. I was bringin' in coffee from the kitchen and had a cup and saucer in my hand. I don't know where I put that coffee, but I throwed it away, and we all got out of there in a hurry.

I went out to the gate. An old colored man was comin' down the pavement with

Main Street, Sharpsburg

an iron pot on his head. He said the Yankees had got the Rebels on the run, and there'd be fightin' right in the town streets. He was goin' to get away, and he was carryin' that pot so he'd have somethin' to cook in.  Pretty soon I was back workin' in the kitchen, but the soldiers told me I'd better get out, and then all of us in the house went into the cellar. We carried boards down there and spread carpets on 'em and took chairs down to set on. There was seven or eight of us, white and black, and we was all so scared we didn’t know what we was doin' half the time. They kept us in the cellar all day while they was fightin' backwards and forwards. 

My goodness alive! there was cannon and everything shootin'. Lord 'a' mercy, man! we could hear 'em plain enough. The cannon sounded jest like thunder, and the small-arms the same as pop-guns. Sometimes we'd run up and look out of a window to see what was happening, but we didn’t do that often — not the way them guns was firin'.

By and by word was sent in for the women and children to all leave town. That was about — le's see — between ten and 'leven o'clock, I reckon. We went out on the street, and there lay a horse with his whole backbone split wide open. The ambulances was comin' into town, and the wounded men in 'em was hollerin', "O Lord! O Lord! O Lord!"  Poor souls! and the blood was runnin' down throo the bottom of the wagons. Some of the houses was hospitals, and the doctors was cuttin' off people's legs and arms and throwin' 'em out the do' jest like throwin' out old sticks.

We hadn’t gone only a couple of houses when a shell busted right over our heads. So we took back to the cellar in a hurry. The way they was shootin' and goin' on we might have been killed befo' we was out of town.  After they'd fit all day and it got to be night they ceased fightin' and wasn’t doin' much shootin', and then we come up and got a little mouthful of food. We didn’t have nothin' to eat in the cellar, and, indeed, we was glad to be there ourselves, and wasn’t botherin' about no dinner or no supper.

At last the Rebels retreated and we heard 'em hollerin'. I spoke to one of 'em who was passin', and said, "Did you have a hard fight to-day?" "Yes, Aunty," he said, "the Yankees give us the devil, and they'll give us hell next."

I went in the house and laid down, but I couldn’t sleep none because I didn’t know when they'd break in on me. Oh Lordy! that was a squally time — squally, squally time — squally time, sure!

The Rebels all got away the next morning early. They run in every direction. You couldn’t hardly tell what direction they wasn’t runnin' to get across the Potomac into Virginia.  We was afraid there would be mo' fightin', and we went out of the town tereckly and stayed with a farmer till the next day. My old boss got a pass. There was pickets all along the road who would stop you. Yes, sir, they stopped every one that come along and asked where they was goin' to. We come home Friday, and then we had everything to clean up. But we thanked the Lord we wasn’t killed, and we didn’t mind the dirt.

Edward Needles Hallowell and his brother, Norwood Penrose "Pen" Hallowell, were officers

Edward Needles Hallowell

serving in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Pen later wrote about his younger brother:

Your Uncle Edward was not a contentious man, — far from it ; but he was one of the few men I knew who really seemed to enjoy a fight. He appeared to go into action with grim delight, and to get out of it with something like regret. And yet in a marked degree he had that peculiar tenderness which is so often the characteristic of strong men. I shall never forget him on Antietam day, as he dashed by with General N. J. T. Dana's staff, waving his sword in recognition of the 20th, with the light of battle on his countenance. Throughout that same Antietam night he wandered over the field, turning up the faces of dead men as he searched for the brother whom he thought was dead.

Casualties among the Twentieth were high; the regiment lost one-hundred and fifty men out of four-hundred. Captain "Pen" Hallowell received a shattering wound to his left arm,

Norwood Penrose Hallowell

and later wrote in his Reminiscences:

Holding my shattered left arm, I walked right through the rebel ranks, whose men were in much confusion and too busy with their onward work to notice or to care for my presence. A shot in the back, whether by chance or design, dropped a Union soldier who preceded me by a few yards. Before long I gained the little farmhouse marked on the maps as the Nicodemus House. The yard was full of wounded men, and the floor of the parlor, where I lay down, was well covered with them. Among others, Captain O. W. Holmes, Jr., walked in, the back of his neck clipped by a bullet. 

The baggage train had not been up for many a day, so that I had replenished my wardrobe by appropriations of chance clothing from various sources. It so happened that I wore on that day the light blue trousers and dark blue blouse of a private soldier. When the rebels, a little later, were busy in the yard, paroling some and taking others to the rear, paying marked attention, of course, to officers, I was glad to have taken the precaution to remove my shoulder-straps and to conceal them with my sword under a blanket. 

The first Confederate to make his appearance put his head through the window and said : " Yankees?" "Yes." "Wounded?" "Yes." "Would you like some water?" A wounded man always wants some water. He off with his canteen, threw it into the room, and then resumed his place in the skirmish line and his work of shooting retreating Yankees. In about fifteen minutes that good- hearted fellow came back to the window all out of breath, saying: " Hurry up there! Hand me my canteen! I am on the double-quick myself now! " Some one twirled the canteen to him, and away he went. 

An Irishman in the yard, whose side had been scooped out by a shell, was asked by a rebel whether he could walk. He replied humorously: "Would I be here if I could?  I 'll just leave it to yourself." And then he died. 

For a while the farmhouse appeared to be midway between the opposing forces. Shells broke the window panes, and ploughed up the wounded in the yard, but not a shot went through the house.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was hit in the back of the neck, the ball "passing straight through the central seam of coat & waistcoat collar coming out toward the front on the left hand side."   He later wrote that the regimental chaplain had asked him, "You're a Christian, aren't you?"  When Holmes nodded, the chaplain said, "Well then that's all right!" left him lying on the battlefield to join the retreat.  

Confederate reinforcements arrived just after 7 o'clock, following a night march from Harpers Ferry. At 7 a.m., Confederate General John Bell Hood's division of 2,300 soldiers from Texas advanced through the West Woods and pushed the Union troops back through the cornfield again. The Texans attacked with particular ferocity because as they were called from their reserve position they were forced to interrupt the first hot breakfast they had had in days. They were aided by three brigades of D.H. Hill's division arriving from the Mumma Farm, southeast of the cornfield, and by Jubal Early's brigade, pushing through the West Woods from the Nicodemus Farm, where they had been supporting J.E.B. Stuart's horse artillery.

John Pelham was the son of Dr. Atkinson Pelham of Alabama; he attended West Point, but 

John Pelham

resigned a few weeks before his graduation in May 1861 in order to join the Alabama state militia.  In a March 1861 letter to his cousin, Marianna Pelham, the niece of Lucretia Coffin Mott, he wrote:

I am not master of my own acts at present. I have been appointed a 1st Lieutenant in the Army of the ‘Confederate States of America.’ My appointment has been confirmed by the Congress. The appointment was made without my consent or knowledge. I cannot accept an appointment from them as long as I am a member of this Institution, but if I am recalled by the Authorities, I will obey it. I have thus far resisted every overture, on the part of my friends, to resign, disregarded their advice and braved their anger. My father and brothers alone wished me to graduate.

After his first experience in combat, he wrote to his father:

I have seen what Romancers call glorious war. I have seen it in all its phases. I have heard the booming of cannon, and the more deadly rattle of musketry at a distance – I have heard it all nearby and have been under its destructive showers; I have seen men and horses fall thick and fast around me. I have seen our own men bloody and frightened flying before the enemy – I have seen them bravely charge the enemy’s lines and heard the shout of triumph as they carried the position. I have heard the agonizing shrieks of the wounded and dying – 

I have passed over the battle field and seen the mangled forms of men and horses in frightful abundance – men without heads, without arms, and others without legs. 

All this I have witnessed and more, till my heart sickens; and war is not glorious as novelists would have us believe. It is only when we are in the heat and flush of battle that it is fascinating and interesting. It is only then that we enjoy it. . . . I see the horrors of war, but it is necessary: We are battling for our rights and our homes. Ours is a just war, a holy cause.  

John Pelham later joined Stuart's cavalry unit as an artillerist.  Stonewall Jackson once wrote of him in an official report:

It is really extraordinary to find such nerve and genius in a mere boy. With a Pelham on each flank I believe I could whip the world.

Atkinson Pelham and his brother, Peter, had both studied medicine in Philadelphia, where they boarded with Abigail Coffin, the mother of Lucretia Coffin Mott and Martha Coffin.  Peter and Martha had fallen in love and married; after Peter's death, Martha and her family corresponded with various members of the Pelham family, and visited them in Kentucky in 1853.  Lucretia Mott wrote of this trip:

We left Cincinnati at eleven o'clk, and did not reach Maysville till ten at night. The banks of the river afforded a constantly varying scene, and we enjoyed the day, though there were no passengers that were attractive. John Pelham met us at the landing, with his carriage. . . . We were made so entirely at home by their Kentucky hospitality, that we soon felt like old acquaintances. . . .  In the morning before we were up, a real slave-looking girl came in, sans ceremony, and made up the fire anew. We passed the next morning in free conversation. Their table was generous, as their reception in other respects. A meeting had been appointed for me in the Town Hall of Maysville, in the afternoon. There was a crowded house. Slavery spoken of without reserve, and well borne. Much persuasion to have another meeting in the evening — which we consented to . . .  J. P. seemed satisfied with the meetings, though I learned afterwards that he had felt apprehensive, and had expressed a wish that I should be told not to speak on, or allude to slavery.

In a letter to Lucy Stone, referring to this journey, James Mott wrote:

My dear Lucy, — Here we are on the way up the Ohio river, in a small but tolerably comfortable boat. . . . On reaching Maysville on Seventh-day eve, we found John Pelham (Martha's brother-in-law) waiting to take us to his house, on reaching which his sisters gave as a hearty welcome, and we had a pleasant visit. Yesterday after dinner we returned to Maysville to attend a meeting that had been appointed in the Court House at two o'clock. Theology, war, intemperance, and slavery were the topics dwelt upon; slavery was spoken to, plainly, and well received by a large and attentive audience. At the close, another meeting was appointed for the evening, on Woman's Rights. . . . Lucretia told them they must get Lucy Stone to talk to them . . 

Martha Coffin Wright added to this letter: 

Dear Lucy, — I don't know how brother James has done to write a word, the boat jars so; I must add, however, my wish that you will go to Maysville. A slaveholder said to me, that she thought it a great pity the meeting last night could not be followed by others, there was such a willingness to hear the truth. I never heard more earnest demonstrations, not by applause, but in remarks afterwards. My good brother-in-law, John Pelham, said to me before the first meeting, "I hope Mrs. Mott will not name slavery, — notice was given for a religious meeting." " Why," said I, " that is eminently a religious subject, and the people, believe me, will respect the free utterance of opinion far more than an unworthy concealment . . He still demurred, but I think he felt entirely satisfied after hearing her; and she did not spare them. Of course I said not a word to her beforehand of this conversation.

Hood's Texans bore the brunt of the fighting and paid a heavy price—60% casualties—but they were able to prevent the defensive line from crumbling and held off the I Corps. When later asked by a fellow officer where his division was, Hood replied, "Dead on the field."

A young man who was working as a hired hand on the Nicodemus farm told his experiences to Clifton Johnson in 1913:

I was twenty-two years old. I'd been raised by a man by the name of Jacob Nicodemus, and I was still workin' for him. He had a log house with two rooms downstairs and just a sort of loft divided by a partition up above. There was what we called a bat-house with a couple of bedrooms in it attached to the rear like a shed. In winter we used a room in the house for a kitchen, but in summer the kitchen was in another building off a little piece from the house. We had one of these old German barns with a roof that had a long slant on one side and a short slant on the other. The roof was thatched with rye straw.

At the time of the battle we'd thrashed our rye and oats, but our wheat was standing in stacks beside the farmyard. Our corn was on the stalk in the field, and there was sixteen acres of it.

We had 'bout a dozen large hogs and mebbe eighteen or twenty pigs that run with their mammy yet in the fields and woods. We never penned any of 'em up till after we'd done seedin' wheat. Even our fattening hogs didn’t get any feed till after that time. Ourn was a pretty good breed of hogs. . . . We had quite a few cattle. I suppose there was over twenty head . . .There was six horses on our place and not one of 'em but what we could both work and ride. All the people round had good ridin' horses then — lopers, rackers, and pacers. There wa'n't no buggies much. Horseback ridin' was the go of the day. Men and women, too, would travel anywhere on their horses. Ridin' was healthy and it was fun . . .  

On the Sunday before the battle of Antietam the Federals and Confederates fit over hyar on South Mountain. We could hear the guns, but we couldn’t figure out what was goin' on, and thinks I, "Dog-gone it! I'll go and see this fightin'."

So two or three of us young fellers started. We went afoot 'cross the fields to Keedysville and then to Boonsboro, a matter of five or six miles in all. As we went along we kept pickin' up recruits till there was a dozen of us. A hotel man in Boonsboro spoke to us and said, "You fellers'll get right in the fight and be killed if you keep on."  But we was nosey and wanted to nose in. We wa'n't afraid, and we'd 'a' went till we heard the bullets whistle if we hadn’t met a wounded soldier. He'd been shot in his hand, and he told us the troops was hot at it up there on the mountain. So we thought we'd let well enough alone, and we went back home.

We expected there was goin' to be another battle, but we didn’t know where or when it would be fought. Nobody was a-workin' the next day. They was ridin' around to find out what was goin' to happen. By afternoon the Rebel army was gettin' into position on the south side of Antietam Creek. Some of the troops was posted off on the edge of our farm, and I went over where they was and walked right up and talked with the pickets. None of 'em didn’t offer to do me no harm. They asked me for some tobacker. I had a right good plug in my pocket, and I divided it up among 'em. They took it all, and they chewed and spit and felt pretty good. An officer lent me his glasses, and I could see the Union army maneuvering over on the hills beyond the creek. 

By and by, while I was layin' there talkin' to the pickets, a shell landed in a fence 'bout thirty yards from me. I'd never seen no battle nor no war, and I was scared, and I said, "Ain't you fellers afraid?" "Oh, no!" they said, "a shell has to come closer than that to make us afraid."

But I got up and says I, "Good-by, boys, I'm goin' to take care of my horses."

I went to the house, and a feller named Hines helped me bridle 'em up. Then he mounted one, and I mounted another, and we each led two and rode eight miles north to the place of a farmer we knew. We shut the horses up in his barn and stayed there that night.

The next day I set out to walk home, but when I got most to our farm the pickets wouldn’t let me pass, and I had to return the same way I'd come. While I was gone my horses had been stolen. Hines seen the Union soldiers takin' 'em, and he heard 'em braggin' how much they was goin' to get for 'em. He went to the fellers, and, says he, "Them there belongs to a farmer down near Sharpsburg"; but they took 'em just the same.

Hines said that the fellers belonged to the command of Cap'n Cowles who was stationed at Williamsport, three or four miles away. I follered 'em right up and Hines went along with me. We found Cap'n Cowles and told him what had happened.  "Well," he said, "come with me to the corral where we keep our horses, and if you see yourn there, take 'em." We found 'em, and the soldiers stood around and looked at us pretty hard while we rode off with 'em.

There was some cannonadin' and fightin' on Tuesday, and they were at it again the next day at sunrise and fought pretty savage way on into the night. 

They tell me that was the bloodiest day in American history. More than twenty-three thousand men was killed or wounded. During the night Lee got away across the Potomac. It had been only two weeks since he started north with an army of fifty thousand, but he lost so heavily in the battle and by straggling that he went back with scarcely half that number.

On Thursday morning I walked home. None of the family was there. The soldiers had taken the children and the old man and old woman off the battlefield before day on Wednesday. The house was full of wounded Northern soldiers, and the hogpen loft was full, and the barn floor. The wounded was crowded into all our buildings.  I looked around to find something to eat, but there wa'n't enough food in the house to feed a pair of quail. We'd left fifty pounds of butter in the cellar and seventy-five pounds of lard and twenty gallons of wine — fine grape wine — and half a barrel of whiskey. We had just baked eight or ten loaves of bread the day before, and pies, and I don't know what else. Those things was all gone. So was every piece of bacon from the smoke-house. When the family went away there was the big end of a barrel of flour in the house, and I reckon the soldiers had used half of it in making shortcakes. They'd mixed up flour and lard and water in a tin that we called a washall — we washed dishes in it — and they'd rolled the cakes out thin and greased the whole top of the cookstove and baked 'em on that. After bakin' a cake on one side they'd take a-hold of it and turn it over to bake the other side. I didn’t hardly know the stove when I come home.

We had four geese and 'bout sixty chickens, and the soldiers got 'em all except one hen. She was settin' under the woodpile, and with all that thunderin' and crackin' goin' on she kept settin'. 'Pears to me that was providential. The Lord seen fit to let us have some chickens. She had seventeen eggs, and every one hatched. We didn’t know she was there till she come out with the chickens; and they all lived. I never see chickens grow so fast in my life. We hadn’t no time to tend to 'em, and the hen raised 'em herself.

The soldiers had done their chicken-killin' in the room where we had our winter kitchen. They'd taken the dough scraper and put it on a chicken's neck and hit it a whack with the rollin'-pin, and that rollin'-pin was all bruised up. They were dirty butchers, and the floor was ankle deep easy with heads and feet, entrails and feathers. It just happened that they couldn’t cook in there or they'd have burnt the house up, I reckon. The stove was in the summer kitchen.

What we called our cellar was a large cave, 'bout fifteen yards from the house, with a ten by twelve log buildin' settin' on it. The buildin' had been made for a shop, but we'd repaired it up and plastered it, and we kept our parlor furniture in it. If we had visitors of a Sunday we invited 'em in there to set and talk. Our best chairs was in there — mohair chairs with black, stuffed seats, — and a six-dollar lookin'-glass, mahogany finish, and a nice bed. It was a cord bed with the woodwork of sycamore all through, and it had two feather-beds, one to lay on, and one to cover you. There was two sheets of home-made linen, and these hyar old-time coverlids wove by the women on a loom, blue on one side and red on the other, with flowers of all kinds on 'em. That was what you'd call a fine bed in them days, and you couldn’t buy one like it now, with the pillows and bolsters and sich-like stuff on it, for one hundred dollars.

A shell come in at the northeast corner of that buildin' and hit the bureau and took the top off and went out the southeast corner. Another shell went through the gable ends, and it struck the bed and knocked the headboard and footboard out and took the feathers and sheets and carried 'em right along. The big house didn’t escape either. A shell went through the roof and cattycornered across and went out the other side. Great large limbs were knocked off the trees, and sometimes the whole top of a tree had been carried away. Oh! the trees was knocked to pieces considerable. Yes, indeed!

Our wheatstacks was full of shells, and we picked 'em out while we was thrashing. There was grapeshots in the stacks too. We couldn’t see 'em, and they broke down the machine several times and made us a lot of expense.  The soldiers stole a good many of our potatoes, which they dug out of the ground, but we still had enough to do us over the winter. We didn’t get pay for anything except some hay and rye and oats and two colts.

A good deal of our corn was broken down. The soldiers had two batteries right in the middle of it, but we got enough at the ends of the field to see us out the year.  Our cattle strayed down in the woods by the river. I reckon they got wild at the noise and the sight of the troops and jumped out of their pasture. They didn’t none of 'em get killed, but it was three or four days before we found 'em. Our hogs went down by the river, too. Part of 'em come home after the battle, but some was shot. The soldiers took the hams off and let the rest of the carcass lay. More was wasted than was saved.

Fully one third of the fences on our farm was gone. Some of the rails had been used to burn the dead horses, and the soldiers always took rails whenever they wanted a campfire to cook with. It was quite a job to make them rails, and quite a job to lay a fence up again. Yes, sir!

On Friday morning I fetched our horses. I hadn’t seen the old man and old woman since the battle, but him and her got back that day. They didn’t like the looks of things very much. The house had been looted. The dishes was gone, and we had no beds and no bed-clothing. There wa'n't a pillow in the house, and no sheets, no blankets, no quilts or coverlids. There was only bedticks — just them left. The soldiers had taken every stitch of mine and the old man's clothing, and they'd torn up the old woman's clothing and used it for bandages. We got gray-backs and bedbugs and everything on us, and the first thing we did was to renovate the house. It took us three weeks with hire to get in shape. 

I never want to see no war no more. . . . Thursday I had come on down half way to Sharpsburg to Bloody Lane, and I went all around as far as I had time to go. I saw a heap of dead men of both sides. The soldiers was buryin' 'em as fast as they could gather 'em together. They'd dig trenches 'bout six or seven feet wide and eighteen inches deep, and those trenches was dug right straight along a considerable distance unless the diggers come to a rock. Each dead man was first laid on a blanket, then put in the trench and the blanket spread over him, and there the bodies was buried side by side. The trenches was so shallow that after the loose dirt which was thrown back had settled down heads and toes sometimes stuck out.  All over the fields the bodies was picked up, but those right around the buildings was left. I suppose the soldiers thought that the people who owned the buildings would bury the bodies to get rid of 'em. It was a warm September. Yes, sir, some days was very hot, and we had to bury them bodies or stand the stench. 

By Saturday night I had all those on our place buried, but the smell hung on for a month, there was so many dead men and horses that was only half covered. The stench was sickening. We couldn’t eat a good meal, and we had to shut the house up just as tight as we could of a night to keep out that odor. We couldn’t stand it, and the first thing in the morning when I rolled out of bed I'd have to take a drink of whiskey. If I didn’t I'd throw up before I got my clothes all on.

I buried three bodies right behind our smokehouse, then four layin' at the back barn doors, and one near the well. A lane for our stock run through the middle of our farm, and I buried three in that lane, and I buried fifteen in a corner of a field that we'd ploughed and got ready to seed. Those fifteen were government soldiers, and they were very near all Massachusetts men. The flesh of the dead men had discolored so they looked like they was black people, except one. He lay close by our well. He had a wound in his neck, and an army doctor who saw him said to me, "Judgin' from his looks and the len'th of time he's been layin' hyar, he must have bled all the blood he had in him."  I took cotton and tied up my mouth and nose and dug a grave right where he was a-layin'. He was an awful big man, and that was the only thing I could do. Then I shoved a board under him and got him to rollin', and he went into the grave. I'd rather not have buried him so near the well, but the water wa'n't very good anyhow. In the heat of midsummer it seemed stagnant like, and we'd haul water from a neighbor's well, a bar'l or two at a time.  'Bout a year later that body was dug up to put in the cemetery, and we found a pocket in the back of the man's coat up between his shoulder blades with a ten-dollar bill in it. But the bill was so rotten it fell to pieces, and we couldn’t make nothin' out of it, only on one corner we could see it was a government ten-dollar bill. All his other pockets was wrong side out, and that was the way with the pockets of every dead soldier I saw on the battlefield. They'd all been robbed.

The battle made quite a change in the look of the country. The fences and other familiar landmarks was gone, and you couldn’t hardly tell one man's farm from another, only by the buildings, and some of them was burnt. You might be out late in the day and the dark would ketch you, and things was so torn and tattered that you didn’t know nothin'. It was a strange country to you. I got lost three or four times when I thought I could go straight home.

Another queer thing was the silence after the battle. You couldn’t hear a dog bark nowhere, you couldn’t hear no birds whistle or no crows caw. There wa'n't no birds around till the next spring. We didn’t even see a buzzard with all the stench. The rabbits had run off, but there was a few around that winter — not many. The farmers didn’t have no chickens to crow. Ourn didn’t commence for six months. When night come I was so lonesome that I see I didn’t know what lonesome was before. It was a curious silent world.

Adoniram Warner

Hooker's men also paid heavily but without achieving their objectives: after two hours and 2,500 casualties, they were back where they started. The cornfield, an area about 250 yards  deep and 400 yards wide, was a scene of indescribable destruction. It was estimated that the cornfield changed hands no fewer than 15 times in the course of the morning.  Adoniram Judson Warner of the 10th Pennsylvania Reserves had been ordered by Hooker to proceed to the extreme right of the line, and as far to the front as he could, and report the movements of the enemy. In his report, he said "I immediately threw out nearly the whole regiment into a corn-field, as skirmishers . . . For about twenty minutes the skirmishing was kept up sharply . . ." Colonel Warner, after having his horse shot twice, his sword once, one ball graze his right side and another pass through his coat, was hit by a Minie ball in the right hip, which shattered his pelvis.  

A man from Wisconsin with his bowels all open lay calmly waiting his end.  He had been struck by a shot and brought back so far and left by a tree to die.  He gave his name and the name of his parents to let them know he had done his duty.  He did not groan nor murmured . . . . But soon turned over and died.

This incident our men looked on without emotion apparently, for such is the feeling at such a time. . . . The wounded began to come by scores. . . . That dreadful cornfield that will ever be known as the scene of the most deadly strife that took place on that day.  We were now on ground strewn thick with our own and the rebel dead . . .  

John Sedgwick

The Union II Corps, led by General Edwin Sumner, was ordered at 7:20 a.m. to send two divisions into battle.  General John Sedgwick's division of 5,400 men was the first to ford the Antietam, and they entered the East Woods with the intention of forcing the Confederates south into the assault of Ambrose Burnside's IX Corps. But the plan went awry: they became separated from William French's division, and at 9 a.m. Sumner launched the attack with an unusual battle formation—the three brigades in three long lines, men side-by-side, with only 50 to 70 yards separating the lines. They were assaulted first by Confederate artillery and then from three sides by the divisions of Early, Walker, and McLaws.  In less than half an hour, Sedgwick's men were forced to retreat in disorder to their starting point with over 2,200 casualties, including Sedgwick himself.  He was wounded in the wrist, leg, and shoulder, and had a horse shot from under him before being carried unconscious from the field. He was out of action until December.

The final actions in the morning phase of the battle were around 10 a.m., when two regiments of the Union XII Corps advanced, only to be confronted by the division of John G. Walker. Walker's men were forced back by two Union brigades, and the Federal troops seized some ground in the West Woods.  The morning phase ended with casualties on both sides of almost 13,000.

Before the war, Clara Barton worked in in the  U.S. Patent Office. When the war began, Ladies' Aid societies helped by sending bandages, food, and clothing to the troops. In August of 1862, Barton finally gained permission from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to work on the front lines. She gained support from other people who became became her patrons, her most supportive being  Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts.  

Arriving at the northern edge of the cornfield, Barton watched as harried surgeons dressed the soldiers' wounds with corn husks; medical supplies were far behind the troops on the battlefield. Barton handed over a wagon load of bandages and other medical supplies that she had personally collected. As bullets whizzed overhead and artillery boomed, Barton cradled the heads of suffering soldiers, prepared food for them in a local farm house, and brought water to the wounded men. In her bonnet, red bow and dark skirt she worked non-stop until dark, When night fell, Barton produced lanterns from her wagon of supplies, and the grateful doctors continued to work.  Barton later wrote in Notes on Antietam:

On the way to Antietam my wagons were at the rear of the army; the road was filled for ten miles with a solid moving mass. It was impossible to get by until they stopped for the night. You understand that if one wagon tries to pass another at such a time, it simply is pushed into the ditch. But at dusk the train drew to one side of the road and halted for the night. At midnight I directed my drivers to harness quietly and drive on past them, if possible without creating suspicion. We made the entire ten miles before daybreak and took our place in the rear of the headquarters wagon, and moved on next day unquestioned - passing the field of South Mountain, the guns of which had rung in our ear all the day before.

On the evening of the 16th of September we reached the valley of Antietam.

It was a miserable night. There was a sense of impending doom. We knew, every one knew, that two great armies of 80,000 men were lying there face to face, only waiting for dawn to begin the battle. It gave a terrible sense of oppression. 

When the dawn came I was in a hollow which was filled with men and beasts; it was all used and made fetid by this press of human beings and animals. Before dawn I went up on the hill, and there I could sweep the country with my glass, see the countless watchfires of both armies, lying face to face, ready to spring, yet not a man to be seen. Before I left the hill, the dawn came, and the firing began away on the right. There was to be the beginning of the battle, and there I should be needed first. I hastened down; my men were all ready with their wagons, and ordered them to drive to the right, eight miles. We galloped the whole distance, and drew up behind the line of artillery which was covering our infantry and slanted away to the left. There was a big cornfield, and we drove in, and up towards an old barn which was standing in the midst. My men unharnessed the mules and tied them to the wheels and we were ready for work. They were always my helpers. We knew the wounded were in there somewhere, the men went in search of them. 

The corn was immensely tall, it entirely hid the house from us. Presently, the men came back saying, "yes, they are over there, the tables and surgeons" and I followed them through the corn and came upon the house. It had a high, broad verandah, and on this every kind of thing that pretended to be a table was standing, and on the tables were the poor men, and beside them the surgeons. They were the same with whom I had just been at the second Bull Run.

"The Lord has remembered us!" "You are here again."  "And did you want me?" I asked.  "Want you! Why, we want you above all things, and we want everything."  "I have everything," I replied.  "Look here," he said, "see what we need, and how much we need it, we have no more chloroform, no more bandages nor lint, no more liquor, nothing. See here" and he showed me some poor fellows whose raw new wounds were actually dressed with those rough corn leaves.

And this was the beginning of the battle. You must know that we had passed the supplies the night before; they could not come up until the fate of the day was decided. Those were their orders; they must not risk falling into the hands of the enemy. That was the point I always tried to make, to bridge that chasm, and succor the wounded until the medical aid and supplies should come up. I could run the risk; it made no difference to anyone if I were shot or taken prisoner and I tried to fill that gap.

My men unloaded the wagons, and brought up everything the good women of the country had provided; the wounded kept pouring in, and we kept working over them. After a time my stores for feeding the men began to give out; not the other things, oh no there were plenty of those; but of food I had naturally not enough for thousands, and by afternoon the line of wounded stretched out for five miles.

A curious thing happened there. I had twelve cases of wine, the first nine opened were packed in sawdust; but the last three, when we were nearly in despair of food, were packed in corn meal. My men were almost superstitious over that; they had the idea it must have changed some way from sawdust to meal. It was a lucky sign too, for when we went into the house to reconnoitre for food; down in the cellar we found three barrels of Indian meal and a bag of salt; there were three or four great kettles in and about the house, and we made gruel, gruel, gruel . . .

Towards sunset the third charge was made on the line of artillery covering our infantry. Of course, all day the cannonading had been close upon us; but the house and corn field were under the lee of a hill and the enemy's guns were mostly trained on that hill so that the firing went over us. The upper stories of the house were riddled to be sure and several shells fell in among us and at the edge of the verandah, yet none explored to do harm, fortunately. This third charge was the most terrific artillery duel I ever heard, and I have had some experience. The tables jarred and rolled until we could hardly keep the men on them, and the roar was overwhelming. After a while I looked around, and to my surprise saw all the surgeons gone, except one man, the chief, who was standing by a table where a man lay, but there was no one to help him with the operation. "What has become of your assistants?" said I going up to him. "Don't blame them, madam" said he. "They have been here through ghastly scenes since daylight and then cannonading is nerve-breaking. Don't blame them that they have retired, and some have gone down the line to the wounded."  "Very well" said I, "and how about this man? Do you want to go on with the operation? Can I assist you?"  "Can you stand it?" said he.  "Oh, yes" said I, and I took the chloroform. He gave me directions and we tended the man through the whole of the frightful firing.

While tending to the wounded soldiers, Barton discovered that one was actually a young woman who had followed her lover in the army. She was eventually able to help the woman find her soldier in a Washington hospital, and the couple later named their daughter for her.

Dr. James Dunn, a surgeon at Antietam, said:

In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.

By midday, the action had shifted to the center of the Confederate line. The first brigade to attack, mostly inexperienced troops commanded by Union General Max Weber, was quickly cut down by heavy rifle fire. Private J. Polk Racine of the 5th Maryland Infantry later wrote in his Recollections of a Veteran:

Recollections of a Veteran

When we came to that beautiful corn field, boys, that was when the trouble began; and just as we crossed that worn fence, which divided the corn and clover fields, oh, but the bullets did fly! I didn't see them, but saw the effects. Men were falling all around us. 

Our bugler was standing near me, when a cannon-ball struck him in the head and cut it from his shoulders. I think I got some of the blood and brains in my face; I always imagined so. 

I saw poor Amor Dunbar, standing looking at some horses and cattle that were pasturing in that clover field. It was the last I ever saw of him. He must have been killed there, for no one has ever heard from him since. Just in the middle of the clover field, I saw a mare and colt, two or three cattle, and some sheep, pasturing. They were between two fires - that is, getting our bullets and the enemy's. I saw the old mare stagger and fall, then all but the little colt fell at the first fire. After that we could not see, for the smoke from the burning powder was so dense that we could see only at close range. But in 15 minutes after the fighting commenced, that little colt ran down our line, apparently unhurt. The most remarkable part of it was, that the next day we found the little thing half a mile down the line. It was full of bullets.

In the second attack, more raw recruits under Colonel Dwight Morris were also subjected to heavy fire, but managed to beat back a counterattack by the Alabama Brigade of Robert Rodes. The third attack, under General Nathan Kimball, included three veteran regiments, but they fell to fire from the sunken road (later known as "The Bloody Lane"). One division suffered 1,750 casualties (of 5,700 men) in under an hour.  The carnage from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on the sunken road gave it the name Bloody Lane, leaving about 5,600 casualties (Union 3,000, Confederate 2,600) along the 800-yard road. 

Thomas Meagher

Leading off the fourth attack of the day against the sunken road was the Irish Brigade of  General Thomas Meagher, an Irish nationalist and leader of the Irish Rebellion of 1848.  After being convicted of sedition, he was sentenced to death, but received transportation for life to Australia.  In 1852 he escaped and made his way to the United States, where he settled in New York City.  There he  studied law, worked as a journalist, and traveled to lectures on the Irish cause.  At the beginning of the war, Meagher joined the Union army and rose to the rank of brigadier general.  He recruited and led the Irish Brigade.  Before the war began, Meagher had visited the South to lecture, and was sympathetic to its people. His Irish friend John Mitchel, who had settled in the South, supported the Confederacy; Meagher and Mitchel split over the issue of slavery.  Mitchel went to the Confederate capitol in Richmond, Virginia, and his three sons served with the Confederate army.  

Reinforcements were arriving on both sides, and by 10:30 a.m. General Robert E. Lee sent his final reserve division—some 3,400 men under General Richard Anderson—to bolster Hill's line and extend it to the right. But at the same time, the 4,000 men of Union General Israel Richardson's division arrived; this was the last of Sumner's three divisions, which had been held up in the rear by McClellan as he organized his reserve forces.  Richardson dispatched the brigade of General John Caldwell into battle around noon, and finally the tide turned. 

George B. Anderson
 was hit in the ankle.
He was sent home to recuperate,
but the wound festered;
his leg was amputated,
but he died on October 16,
one day before the birth of his
daughter.

Confederate leaders were  lost, including George B. Anderson, Colonel Charles Tew, of North Carolina, who was killed minutes after assuming command) and Colonel John B. Gordon of the 6th Alabama.  Gordon received five  serious wounds in the fight: twice in his right leg, twice in the left arm, and once in the face. Gordon wrote in his Reminiscences of the Civil War:

This battle left its lasting impress upon my body as well as upon my memory. . .

The list of the slain was lengthened with each passing moment. I was not at the front when, near nightfall, the awful carnage ceased; but one of my officers long afterward assured me that he could have walked on the dead bodies of my men from one end of the line to the other. This, perhaps, was not literally true; but the statement did not greatly exaggerate the shocking slaughter. 

Before I was wholly disabled and carried to the rear, I walked along my line and found an old man and his son lying side by side. The son was dead, the father mortally wounded. The gray-haired hero called me and said: "Here we are. My boy is dead, and I shall go soon; but it is all right." Of such were the early volunteers.

John Gordon

My extraordinary escapes from wounds in all the previous battles had made a deep impression upon my comrades as well as upon my own mind. So many had fallen at my side, so often had balls and shells pierced and torn my clothing, grazing my body without drawing a drop of blood, that a sort of blind faith possessed my men that I was not to be killed in battle. This belief was evidenced by their constantly repeated expressions: "They can't hurt him." "He's as safe one place as another." "He's got a charmed life."  If I had allowed these expressions of my men to have any effect upon my mind the impression was quickly dissipated when the Sharpsburg storm came and the whizzing Miniés, one after another, began to pierce my body.

Charles Tew

The first volley from the Union lines in my front sent a ball through the brain of the chivalric Colonel Tew, of North Carolina, to whom I was talking, and another ball through the calf of my right leg. 

On the right and the left my men were falling under the death-dealing crossfire like trees in a hurricane. The persistent Federals, who had lost so heavily from repeated repulses, seemed now determined to kill enough Confederates to make the debits and credits of the battle's balance-sheet more nearly even. Both sides stood in the open at short range and without the semblance of breastworks, and the firing was doing a deadly work. Higher up in the same leg I was again shot; but still no bone was broken. I was able to walk along the line and give encouragement to my resolute riflemen, who were firing with the coolness, and steadiness of peace soldiers in target practice. 

When later in the day the third ball pierced my left arm, tearing asunder the tendons and mangling the flesh, they caught sight of the blood running down my fingers, and these devoted and big-hearted men, while still loading their guns, pleaded with me to leave them and go to the rear, pledging me that they would stay there and fight to the last. I could not consent to leave them in such a crisis. The surgeons were all busy at the field-hospitals in the rear, and there was no way, therefore, of stanching the blood, but I had a vigorous constitution, and this was doing me good service.

A fourth ball ripped through my shoulder, leaving its base and a wad of clothing in its track. I could still stand and walk, although the shocks and loss of blood had left but little of my normal strength. 

I remembered the pledge to the commander that we would stay there till the battle ended or night came. I looked at the sun. It moved very slowly; in fact, it seemed to stand still. 

I thought I saw some wavering in my line, near the extreme right, and Private Vickers, of Alabama, volunteered to carry any orders I might wish to send. I directed him to go quickly and remind the men of the pledge to General Lee, and to say to them that I was still on the field and intended to stay there. He bounded away like an Olympic racer; but he had gone less than fifty yards when he fell, instantly killed by a ball through his head. 

I then attempted to go myself, although I was bloody and faint, and my legs did not bear me steadily. I had gone but a short distance when I was shot down by a fifth ball, which struck me squarely in the face, and passed out, barely missing the jugular vein. I fell forward and lay unconscious with my face in my cap; and it would seem that I might have been smothered by the blood running into my cap from this last wound but for the act of some Yankee, who, as if to save my life, had at a previous hour during the battle, shot a hole through the cap, which let the blood out.

I was borne on a litter to the rear, and recall nothing more till revived by stimulants at a late hour of the night. I found myself lying on a pile of straw at an old barn, where our badly wounded were gathered. My faithful surgeon, Dr. Weatherly, who was my devoted friend, was at my side, with his fingers on my pulse. As I revived, his face was so expressive of distress that I asked him: "What do you think of my case, Weatherly?" He made a manly effort to say that he was hopeful.  I knew better, and said: "You are not honest with me. You think I am going to die; but I am going to get well." Long afterward, when the danger was past, he admitted that this assurance was his first and only basis of hope. 

General George B. Anderson, of North Carolina, whose troops were on my right, was wounded in the foot, but, it was thought, not severely. That superb man and soldier was dead in a few weeks, though his wound was supposed to be slight, while I was mercifully sustained through a long battle with wounds the combined effect of which was supposed to be fatal. Such are the mysterious concomitants of cruel war.

Charles Tew of South Carolina was shot through both temples, but evidently did not die immediately. His body was apparently pulled down into the Sunken Road after he was struck. When the Confederates were forced to retreat from the Sunken Road, Tew's body was not recovered, and was never identified or returned. Many conflicting stories and rumors were spread concerning Tew's fate. A prominent one was that Tew was alive and a prisoner of war at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.  Tew's father went to Washington, D.C. and received permission to visit the prison but he was unable to locate him. His place of burial remains unknown. 

A photograph taken by Alexander Gardner is believed by some to contain an image of Charles Tew's body; the photograph, often called "Dead at Bloody Lane" shows a Confederate officer in the bottom right of the photo, lying on his back against the bank of the Sunken Road.

A solider at the Roulette Farm field hospital wrote:

Roulette Farm

A strong, sturdy-looking Reb was coming laboriously on with a Yank of no small proportions perched on his shoulders. Wonderingly I joined the group surrounding and accompanying them at every step, and then I learned why all this especial demonstration; why the Union soldiers cheered and again cheered this Confederate soldier, not because of the fact alone that he had brought into the hospital a sorely wounded Federal soldier, who must have died from hemorrhage had he been left on the field, but from the fact, that was palpable at a glance, that the Confederate too was wounded. 

He was totally blind; a Yankee bullet had passed directly across and destroyed both eyes, and the light for him had gone out forever. 

But on he marched, with his brother in misery perched on his sturdy shoulders. He would accept no assistance until his partner announced to him that they had reached their goal - the field hospital.

It appears that they lay close together on the field . . .The groans of the wounded Yank reached the alert ears of his sightless Confederate neighbor, who called to him, asking him the nature and extent of his wounds. On learning the serious nature of them, he said:

"Now, Yank, I can't see, or I'd get out of here mighty lively. Some darned Yank has shot away my eyes, but I feel as strong otherwise as ever. If you think you can get on my back and do the seeing, I will do the walking, and we'll sail into some hospital where we can both receive surgical treatment." This programme had been followed and with complete success.

We assisted the Yank to alight from his Rebel war-horse, and you can rest assured that loud and imperative call was made for the surgeons to give not only the Yank, but his noble Confederate partner, immediate and careful attention.

Colonel Francis Barlow and 350 men of the 61st and 64th New York saw a weak point in the Confederate line and seized a knoll commanding the sunken road, firing into the Rebel troops. Confederate Lt. Col. James N. Lightfoot, who had succeeded the unconscious John Gordon, ordered his men to about-face and march away, an order that all five regiments of the brigade thought applied to them as well. Confederate troops streamed toward Sharpsburg, their line lost.  Union soldiers were in pursuit when massed artillery hastily assembled by General James Longstreet drove them back. A counterattack with 200 men led by D.H. Hill got around the Federal left flank near the sunken road, and although they were driven back by a charge of the 5th New Hampshire, this stemmed the collapse of the center. Colonel Barlow was severely wounded, and a soldier from the 1st Delaware Infantry saw a comrade staggering around with both eyes shot out and pleading “for the love of God” for someone to end his agony. A lieutenant heard his appeal, verified its sincerity and coolly shot the blind man in the brain. “It was better thus,” the lieutenant said. Then a solid shot took the lieutenant’s head off.

If this broken sector of the Confederate line had been exploited, Lee's army would have been divided in half and possibly defeated. There were ample forces available to do so: there was a reserve of 3,500 cavalry and the 10,300 infantrymen of the V Corps, waiting a mile away. The VI Corps had just arrived with 12,000 men; General William B. Franklin of the VI Corps was ready to exploit this breakthrough, but Sumner, the senior corps commander, ordered him not to advance. Franklin appealed to McClellan, who left his headquarters in the rear to hear both arguments but backed Sumner's decision, ordering Franklin and Hancock to hold their positions.

Confederate Colonel John R. Cooke of the 27th North Carolina sent a message during combat:

We will stay here . . . if we must all go to hell together.  Tell General Longstreet to send me some ammunition. I have not a cartridge in my command, but will hold my position at the point of the bayonet. 

John Rogers Cooke was the brother-in-law of Confederate cavalry leader Jeb Stuart and the son of Union general Phillip St. George Cooke.   

Charles "Charley" King

One of the youngest enlisted soldiers in the Union army was Charles E. King, known as "Charley," the drummer boy of Company F, 49th Pennsylvania Volunteers of General Winfield Hancock's brigade. Charley was the oldest child of Pennell and Adaline King of Chester County, Pennsylvania; they had five younger children.  Charley had learned to play the drums before the war, and he begged his parents for permission to enlist as a drummer boy. Although they refused, he got Captain Benjamin Sweeney of Company F to discuss it with them.  Sweeney assured his parents that drummer boys did not actually go into combat, and that the officers would look out for the boy.  Charles enlisted in the 49th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry with the reluctant permission of his father at the age of 12 years, 5 months and 9 days. 

In the noise and confusion of battle, it was often impossible to hear the officers’ orders, so each order was given a series of drumbeats to represent it. Both soldiers and drummers had to learn which drum roll meant “meet here” and which meant “attack now” and which meant “retreat” and all the other commands of battlefield and camp.  When the drummer boys weren’t needed for sounding the calls, they had another job: stretcher bearers. They walked around the battlefield looking for the wounded and brought them to medical care.

At Antietam, the 49th was placed in support on the Miller Farm just north of the East Woods.  A shell exploded in the ranks, wounding several soldiers, including Charley King, who was hit "through the body" by a piece of shrapnel.  He was carried to a field hospital and died there three days later. Thirteen year old Charley King was the youngest soldier killed in the Civil War. 

McClellan's plan called for General Ambrose Burnside and the IX Corps to conduct a diversionary attack in support of Hooker's I Corps, hoping to draw Confederate attention away from the intended main attack in the north. However, Burnside was instructed to wait for explicit orders before launching his attack, and those orders did not reach him until 10 in the morning.  Burnside was disgruntled that McClellan had abandoned the previous arrangement of "wing" commanders reporting to him; previously, Burnside had commanded a wing that included both the I and IX Corp,s and now he was responsible only for the IX Corps. Burnside had four divisions (12,500 troops) and 50 guns east of Antietam Creek. Facing him was a force that had been greatly depleted by Lee's movement of units to bolster the Confederate left flank. At dawn, the divisions of Confederate Generals David R. Jones and John G. Walker stood in defense, but by 10 a.m. all of Walker's men and Colonel George T. Anderson's Georgia brigade had been removed. 

David R. Jones

David R. Jones was a West Point graduate and a cousin of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.  Although he would survive the battle, he died four months later from heart disease. His troops faced those of his brother-in-law, Union Colonel Henry Kingsbury.  Henry Kingsbury entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June of 1856. Of the 52 member class of May 1861, forty-one fought for the Union and eleven for the Confederacy. In the early 1850s, his sister, Mary, had married future Confederate Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner. Late in 1861 Kingsbury married Eva Taylor, niece of President Zachary Taylor and sister-in-law of his close friend David Jones, who was nicknamed “Neighbor” for his gregarious personality. 

Jones had only about 3,000 men and 12 guns available to meet Burnside. Four thin brigades guarded the ridges near Sharpsburg, primarily a low plateau known as Cemetery Hill. The remaining 400 men—the 2nd and 20th Georgia regiments, under the command of General Robert Toombs, with two artillery batteries—defended Rohrbach's Bridge, a stone structure that was the southernmost crossing of the Antietam. It would become known to history as "Burnside's Bridge" because of the notoriety of the coming battle. The bridge was a difficult objective: the road leading to it ran parallel to the creek and was exposed to enemy fire. The bridge was dominated by a 100-foot high wooded bluff on the west bank, strewn with boulders from an old quarry, making infantry and sharpshooter fire from good covered positions a dangerous impediment to crossing. Antietam Creek in this sector was seldom more than 50 feet wide, and several stretches were only waist deep and out of Confederate range. Burnside has been widely criticized for ignoring this fact, starting with derision from Confederate staff officer Henry Kyd Douglas. However, the commanding terrain across the sometimes shallow creek made crossing the water a comparatively easy part of a difficult problem. Burnside concentrated his plan instead on storming the bridge while simultaneously crossing a ford McClellan's engineers had identified a half mile downstream, but when Burnside's men reached it, they found the banks too high to negotiate.

While Colonel George Crook's Ohio brigade prepared to attack the bridge with the support of General Samuel Sturgis's division, the rest of the Kanawha Division and General Isaac Rodman's division struggled through thick brush trying to locate Snavely's Ford, 2 miles  downstream, intending to flank the Confederates.  Crook's assault on the bridge was led by skirmishers from the 11th Connecticut, who were ordered to clear the bridge for the Ohioans to cross and assault the bluff. After receiving fire for 15 minutes, the Connecticut men withdrew with 139 casualties, one-third of their strength, including their commander, Colonel Henry W. Kingsbury, who was fatally wounded.  As the 11th Connecticut rushed down the slope and raced for cover they were shot to pieces by Confederates well-concealed on the bluffs on the opposite bank. A Confederate bullet broke Kingsbury's leg; another tore into his foot. As his men raised him up to evacuate him to the rear a third bullet slammed into his shoulder. A fourth and mortal bullet ripped into his abdomen. Kingsbury was taken to the Rohrbach farmhouse where he joined many of the regiment’s

Henry Kingsbury

139 casualties at the improvised hospital. Surgeon Nathan Mayer wrote of the Rohrbach farmhouse: 

Every room was soon filled [with wounded] . . . The barnyard and garden were crowded with wounded. And I should not have known where to place more.

With no hope for his own survival, Kingsbury ordered the surgeons to “take care of the men.” That evening a tearful Ambrose Burnside visited Kingsbury and in his final hours helped arrange his affairs. Kingsbury’s dying request was that Burnside care for his unborn child. The following evening, September 18, an assistant-surgeon of the 11th Connecticut reported, “the Colonel has opened his eyes and given me the sweetest smile and closed them forever.” His son was born three months later. When word reached David Jones that men from his division had killed Kingsbury, Jones was inconsolable. He had learned of the death of his friend through prisoners of the 11th Connecticut.  Jones was never the same after that day, asking to be relieved of command of his division and dying of a heart attack in January 1863 at the age of 39.

Burnside and Cox directed a second assault at the bridge by one of Sturgis's brigades, led by the 2nd Maryland and 7th New Hampshire.  They also fell prey to the Confederate sharpshooters and artillery, and their attack fell apart. By this time it was noon, and McClellan was losing patience: he sent a succession of couriers to urge Burnside to move forward. McClellan ordered one aide, "Tell him if it costs 10,000 men he must go now." He increased the pressure by sending his inspector general to confront Burnside, who reacted indignantly: "McClellan appears to think I am not trying my best to carry this bridge; you are the third or fourth one who has been to me this morning with similar orders."

The third attempt to take the bridge was at 12:30 p.m. by Sturgis's other brigade, commanded by General Edward Ferrero. It was led by the 51st New York and the 51st Pennsylvania, who, with adequate artillery support and a promise that a recently canceled whiskey ration would be restored if they were successful, charged downhill and took up positions on the east bank. Maneuvering a captured light howitzer into position, they fired double canister down the bridge and got within 25 yards of the enemy. By 1 p.m., Confederate ammunition was running low, and word reached Toombs that Rodman's men were crossing Snavely's Ford on their flank. He ordered a withdrawal. His Georgians had cost the Federals more than 500 casualties, giving up fewer than 160 themselves. And they had stalled Burnside's assault on the southern flank for more than three hours.

Robert Augustus Toombs was a Georgia planter, attorney, and politician who was one of the

Robert Toombs 

founding fathers of the Confederacy. In November, 1860, after Lincoln had been elected president, Governor Joe Brown of Georgia called the legislature into session to consider the question of calling a secession convention.  Toombs made a speech to the gathering:

GENTLEMEN OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY: I very much regret, in appearing before you at your request, to address you on the present state of the country, and the prospect before us, that I can bring you no good tidings. The stern, steady march of events has brought us in conflict with our non-slave holding confederates upon the fundamental principles of our compact of Union. 

We have not sought this conflict; we have sought too long to avoid it; our forbearance has been construed into weakness, our magnanimity into fear, until the vindication of our manhood, as well as the defence of our rights, is required at our hands. 

. . . The basis, the corner-stone of this Government, was the perfect equality of the free, sovereign, and independent States which made it. They were unequal in population, wealth, and territorial extent - they had great diversities of interests, pursuits, institutions, and laws; but they had common interests, mainly exterior, which they proposed to protect by this common agent - a constitutional united government - without in any degree subjecting their inequalities and diversities to Federal control or action. . . .

The Executive Department of the Federal Government, for forty-eight out of the first sixty years under the present Constitution, was in the hands of Southern Presidents, and so just, fair, and equitable, constitutional and advantageous to the country was the policy which they pursued, that their policy and administrations were generally maintained by the people. . . .They never sought to use a single one of the powers of the Government for the advancement of the local or peculiar interests of the South, and they all left office without leaving a single law on the statute-book where repeal would have affected injuriously a single industrial pursuit, or the business of a single human being in the South.

. . . The instant the Government was organized, at the very first Congress, the Northern States evinced a general desire and purpose to use it for their own benefit, and to pervert its powers for sectional advantage, and they have steadily pursued that policy to this day. . . 

The North agreed to deliver up fugitives from labor. In pursuance of this clause of the Constitution, Congress, in 1797, during Washington's administration, passed a Fugitive Slave law; that act never was faithfully respected all over the North, but it was not obstructed by State legislation until within the last thirty years; but the spirit of hostility to our rights became more active and determined, and in 1850 that act was found totally insufficient to recover and return fugitives from labor; therefore the act of 1850 was passed. The passage of that act was sufficient to rouse the demon of abolition all over the North. The pulpit, the press, abolition societies, popular assemblages, belched forth nothing but imprecations and curses upon the South and the honest men of the North who voted to maintain the Constitution. And thirteen States of the Union, by the most solemn acts of legislation, wilfully, knowingly, and corruptly perjured themselves and annulled this law within their respective limits. I say willfully, knowingly, and corruptly.  . . Some of them punish us with penitentiary punishment as felons for even claiming our own slaves within their limits, even by his own consent; others by ingenious contrivances prevent the possibility of your sustaining your rights in their limits, where they seek to compel you to go, and then punish you by fine and infamous punishments for asserting your rights and failing to get them. . . .God Almighty have mercy on these poor people . . .

For twenty years this party has, by Abolition societies, by publications made by them, by the public press, through the pulpit and their own legislative halls, and every effort - by reproaches, by abuse, by vilification, by slander - to disturb our security, our tranquility - to excite discontent between the different classes of our people, and to excite our slaves to insurrection. . . . I have thus shown you the violations of our constitutional rights by our confederates . . 

The Abolitionists say you are raising a clamor because you were beaten in the election. The falsity of this statement needs no confirmation. . . .What is the significance of Lincoln's election? It is the indorsement, by the non-slave holding States, of all those acts of aggression upon our rights by all these States, legislatures, governors, judges, and people. He is elected by the perpetrators of these wrongs with the purpose and intent to aid and support them in wrongdoing. . . Surely no one will deny that the election of Lincoln is the indorsement of the policy of those who elected him, and an indorsement of his own opinions. . . .Hitherto they have carried on this warfare by State action, by individual action, by appropriation, by the incendiary's torch and the poisoned bowl. . .  

Withdraw your sons from the army, from the navy, and every department of the Federal public service. Keep your own taxes in your own coffers - buy arms with them and throw the bloody spear into this den of incendiaries and assassins, and let God defend the right. 

. . . We are told that secession would destroy the fairest fabric of liberty the world ever saw, and that we are the most prosperous people in the world under it. The arguments of tyranny as well as its acts, always reenact themselves. The arguments I now hear in favor of this Northern connection are identical in substance, and almost in the same words as those which were used in 1775 and 1776 to sustain the British connection. We won liberty, sovereignty, and independence by the American Revolution - we endeavored to secure and perpetuate these blessings by means of our Constitution. . . . 

Our purpose is to defend those liberties. . . .Withdraw yourselves from such a confederacy; it is your right to do so - your duty to do so. I know not why the abolitionists should object to it, unless they want to torture and plunder you. . . As for me, I will take any place in the great conflict for rights which you may assign. I will take none in the Federal Government during Mr. Lincoln's administration.  If you desire a Senator after the fourth of March, you must elect one in my place. I have served you in the State and national councils for nearly a quarter of a century without once losing your confidence. I am yet ready for the public service, when honor and duty call. I will serve you anywhere where it will not degrade and dishonor my country. Make my name infamous forever, if you will, but save Georgia. I have pointed out your wrongs, your danger, your duty. You have claimed nothing but that rights be respected and that justice be done. Emblazon it on your banner - fight for it, win it, or perish in the effort.

Toombs delivered a farewell address in the U.S. Senate in January 1861 in which he said:

We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.

The selection of of Jefferson Davis as the new nation's chief executive dashed any hopes Toombs had of holding the high office of the Confederacy; Confederate leaders rejected him because of his serious drinking problem. Toombs had no diplomatic skills, but Davis chose him as the Secretary of State.  Within months of his cabinet appointment, a frustrated Toombs resigned to join the Confederate States Army; he received a commission as a brigadier general on July 19, 1861. He was wounded in the hand at the Battle of Antietam. 

Burnside's assault on the bridge stalled again; his officers had neglected to transport ammunition across the bridge, which was becoming a bottleneck for soldiers, artillery, and wagons. This resulted in a two-hour delay. General Robert E. Lee used this time to bolster his right flank: he ordered up every available artillery unit, counting on the arrival of A.P. Hill's Light Division,  Those troops had embarked on an exhausting 17 mile march from Harpers Ferry; by 2 p.m., Hill's men had reached Boteler's Ford, and Hill was able to confer with Lee at 2:30.

Lewis Powell, 1865

Washington Roebling

One of the members of A.P. Hill's division was a young soldier from Florida named Lewis Powell.  In 1865, he would be part of John Wilkes Booth's conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln and other members of his administration.  Powell went to the home of Secretary of State William Seward and savagely attacked him.  He was hanged along with three other conspirators.

Washington Augustus Roebling was an assistant to McClellan's Chief Engineer, Captain James Duane; Roebling was a member of the teams that created topographic maps of the battlefield and surrounding area.  He later worked as chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was designed by his father, John Roebling.

Sergeant William McKinley of the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in charge of the

Commissary Department, served hot coffee and warm food to every man in his regiment. General J.L. Botsford of the Ohio Volunteers later said:

We heard tremendous cheering from the left of our regiment. As we had been having heavy fighting right up to this time, our division commander, General Scammon, sent me to find out the cause which I very soon found to be cheers for McKinley and his hot coffee. . . When you consider the fact of his leaving his post of security, driving right into the middle of a bloody battle with a team of mules, it needs no words of mine to show the character and determination of McKinley, a boy at this time about twenty years of age. McKinley loaded up two wagons with supplies, but the mules of one wagon were disabled. He was ordered back time and again, but he pushed right on.

McKinley's regimental commander and mentor, Rutherford B. Hayes, said that

Early in the afternoon, naturally enough, with the exertion required of the men, they were famished and thirsty, and to some extent broken in spirit. The commissary department of that brigade was under Sergeant McKinley’s administration and personal supervision. From his hands every man in the regiment was served with hot coffee and warm meats.  

He passed under fire and delivered, with his own hands, these things, so essential for the men for whom he was laboring.

In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes was the Republican nominee for president, opposing the Democrats' candidate, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Both sides mounted mud-slinging campaigns, with Democratic attacks on Republican corruption being countered by Republicans raising the Civil War issue, a tactic ridiculed by Democrats who called it "waving the bloody shirt." Republicans chanted, "Not every Democrat was a rebel, but every rebel was a Democrat." The Democratic strategy for victory in the south was highly reliant on paramilitary groups such as the White League and the Red Shirts: these groups actively suppressed black and white Republican voter turnouts by disrupting meetings and rallies using intimidation and violence. 

It was one of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in United States in American history. After a first count of votes, it was clear that Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes unresolved. These 20 electoral votes were in dispute in four states: in the case of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party reported its candidate had won the state, while in Oregon one elector was declared illegal and replaced. The question of who should have been awarded these electoral votes is the source of the continued controversy concerning the results of this election.  If all the disputed electoral votes went to Hayes, he would win; a single one would elect Tilden.  Months of uncertainty followed. In January 1877 Congress established an Electoral Commission to decide the dispute. The commission, made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, determined all the contests in favor of Hayes by eight to seven. The final electoral vote: 185 to 184.  An informal deal was struck to resolve the dispute: the Compromise of 1877, which awarded all 20 electoral votes to Hayes. In return for the Democrats' acquiescence in Hayes's election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.  The Compromise effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic "Redemmers," who returned the South to a political economy resembling that of its pre-war condition, including the disenfranchisement and oppression of black people. Hayes pledged protection of the rights of Negroes in the South, but at the same time advocated the restoration of "wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government." Hayes hoped conciliatory policies would lead to the building of a "new Republican party" in the South, to which white businessmen and conservatives would rally.  Many of the leaders of the new South did indeed favor Republican economic policies and approved of Hayes's financial conservatism, but they faced annihilation at the polls if they were to join the party of Reconstruction. 

William McKinley was elected twice as president. McKinley was the last president to have served in the civil war. He returned to the Antietam battlefield on May 30, 1900--Memorial Day--to deliver an address at the unveiling of the Maryland State Monument. Among McKinley's guests of honor were Mr. and Mrs. James Longstreet. McKinley was killed the following year by an assassin’s bullet. 

Robert Edward "Rob" Lee, Jr. was the youngest of three sons of General Robert E. Lee, and

 "Rob" Lee, Jr. 

the sixth of their seven children.  At Antietam, he was a private with the Rockbridge Virginia Artillery in J.R. Jones division.  In the afternoon, he saw his father organizing forces for a counterattack:

As one of the Army of Northern Virginia I occasionally saw the Commander-in-Chief, or passed the headquarters close enough to recognize him and members of his staff; but a private soldier in Jackson's corps did not have much time during that campaign for visiting, and until the battle of Sharpsburg I had no opportunity of speaking to him. 

On that occasion our battery had been severely handled, losing many men and horses. Having three guns disabled, we were ordered to withdraw and, while moving back, we passed General Lee and several of his staff grouped on a little knoll near the road. Having no definite orders where to go, our captain, seeing the commanding General, halted us and rode over to get some instructions. Some others and myself went along to see and hear. General Lee was dismounted with some of his staff around him, a courier holding his horse. Captain Poague, commanding our battery, the Rockbridge Artillery, saluted, reported our condition, and asked for instructions. 

The General listened patiently, looked at us, his eyes passing over me without any sign of recognition, and then ordered Captain Poague to take the most serviceable horses and men, man the uninjured gun, send the disabled part of his command back to refit, and report to the front for duty. 

As Poague turned to go, I went up to speak to my father. When he found out who I was he congratulated me on being well and unhurt. I then said, 'General, are you going to send us in again?' "Yes, my son," he replied, with a smile, "you all must do what you can to help drive these people back." 

In a letter to Mrs. Lee, General Lee says, "I have not laid eyes on Rob since I saw him in the battle of Sharpsburg, going in with a single gun of his, for the second time, after his company had been withdrawn in consequence of three of its guns having been disabled."

The Federals were completely unaware that 3,000 newly arrived troops would be facing them. Burnside's plan was to move around the weakened Confederate right flank, converge on Sharpsburg, and cut Lee's army off from Boteler's Ford, their only escape route across the Potomac. At 3 p.m., Burnside left Sturgis's division in reserve on the west bank and moved west with over 8,000 troops (most of them fresh) and 22 guns for close support. An initial assault led by the succeeded against Jones's outnumbered division, which was pushed back past Cemetery Hill and to within 200 yards of Sharpsburg. Farther to the left, Rodman's division advanced toward Harpers Ferry Road; its lead brigade came under heavy fire from a dozen enemy guns mounted on a ridge to their front, but they kept pushing forward. 

There was panic in the streets of Sharpsburg, which were filled with retreating Confederates. Of the five brigades in Jones's division, only Toombs's brigade was still intact, but he had only 700 men.  Just as it seemed that Lee's men would be pushed back through the town, General A.P. Hill's men, moving up the road after a 17-mile march, slammed into Burnside's exhausted men, rolling up the left flank of the Union line. 

A.P. Hill

A.P. Hill, known to his family as Powell (and to his soldiers as "Little Powell"), was born in Virginia, the seventh and last child of Thomas and Fannie Hill. Powell was named for his uncle, Ambrose Powell Hill, who served in both houses of the Virginia legislature, and Captain Ambrose Powell, an Indian fighter, explorer, sheriff, legislator, and close friend of President James Madison.  At West Point, Hill was friendly with many of his classmates, including George McClellan, but did not get along with Thomas Jackson, who became known as "Stonewall" at the beginning of the war. In 1844, Hill returned from a furlough with a case of gonorrhea, which caused him to miss so many classes that he was required to repeat his third year. Reassigned to the class of 1847, he made new friendships with Ambrose Burnside and others. He was once engaged to Ellen B. Marcy, the future wife of his West Point roommate George McClellan, before her parents pressured her to break off the engagement. During the war a rumor spread that Hill always fought harder if he knew McClellan was present with the opposing army, because of Ellen's rejection. On July 18, 1859, Hill married Kitty ("Dolly") Morgan McClung, a young widow, becoming the brother-in-law of future Confederate cavalry general  John Hunt Morgan, who was Hill's best man at the wedding.  A Confederate chaplain later said of Hill:

I remember seeing him visiting, as was his custom, his field hospitals, looking after the comfort of his wounded, and with his own hands lifting some of the poor fellows into more comfortable positions.

Robert E. Lee wrote in his official report that A.P. Hill

drove the enemy immediately from the position they had taken, and continued the contest until dark, restoring our right, and maintaining our ground.

Hill divided his column, with two brigades moving southeast to guard his flank and the other three, about 2,000 men, moving to the right of Toombs's brigade. At 3:40 p.m., General Maxcy Gregg's brigade of South Carolinians attacked the 16th Connecticut on Union General Isaac Rodman's left flank in the cornfield of farmer John Otto. The Connecticut men had been in service for only three weeks, and their line disintegrated with 185 casualties. The 4th Rhode Island came up on the right, but they had poor visibility amid the high stalks of corn, and they were disoriented because many of the Confederates were wearing Union uniforms captured at Harpers Ferry. They also broke and ran, leaving the 8th Connecticut far out in advance and isolated. They were driven down the hill toward Antietam Creek.

Isaac Peace Rodman was born into a Baptist family in Rhode Island; he was co-owner of a

Isaac Peace Rodman

textile mill, a community leader and state senator. At the start of the Civil War, Rodman raised a group of local residents for the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry regiment.  Before the Maryland campaign, Rodman was convalescing at home from typhoid fever, but returned to his regiment against his doctor's advice.

Dr. Anson Hurd, 14th Indiana Volunteers,
attending Confederate wounded in a field hospital

During the last Union attack, conducted between the Lower Bridge and Sharpsburg, Rodman was leading his troops when he was struck  by a bullet in his chest and knocked off his horse.  He was carried to a field hospital at the Rohrbach Farm.  His wife, Sally, was notified of her husband's wound, and reached him a few days later, just before he died.  He was 40 years old and the father of six children.  He was buried in the family cemetery in Peace Dale, Rhode Island.

A slave owned by John Otto later told his experiences to Clifton Johnson in 1913:

Well, sir, if I live to see the first day of May, I'll be eighty-one years old. I was thirty when the battle of Antietam was fought. My home hyar in Sharpsburg is only about two miles from Calamus Run where I was born. When I was ten months old my mother and I was bought by Mr. Otto, who lived a little outside of the town down toward Antietam Creek, and I've worked for the Otto family ever since.

My boss was a slaveholder. Yes, he belonged to that sec', but he was a good man to his black people. I'll tell any one that. I was foreman on his place for twenty-odd years. His colored people lived in the same house the white people did, and they e't the same food as the white people did. But we had our table in the kitchen, and they had theirs in the dining-room. When I worked in harvest all day cradling wheat I was paid as much as anybody else, and if I went with the horses to do teaming for a neighbor the money for what I done was mine. That's the kind of a boss I had. There was not many like that — no, sir, not in this country.

After emancipation his son said to me, "Now, Hilary, you're your own man. Pap wants to hire you, but you can go and work wherever you please. If you decide to go away, and it happens that by and by you have nothin' to do, come back and make your home with us."  I stayed there, and later, when I was draughted to be a soldier, my boss said, "Do you want to go?" and I told him, "No, sir."  So me 'n' him went to Frederick and he paid three hundred dollars to keep me out of the army.

. . . Early in the morning of the Monday before the battle of Antietam the Rebels come in hyar, and the hill at our place was covered with 'em. They'd walk right into the house and say, "Have you got anything to eat?" like they was half starved.  We'd hardly fix up for a couple when a lot mo' would come in. The white people and my mother was in the kitchen givin' 'em bread and bacon. They was great fellers for milk, too. Some sat down at table, and some would just take a chunk of food in their hands. They e't us out directly.

The Union troops, who come onto our place a few days later, wasn’t so hongry. That was the difference between the two armies. The Rebels was always hongry, and the men were miserable dirty. They certainly looked pretty rough.

Monday night I went up to the village to see my wife who was workin' for a family there. She was skeered up a little but hadn’t got into no trouble.

When I went back home the Rebels was sleepin' along the edge of the road same as a lot of hogs might. I stumbled over some of 'em, but they didn’t say anything. Their guns was laid aside, and they didn’t know they had 'em, I reckon.

On Tuesday all the Otto family left and went down country for safety. I stayed on the place. Once I fastened up the house tight and walked up in the field. By and by I had a feelin' that I'd better go back, and I went. I found some one had broke a pane of glass in a window and reached in and took out the nail that kept the sash down. Then he'd raised the window and crawled in. Close by, inside of the room, was a washbench, and he'd set a crock of preserves and a crock of flour on it ready to carry away. I took the things and put 'em where they belonged and started on the trail of the thief. It was easy follerin' him, for he left all the doors open which he went through. In the dining-room he'd poured out a lot of sugar on a handkercher to take along, and he 'd gone into my old boss's room and strewed his papers around over the floor. Next he'd gone upsteps, and I went up 'em, too, and hyar he was in a little pantry. He was a Rebel soldier — a young feller — and not very large. I was skeered, but he was mo' skeered than I was — certainly he was; and I said, "You dirty houn' you, I have a notion to take you and throw you down those steps."  Oh! I could have mashed him, for I saw he had no revolver. He didn’t say anything. He left. I reckon I was too big for him.

"I'm goin' to have a guard hyar befo' night," I said, and pretty soon an officer come down there and I told him how one of his men had been carryin' on after we'd give the soldiers so much to eat. So he sent three men with guns to guard the place.  That evening the old boss come in and said, "General Toombs is goin' to be hyar over night, and he will be up to supper." 

"Who in the name of the Lord will get the supper?" I asked.  "You and his waiter will have to get it some way or 'nother," he said.  Well, we fried some meat and made some biscuit, and the old general got his supper, but he didn’t get no breakfast there. The firin' commenced so strong on Wednesday morning that he had to hurry to his post, and the waiter took his breakfast out to him.

My boss went down in the country to get under the hill where they wouldn’t shoot him. The shells soon begun flyin' over the house and around hyar, and while I was out in the yard there was one that 'peared like it went between our house and the next, and busted. I could see the blue blaze flyin', and I jumped as high as your head, I reckon.

I've ploughed up a many a shell in our fields since the battle. You'd find 'em most anywheres. Often, I've broke 'em in two. It's a wonder I wasn’t killed. There was balls inside and brimstone and stuff.

I didn’t like those shells a-flyin', and I got on one of the horses and led some of the others and went off across the Potomac to the place of a man who was a friend of my boss. There I stayed all day listenin' to the cannon.

Thursday I come home. Befo' I got there I began to see the Johnnies layin' along the road, some wounded and some dead. Men was goin' over the fields gatherin' up the wounded, and they carried a good many to our barn, and they'd pulled unthreshed wheat from the mow and covered the floor for the wounded to lay on. In the barnyard I found a number of Rebels laid in our straw pile and I told 'em the Yankees was comin' to ketch 'em. But they said that was what they wanted — then they'd get a rest.

I was goin' over a stone wall on my way to the house, and there, leanin' against the wall was a wounded Yankee. I asked him when the Rebs left him.  "Last night about twelve o'clock," he said. I asked him how they'd treated him, and he said: "They found me wounded, and I reckon they did the best they could, but that wasn’t much. They didn’t have much to do with." For a while I carried water to the wounded in the barn, and then I went on to town. I wanted to see where my wife was, and after I found she hadn’t been hurt I felt considerable better.

A week later the wounded was moved off our place to a camp hospital, and the family come home. The house, as well as the barn, had been used as a hospital, and whatever had been left in it was gone. Besides, every bit of our hay and stuff had been taken to feed the army horses, We didn’t lose any of our own horses, but the next year some Rebel raiders got 'em all except two blind ones.

The IX Corps had suffered casualties of about 20 percent but still were twice the number of Confederates confronting them. Unnerved by the collapse of his flank, Burnside ordered his men all the way back to the west bank of the Antietam, where he urgently requested more men and guns. McClellan was able to provide just one battery; he said, "I can do nothing more. I have no infantry." In fact, McClellan had two fresh corps in reserve, Porter's V and Franklin's VI, but he was too cautious, concerned that he was greatly outnumbered and that a massive counterstrike by Lee was imminent. Burnside's men spent the rest of the day guarding the bridge.  Private David L. Thompson, Company G of the 9th New York Volunteers later wrote:

All were calling for water, of course, but none was to be had. We lay there until dusk--perhaps an hour, when the fighting ceased. During that hour, while the bullets snipped the leaves from a young locust tree growing at the edge of the hollow and powdered us with fragments, we had time to speculate on many things-among others, on the impatience with which men clamor, in dull times, to be led into fight.

Alvin Flint, Jr.

Private Alvin Flint, Jr. of the 11th Connecticut Volunteers, the oldest son of Alvin and Lucy Flint, was 18 years old.  He had enlisted in the army almost a year before the battle, at the age of 17.  A few months after he left home, his mother and younger sister died of tuberculosis.  The following summer, Alvin Flint, Sr., 52 years old, and his youngest son, George, only 13, enlisted together as private in the 21st Connecticut Volunteers.  Alvin Flint, Jr. was killed near the Burnside Bridge at Antietam.  His father, who was on duty in Maryland, wrote a letter to the editor of the Harford Courant in October:

You doubtless are aware that I have come to the land of Dixie, to engage in this killing business . . . We were sent to Frederick City, where we remained two days and thence marched to Sharpsburg. We arrived Saturday night, near what I call "Antie-Dam," where my boy was brutally murdered by a band of midnight assassins. Oh that I could revenge on them, as Sampson did upon the Philistines! I was leaning upon that dear boy, as a prop in my declining years; but if my life is spared, I shall knock out some of the props that hold up this uncalled for, and worse than hellish, wicked rebellion. Hardly had the sadness of the death of my dear daughter in January worn off, when this sad, sad calamity should come upon me.

. . . To me the place was dreadful in the extreme, where my dear boy had been cut down in a moment with no one to say a word to him . . . Oh how dreadful was that place to me, where my dear boy had been buried like a beast of the field!  Oh could I have found the spot, I would have wet it with my tears!  Oh how dreadful was that place to me, where I passed two long, long sleepless nights! . . . My son was a member of the 11th Conn., and his age was 18.

Alvin Flint Jr.'s body was later shipped to Connecticut.  Alvin Flint Sr. died of typhoid fever on January 10, 1863, while the Union army was encamped near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Five days later, his son George died of the same illness.  The family - Alvin, Lucy and their three children - was buried together in Center Cemetery, East Hartford, Connecticut.

The battle was over by 5:30 p.m., twelve hours after it had begun.

George W. Beale of the 9th Virginia Cavalry wrote in A Lieutenant of Cavalry in Lee's Army

George W. Beale

When the night's approach put an end to the fighting on this field, we were allowed to seek some camp near by for food and rest. Wherever we rode for this purpose, however, the ground seemed to be occupied with dead or wounded men.  At length, we sought some stacks, and a barn, resolved not to ride farther but there, on the straw and in the buildings, were the dead. I sought an empty wagon in the barnyard and fastened my horse to a wheel. 

Next morning, under the wagon, lay a young soldier, fair and noble in his death, with his clothes partly unfastened and his clinched fingers near the ghastly wound in his abdomen from which he had died. 

The last scene on which my eye rested that night before it closed, in such close comradeship with the dead, was that of a small group with a flickering lantern beside a fence near by, who were digging a grave and rudely raising the earth over some fellow soldier who had fallen. 

Next day, the 18th of September, was spent in line of battle awaiting a renewal of McClellan's attack; but he showed no disposition to renew it, and preparations were made on our side to withdraw at night, and cross the Potomac at Shepardstown. The need of food among us had now become imperative and desperate, and in our company, at least, was fast beginning to surmount all other considerations. Towards night, six or seven sheep, the frightened and pitiful remnant of a large flock, were found in a field, and on the edge of it, we halted and made ready to cook our supper.  Several of the men were detailed to catch two sheep. I watched the chase, and for celerity of movements and skill of plan to make a speedy capture, the performance could not well have been surpassed. That night, our monotonous fare was varied, and for once at least we ate mutton-chops.

On the morning of September 18, there was an improvised truce for both sides to recover and exchange their wounded.  A sketch by artist Alfred Waud depicted the truce between the opposing sides being held in front of the church. 

Sketch by artist Alfred Waud of truce in front of the Dunker  Church 

David Hunter Strother, a writer and artist, was on General George McClellan’s staff. Born in Martinsburg, Virginia, he had trained as an artist in New York and Europe, and was working as a writer and illustrator in books and magazines in his 20′s. By the 1850′s D.H. was famous as “Porte Crayon” – his nom de plume. He was on assignment for Harpers Weekly at Harpers Ferry in 1859 and covered John Brown’s trial and execution.  On the eve of the Civil War, David Hunter Strother was possibly the best known graphic artist in America. The nation's leading art journal, The Crayon, hailed him as "one of best draughtsmen this country possesses." Other publications noted that his work was known to "half the country" and that his pen name, "Porte Crayon," had become "almost a household word."  In June 1861, at age 44, he volunteered as a topographer for the Federal Army at Martinsburg. Being a Virginia Unionist, he was seen as a traitor by his former friends and neighbors.  He wrote in his journal:

David Hunter Strother

SEPTEMBER 18, THURSDAY. Clouds which lifted about nine o'clock. We have thirty-two thousand fresh men to put into battle today if it recommences. The enemy will not attack from all appearances. The orders given to our generals were to hold their positions but not to attack. . . . Four or five cannon shot of ours broke the stillness of the morning, but no response from the enemy. I think they will retreat by way of Harpers Ferry as a small rear guard can hold the road against our whole force. Saw General McClellan ride to the front and was called to accompany him. We rode to Sumner's post on the right where the General remained for some time in consultation. We then rode to the point of woods where there had been hard fighting. . .  

In every direction around men were digging graves and burying the dead. Ten or twelve bodies lay at the different pits and had already become offensive. In front of this wood was the bloody cornfield where lay two or three hundred festering bodies, nearly all of Rebels, the most hideous exhibition I had yet seen. Many were black as Negroes, heads and faces hideously swelled, covered with dust until they looked like clods. Killed during the charge and flight, their attitudes were wild and frightful. One hung upon a fence killed as he was climbing it. One lay with hands wildly clasped as if in prayer. 

Dead bodies in Sunken Lane

From among these loathsome earth-soiled vestiges of humanity, the soldiers were still picking out some that had life left and carrying them in on stretchers to our surgeons. 

. . . With one good-looking young Rebel from South Carolina I talked. He was shot through the thigh, bone unbroken. Our men were talking to him kindly and I told him he would soon get well. His voice was soft and subdued. The fire of battle had gone out in his soul. Another was sitting up on the stretcher and had taken a drink of water. He looked sleepy and nodded slightly. His face was bloody and his eyes swelled shut. A ball had entered the bridge of his nose and come out the back of his head. . .  

Here was a long grave of ours made in a rain-washed gulley, certain to be washed out the first time it rained hard. I re marked on it to one of the men, who replied, "To be sure they will," and went on digging. In the midst of all this carrion our troops sat cooking, eating, jabbering, and smoking; sleeping among the corpses so that but for the color of the skin it was difficult to distinguish the living from the dead. . .  

Burial Crew

In addition to burial details, many soldiers scavenged the dead bodies for shoes and other valuables.  Robert W. Shand of the 2nd South Carolina Infantry wrote in his memoirs, Incidents In the life of a Private Soldier in the war waged by the United States against the Confederate States:

The shoes that I had on were worn away, nor could I get any from the quartermaster.  At this time the uppers of my old pair were practically gone and I kept the broken soles to my feet by an arrangement of strings around my feet and ankles.  In this condition I fought thro' the Battle of Sharpsburg, or Antietam as it is called by our friends, the enemy.

Early Thursday morning, I went out among the Yankee dead to get a pair of shoes.  I picked out my size and was in the act of removing them from his feet, when he opened his eyes and said: "Can't you wait until I am dead?"  I replied that I really thought he was dead, and that, even then I would not have disturbed him but for the fact that I was barefooted.  I gave him water, and passed on; it was all I could do.

I got my shoes from another, first making sure that he was dead.

In our company was a Swede . . . He was small and his feet were small.  He too went out on a shoe hunt.  On his return he was asked if he had found his shoes.  He said he had found only one pair that would fit, but the fellow was not quite dead yet.  He went out again later in the day, and again returned without the shoes.  When asked what was the matter, he replied: "The damned rascal ain't dead yet." 

William B. Westervelt 0f the 27th New York Infantry later published Lights and Shadows of Army Life:

Thursday, Sept. 18th. - Just before daylight we were called in line, as that is considered the favorable time to surprise a camp, and we did not intend to be caught napping. . . . All remained quiet, however, and soon after sunrise we were ordered to stack arms and break ranks.  Soon a score of small fires were kindled with cornstalks and small twigs, and the coffee cup - that inseparable companion of the soldier - was steaming, and meat frying, and we soon sat down to our morning meal right among the dead that, already in the hot September sun, began to give forth a very unpleasant odor.

 This only shows to what extent we could adapt ourselves to our surroundings.

The Dead of Antietam

 A few months before I could have not taken a mouthful of food and swallowed it in the presence of a corpse.  Now, although they showed unmistakable signs of decomposition, we did not mind it, even though they lay so thick we were obliged to life some of them out of our way to make room for our lines of battle. . . 

Stretcher carriers now came up, and while they carried off scores of wounded we turned in with pick and shovel, in the capacity of grave diggers, and like most everything else done by the army, our grave digging was on a wholesale scale.  We first dug a grave six feet wide and about sixty feet long.  In this grave, or rather trench, were placed side by side, forty of a South Carolina regiment. . . . As we had but few tools for digging, it took most of the day to complete our wholesale interments . . .

We got orders to move, and as we crossed the battle field the stench from the unburied dead almost took our breath away.  We soon crossed the Sharpsburg Pike, where the dead lay in every conceivable position: one with his rammer half drawn from his gun . . . with a small round hole through his forehead, his countenance being by slightly disfigured, but more expressive of surprise than pain.  

Captain Samuel Wheelock Fiske of the 14th Connecticut wrote of bloated bodies and 

Samuel Wheelock Fiske

hundreds of horses, too, all mangled and putrefying, scattered everywhere! Then there are the broken gun-carriages, the wagons and thousands of muskets, and all sorts of equipments, and clothing all torn and bloody . . .The trees torn with shot and scarred with bullets, the farm-houses and barns knocked to pieces and burned down, the crops trampled and wasted, the whole country forlorn and desolate. . .

I have just passed over a part of the field, I suppose only a small part of it, and yet I have counted nearly a thousand dead bodies of rebels lying still unburied in groves and corn-fields, on hill sides and in trenches.

In 1855, Fiske, who was a Congregational minister was from Massachusetts, spent a year in Europe travelling with a party of professors, and chronicled the journey in the Springfield Republican, under the non de plume of “Dunn Browne.”  He continued to use the name in his writings, and Mr. Dunn Browne's Experiences in the Army has been edited by Civil War writer Stephen Sears.  A collection of battlefront letters, the book provided accounts of his experiences in battle and in camp.  Fiske enlisted as a private in the 14th Connecticut and was later commissioned as an officer.  He died of wounds at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1864.

Charles Carleton Coffin was one of the best-known newspaper correspondents of the war.

Charles Carleton Coffin

 He wrote:

I recall a Union soldier lying near the Dunker Church with his face turned upward, and his pocket Bible open upon his breast. I lifted the volume and read the words: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." Upon the fly-leaf were the words, "We hope and pray that you may be permitted by kind Providence, after the war is over, to return."

Harrison White 

One soldier who was killed near the Dunker Church was Private Harrison White of the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteers, a 19-year-old cousin of General George McClellan.  Harrison's mother, Sarah Brinton White, was the sister of Elizabeth Brinton McClellan, the mother of George.  Harrison White had enlisted in the army in the summer of 1861, and sent most of his pay home to his widowed mother.  He was shot on the morning of September 17, carried to a field hospital, and died of his wound at midnight.  He was buried on the Hoffman farm; his body was later transferred to the Antietam National Cemetery.

When Joseph Poffenberger and his family returned to their farm, they found that their home and land had been ransacked by soldiers.  Jospeph Poffenberger later said that the family members subsisted for five days on army hardtack they found on the battlefield.   Soldiers remained on their property for several weeks, eating everything they dcould find, using the fences for firewood, and taking hay for bedding.  Joseph Poffenberger filed a claim with the government for his losses but never received any payment.

Lee's forces began withdrawing across the Potomac the evening of September 18; Lee knew he must return to Virginia, but he wanted it to be orderly, carrying off his wounded and not panicking the troops.

William Frassanito wrote in Antietam:

It is nearly impossible to describe what a battlefield such as Antietam smelled like . . . Decaying flesh and internal organs exude a disgustingly sour, pungent smell.  Interspersed with the foul odors produced by decomposition was the distinctive odor of human excrement, for whenever a human dies, the contents of the bowels (which at Antietam were frequently diarrheic) are usually evacuated as a result of internal gaseous pressure and the action of the death upon the muscles of the digestive system.

A Union soldier later wrote to his parents:

We were glad to march over the field at night for we could not see the horrible sights so well.  Oh what a smell some of the men vomit as they went along.

David Hunter wrote in his journal:

SEPTEMBER 19, FRIDAY. Bright and pleasant. At breakfast I was not surprised to hear they had retreated. We are advancing but with too much caution to effect anything. Everybody looks pleased but I feel as if an indecisive victory was in our circumstances equivalent to a defeat. 

We rode into Sharpsburg, the General riding in an ambulance drawn by four grey horses. He has been unwell since the battle. The village was riddled with balls and shells. Scarcely a house but had been struck and one house was pierced six places. A shell had entered the window of one house and exploded in the parlor, but leaving a mantel mirror unbroken. 

A child was killed by one of our shells, but no other citizen was injured. In a kitchen were two dead Rebels who were cooking there when killed by a shell. I rode out from the village to see the field of battle on the Hagerstown turnpike. This was the field where our center and right advanced. In a lane hollowed out and affording some protection the dead lay in heaps. In some places they had been dragged together and corded up in heaps of ten or twenty. Elsewhere the men were already burying them. In front of this lane was a long double line of dead showing where they fell in line of battle. The line was a quarter of a mile in length and they were close enough to touch each other. In front of this again was another line along a fence row. They were at least a thousand Rebel dead on this field which joined and was part of that I looked at yesterday in front of Sumner. . . This exceeds all the slaughter I had yet seen. On the river side of the Hagerstown pike and in the wood behind the church there were many more

bodies. . .  

It soon came to be understood that the retreat had been successfully conducted and they were all safe, having abandoned only two field pieces. From the questions asked on the subject of local geography, I judge we may have some intention of marching on Harpers Ferry . . . We captured yesterday an aide of General Stuart named Turner, a pleasant-mannered youth. I have met with no Rebel prisoner yet whose conversation amounted to anything.

William G. LeDuc

Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had been left for dead on the battlefield, was found by his friend, Captain William G. LeDuc, who asked where he was wounded.  Holmes said "Shot in the neck," which suprised LeDuc, because the phrase was army slang for being drunk.  He soon realized Holmes had actually been shot in the neck; as no medical attention was immediately available, LeDuc, a quartermaster, cleaned and bandaged the wound.  Holmes said, "I'm glad, LeDuc, it ain't a case for amputation for I have duced little confidence in your surgery."  LeDuc sent a telegram to the Holmes family: "Capt. Homes wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville."  In Massachusetts, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. received the telegram; the next day, he headed south to try to

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

find his son.

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud summons of a telegraphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might bring.  We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:—

Hagerstown 17th

To H

Capt H wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville

WILLIAM G LEDUC

Through the neck,—no bullet left in wound. Windpipe, food-pipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable, vessels, a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,—ought to kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not thought mortal,—which was it? The first; that is better than the second would be.—“Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland.” Leduc? Leduc? Don’t remember that name.—The boy is waiting for his money. A dollar and thirteen cents. Has nobody got thirteen cents? Don’t keep that boy waiting,—how do we know what messages he has got to carry?

The boy had another message to carry. It was to the father of Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a town a few miles this side of Keedysville. . . . Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the quarter past two o’clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or pressing emergency. I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the cars. I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose society would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, and whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim. . .

In Philadelphia] I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be heard of, if anywhere in this region. His lieutenant-colonel was there, gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son of the house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever. A fourth bed was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though inquiries had been made in the towns from and through which the father had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel . . . In Baltimore as we stood waiting on the platform for a train to Frederick, a telegraphic message was handed in silence to my companion. Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was hastening to see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. It was no time for empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and that now was not the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, felt as women feel it . . .

As we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the trail from the great battle-field. The road was filled with straggling and wounded soldiers. All who could travel on foot—multitudes with slight wounds of the upper limbs, the head or face—were told to take up their beds—a light burden, or none at all—and walk . . .For more than a week there had been sharp fighting all along this road. Through the streets of Frederick, through Crampton’s Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the Antietam, the long battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their path through our fields and villages. The slain of higher condition, “embalmed” and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank-and-file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as I have said, at every step in the road. It was a pitiable sight, truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more than the sight of this great caravan of maimed pilgrims. . .  

The principal collections of the wounded were in the churches. Boards were laid over the tops of the pews, on these some straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with little or no covering other than such scanty clothes as they had on. There were wounds of all degrees of severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs. Most of the sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all had, I presume, received such attention as was required. Still, it was but a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals suggested. I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but they were used to camp-life, and did not complain. The men who watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One of them was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed. I saw one poor fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing, anxious and restless. The men were debating about the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I happened there at the right moment to see that he was well narcotized for the night. 

Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these places? Certainly possible, but not probable; but as the lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind of thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated. Many times, as I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I started as some faint resemblance—the shade of a young man’s hair, the outline of his half-turned face—recalled the presence I was in search of . . .

A ride of some three hours brought us to Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army-surgeon who had charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little sleep after his fatigues and watchings. He bore this cross very creditably, and helped me to explore all places where my soldier might be lying among the crowds of wounded . . 

On Sunday, September 21st, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and two companions set out for the battlefield with his driver, James Grayden, at the reins.

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions, over the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which we did no then know, but which must have been the Antietam. At one point we met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies they had picked up on the battle-field. Still wandering along, we were at last pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit of which was covered with Indian-corn. There, we were told, some of the fiercest fighting of the day had been done. The fences were taken down so as to make a passage across the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days looked like old roads. A board was nailed to the tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of Gardiner, of a New-Hampshire regiment.  On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks and spades. "How many?" "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried, then, in this region of the field of strife. We stopped the wagon, and, getting out, began to look around us. Hard by was a large pile of muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up, and were guarded for the Government. A long ridge of fresh gravel rose before us. A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription, the first part of which was, I believe, not correct: "The Rebel General Anderson and 80 Rebels are buried in this hole."  Other similar ridges were marked with the number of dead lying under them. The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of bread and meat. 

As he walked the field, Holmes picked up "a bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a soldier's belt." He also picked up a letter "directed to Richmond, Virginia, its seal unbroken. 'N.C. Cleveland County. E. Wright to J. Wright.' On the other side, 'A few lines from W.L. Vaughn,' who has just been writing for the wife to her husband, and continues on his own account. 

I will keep this stained letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in my time . . 

Grave of Union Lt. John A. Clark, 7th Michigan Infantry,
near body of dead Confederate soldier

 John A. Clark, 7th Michigan Infantry

John Clark, the youngest of three children, was born on his family's farm in Michigan in 1841. He enlisted in the army in the summer of 1861, and was commissioned as an officer in early 1862.  He died on September 17th in the battle; his grave was photographed by Alexander Gardner. Family members traveled to Sharpsburg to claim his body and bury it in Michigan.  

On September 19, 1862, two days after the battle, Alexander Gardner, an employee of the photographer Mathew Brady, began documenting the battle’s grim aftermath. One of Gardner’s photographs, titled “Dead Horse of Confederate Colonel; both killed at Battle of Antietam,” showed a white horse lying on the field. Of his 70 pictures, Gardner featured only one lone horse, stripped of its saddle and tack. It very likely belonged to the Sixth Louisiana’s Col. Henry Strong, and it became something of a landmark among the Union soldiers left on the field because of its strangely peaceful appearance. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. saw the horse four days after the battle while searching for his wounded son. Later, Holmes examined Gardner’s photograph and said it was the same horse.

"The number of dead horses was high. They lay, like the men, in all attitudes. One beautiful milk-white animal had died in so graceful a position that I wished for its photograph. Its legs were doubled under and its arched neck gracefully turned to one side, as if looking back to the ball-hole in its side. Until you got to it, it was hard to believe the horse was dead."
~ Alphaeus Williams
Alexander Gardner took this photograph of a Confederate Colonel's dead horse

Union General Alpheus Williams later wrote:

Alpheus Williams

It was understood that we were to attack again at daylight on the 19th, but as our troops moved up it was found the Rebels had departed. . . .We lay under arms all day, waiting orders. I took the delay to ride over the field of battle. The Rebel dead, even in the woods last occupied by them, was very great. In one place, in front of the position of my corps, apparently a whole regiment had been cut down in line. They lay in two ranks, as straightly aligned as on a dress parade. There must have been a brigade, as part of the line on the left had been buried. I counted what appeared to be a single regiment and found 149 dead in the line and about 70 in front and rear, making over 200 dead in one Rebel regiment. In riding over the field I think I must have seen at least 3,000. In one place for nearly a mile they lay as thick as autumn leaves along a narrow lane cut below the natural surface, into which they seemed to have tumbled. Eighty had been buried in one pit, and yet no impression had apparently been made on the unburied host. The cornfield beyond was dotted all over with those killed in retreat.  The wounded Rebels had been carried away in great numbers and yet every farmyard and haystack seemed a large hospital.

The number of dead horses was high. They lay, like the men, in all attitudes. One beautiful milk-white animal had died in so graceful a position that I wished for its photograph. Its legs were doubled under and its arched neck gracefully turned to one side, as if looking back to the ball-hole in its side. Until you got to it, it was hard to believe the horse was dead. 

Another feature of the field was the mass of army accouterments, clothing, etc. scattered everywhere or lying in heaps where the contest had been severest. 

. . . I marvel, not only at my own escape, as I was particularly exposed, on account of raw troops to be handled, but at the escape of any mounted officer.

Private George Allen of the 76th New York Infantry served as a hospital steward after the battle:

The principle hospital was established in the brick church near the upper end of the town.  Boards were laid on top of the seats, then straw and blankets, and most of the worse cases of wounded were taken to this, the headquarters. . . The Surgeons, myself and a corps of nurses with sleeves rolled up, worked with tender care and anxiety to relieve the pain and save the lives of all we could.

A pit was dug just under the window at the back of the church and as soon as a limb was amputated I would take it to the window and drop it outside into the pit.  The arms, legs, feet and hands that were dropped into that hole would amount to several hundred pounds. 

Surgeon John Mutius Gaines, Army of Northern Virginia,was the second son of Edwin and Mary Gaines, owners of the old Locust Hill Plantation, Culpepper County, Virginia.  His 25th birthday was on Sept. 1, 1862.  After the battle, Gaines was left at Boonsboro, Maryland, to tend to the wounded of both sides.  Gaines, considered a prisoner of war, worked under the grim conditions after combat, writing:  

Sept. 18, 1862 — Today I saw the leg above the knee taken off a large man. They first cut the flesh around where they intended to cut it off and then took up the arteries and tied the ends of them. Then shoved the flesh up the bone 3 or 4 inches, and then sawed it off. Drew the flesh back. Closed it together, and the job was done.

Dr. Otho Josiah Smith was a well-known physician in Boonsboro and a property owner in Washington County. Dr. Smith owned a large farm two miles northeast of Sharpsburg bordering on Antietam Creek. The barn on this property was used as a hospital for Union and Confederate wounded.  The two doctors worked together and formed a lasting friendship.  Dr. Smith's only daughter, Helen Jeannette Smith, assisted the surgeons at the hospital.  After six weeks of tending to the wounded at Boonsboro, John Gaines was exchanged and returned to the Confederate army, assigned to the 18th Virginia Infantry.

Smith barn being used as field hospital

In October 1865, Miss Helen Jeannette Smith of Boonsboro became the 25-year-old bride of Dr. John Mutius Gaines of Culpeper.  Dr. Gaines became partners with Dr. Smith in Boonsboro.  Gaines worked and resided with his new bride in the same two-story home of his father-in-law. The limestone home still stands on North Main Street in Boonsboro.

Bird B. Wright wrote his wife:

September 21, 18628th Florida Volunteer Infantry RegimentShepherdstown, Jefferson County VirginiaMy dear wife,I write to let you know that I am now in this place badly wounded, was shot onWednesday the 17th near Sharpsburg Washington County Maryland, about three miles from this place. The ball entered my left shoulder and lodged in my brest here it still is. I want you or my brother to come to see me Come by Richmond in Virginia then on to Winchester where you will only be twenty two miles from here. You can then get a conveyance to this place probably by the railway which comes down to Harpers Ferry where a connection is made to a station called Kearneys Ville that is only five miles from here and by the time can here from me and get to this region of country the stage which runs to that place in times of quiet about here, may be running again. We have had hard marching to do, and desperate fighting, our Captain was killed the same day I was shot.I remain as ever yourDevoted husband 

Bird B Wright

William Child, Major and Surgeon with the 5th Regiment New Hampshire Volunteers wrote

William Child

to his wife:

September 22, 1862, Battlefield Hospital near Sharpsburg

My Dear Wife;

Day before yesterday I dressed the wounds of 64 different men - some having two or three each.  Yesterday I was at work from daylight till dark - today I am completely exhausted - but stall soon be able to go at it again.

The days after the battle are a thousand times worse than the day of the battle – and the physical pain is not the greatest pain suffered. How awful it is - you have not can have until you see it any idea of affairs after a battle. 

The dead appear sickening but they suffer no pain. But the poor wounded mutilated soldiers that yet have life and sensation make a most horrid picture. I pray God may stop such infernal work - through perhaps he has sent it upon us for our sins. Great indeed must have been our sins if such is our punishment. 

Our Reg. Started this morning for Harpers Ferry - 14 miles. I am detailed with others to remain here until the wounded are removed - then join the Reg. With my nurses. I expect there will be another great fight at Harpers Ferry.

Carrie I dreamed of home night before last. I love to dream of home it seems so much like really being there. I dreamed that I was passing Hibbards house and saw you and Lud. in the window. After then I saw you in some place I cannot really know where -you kissed me - and told me you loved me - though

you did not the first time you saw me. Was not that quite a soldier dream? 

That night had been away to a hospital to see some wounded men - returned late. I fastened my horse to a peach tree - fed him with wheat and hay from a barn near by - then I slept and dreamed of my loved ones away in N.H. Write soon as you can. Tell me all you can about my business affairs and prospects for the future in Bath. Will Dr. Boynton be likely to get a strong hold there. One thing sure Cad, I shall return to Bath - if I live - and spend my days there. I feel so in that way now. Give me all news you can. Tell Parker and John and the girls to write although I can not answer them all. Tell Parker I will answer his as soon as I can. In this letter I send you a bit of gold lace such as the rebel officers have. This I cut from a rebel officers coat on the battlefield. He was a Lieut. I have made the acquaintance of two rebel officers - prisoners in our hands. One is a physician - both are masons - both very intelligent, gentlemanly men. Each is wounded in the leg. They are great favorites with our officers. One of them was brought off the field in hottest of the fight by our 5th N.H. officers -

he giving them evidence of his being a mason.

Now do write soon. Kisses to you Clint & Kate. Love to all.

Yours as ever

W.C.

George Templeton Strong, representing the U.S. Sanitary Commission, arrived in

George Templeton Strong

Sharpsburg on September 22.  He wrote:

It was fearful to see . . . Gustave Dore's pictures embodied in shivering, agonizing, suppurating flesh and blood.

John B. Gordon wrote in his Reminiscences of the Civil War:

Mrs. Gordon was soon with me. When it was known that the battle was on, she had at once started toward the front. The doctors were doubtful about the propriety of admitting her to my room; but I told them to let her come. I was more apprehensive of the effect of the meeting upon her nerves than upon mine. 

My face was black and shapeless--so swollen that one eye was entirely hidden and the other nearly so. My right leg and left arm and shoulder were bandaged and propped with pillows. I knew she would be greatly shocked. As she reached the door and looked, I saw at once that I must reassure her. Summoning all my strength, I said: "Here's your handsome husband; been to an Irish wedding." Her answer was a suppressed scream, whether of anguish or relief at finding me able to speak, I do not know. 

Thenceforward, for the period in which my life hung in the balance, she sat at my bedside, trying to supply concentrated nourishment to sustain me against the constant drainage. With my jaw immovably set, this was exceedingly difficult and discouraging. My own confidence in ultimate recovery, however, was never shaken until erysipelas, that deadly foe of the wounded, attacked my left arm. The doctors told Mrs. Gordon to paint my arm above the wound three or four times a day with iodine. She obeyed the doctors by painting it, I think, three or four hundred times a day. Under God's providence, I owe my life to her incessant watchfulness night and day, and to her tender nursing through weary weeks and anxious months.

Mary Bedinger Mitchell, known as "Minnie," was eleven years old and living in Shepardstown during the Battle of Antietam. She later published A Woman's Recollections of Antietam in 1886 in  The Century Magazine.  Mary Mitchell lived in a home with her mother, Caroline, the widow of the area's one-time Congressman, the eloquent and very popular Henry Bedinger; her young brother, Henry; and 7-year-old sister, Caroline, nicknamed "Danske." 

Some one suggested that yellow was the hospital color, and immediately everybody who could lay hands upon a yellow rag hoisted it over the house. The whole town was a hospital; there was scarcely a building that could not with truth seek protection under that plea, and the fantastic little strips were soon flaunting their ineffectual remonstrance from every roof-top and chimney. Of course, they did not stop the firing; but when this specific failed, the excitement became wild and ungovernable. It would have been ludicrous had it not produced so much suffering. The danger was less than it seemed, for McClellan, after all, was not bombarding the town, but the army, and most of the shells flew over us and exploded in the fields; but aim cannot be always sure, and enough shells fell short to convince the terrified citizens that their homes were about to be battered down over their ears. The better people kept some outward coolness, with perhaps a sort of ‘noblesse oblige’ feeling but the poorer classes acted as if the town were already in a blaze, and rushed from their houses with their families and household goods to make their way into the country. The road was thronged, the streets blocked; men were vociferating, women crying, children screaming; wagons, ambulances, guns, caissons, horsemen, footmen, all mingled - nay, even wedged and jammed together - in one struggling, shouting mass. It was Pandemonium. . . . 

We had plenty to do, but all that day we went about with hearts bursting with rage and shame, and breaking with pity and grief for the needless, waste of life. The amateur nurses all stood firm, and managed to be cheerful for the sake of keeping their men quiet, but they could not be without fear.

Edward Porter Alexander wrote about McClellan at the battle of Antietam:

Edward Porter Alexander

By the Good Lord’s putting it into McClellan’s heart to keep Fitz John Porter’s corps entirely out to the battle, & Franklin nearly all out. I doubt whether many hearts but McClellan’s would have accepted the suggestions, even from a Divine source, for common sense was just shouting, "your adversary is backed against a river, with no bridge & only one ford, & that the worst one on the whole river. If you whip him now you destroy him utterly, root & branch & bag & baggage….& such game is worth great risks. Every man must fight & keep on fighting for all he is worth.’" No military genius, but only the commonest kind of every day common sense, was necessary to appreciate that. 

Stephen Sears, author of  Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam and George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon, wrote about McClellan's leadership at Antietam:

In all his months as army commander, Major General George Brinton

McClellan fought just one battle, Antietam, from start to finish. Antietam, then, must serve as the measure of his generalship. Colonel Ezra Carman, who survived that bloody field and later wrote the most detailed tactical study of the fighting there, had it right when he observed that on September 17, 1862, “more errors were committed by the Union commander than in any other battle of the war.”

General McClellan’s most grievous error was hugely overestimating Confederate numbers. This delusion dominated his military character. In August 1861, taking command of the Army of the Potomac, he began entirely on his own to over-count the enemy’s forces. Later he was abetted by Allan Pinkerton, his inept intelligence chief, but even Pinkerton could not keep pace with McClellan’s imagination. On the eve of Antietam, McClellan would tell Washington he faced a gigantic Rebel army “amounting to not less than 120,000 men,” outnumbering his own army “by at least twenty-five per cent.” So it was that George McClellan imagined three Rebel soldiers for every one he faced on the Antietam battlefield. Every decision he made that September 17 was dominated by his fear of counterattack by phantom Confederate battalions.

The testing of battle uncovered another McClellan failing – his management of his own generals. Of his six corps commanders, he displayed confidence in only two, Fitz John Porter and Joseph Hooker. He had termed 65-year-old Edwin Sumner “even a greater fool than I had supposed,” and regarded William Franklin as slow and lacking in energy. He had recently rebuked Ambrose Burnside for his tepid pursuit of the Rebels after the fighting at South ountain. Joseph Mansfield, new to command, was an unknown quantity. McClellan called no council of his generals to explain his intentions, issued no plan of battle, and on September 17 conferred at length only with Fitz John Porter.

Antietam must be judged the best chance to utterly defeat Robert E. Lee until that day two and a half years later at Appomattox. Against an enemy he outnumbered better than two to one, George McClellan devoted himself to not losing rather than winning. Nor would he dare to renew the battle the next day. The final measure of his self-delusion is his letter to his wife on September 18: “I hope that God has given us a great success. It is all in his hands, where I am content to leave it. The spectacle yesterday was the grandest I could conceive of—nothing could be more sublime.Those in whose judgment I rely,” he wrote, “tell me that I fought the battle splendidly & that it was a masterpiece of art.”

McClellan believed not only that his "victory" reinforced his value as a general, but that he could and should make changes in the federal administration; he wrote to his wife on September 20:

I have insisted that Stanton shall be removed & that Halleck shall give way to me as Comdr in Chief. I will not serve under him - for he is an incompetent fool - in no way fit for the important place he holds. . . The only safety for the country & me is to get rid of the lot of them. . . .I have shown that I can fight battles and win them! I think my enemies [the anti-McClellan faction in Washington] are pretty effectively killed by this time!

Norwood "Pen" Hallowell later wrote in his Reminiscences:

My recollection is uncertain as to the time which elapsed before my arm received attention. Sometimes I think it was twenty-four hours. At other times I make it thirty-two hours. 

At all events, when they did get at me it was much swollen, and they and I scooped out the maggots from my side and arm which had been generated by the wound. 

The long delay was all right. Every one was immensely busy, too busy with more urgent cases, until a cavalry man from Philadelphia had looked at me as he passed, and, looking again, had asked my name. " Hallowell," I replied. " Are you from Philadelphia ?" "My father is Morris L. Hallowell of that city," I said. "What! " he exclaimed. "Why, I know him!" It was not long before he had several surgeons at me. Among them was Surgeon Thomas Antisell, the Medical Director of the 12th Army Corps. He said there was a chance to save the arm, and asked me whether he should try. I may have told him to take the chance, but I think I told him I did not care. At all events, after etherization I found the arm there, where it now is, a beautiful exhibit of the surgical operation known as exsection. 

The surgeon handed me three quarters of an inch of bone to keep as a souvenir. I told him to throw it away. When coming out of my stupor I heard some one say, "He will hardly pull through."  I did not then care a rap whether I should pull through, and I think they might have buried me alive without protest. . .

While lying on my cot I was startled to see my brother Ned come wandering in. He looked at me a second, saying, "They told me thee was dead." 

. . . He had maintained his search for his brother, albeit his oncoming typhoid fever had unhinged his mind. . . . The next surprise was my blessed father. How in the name of all that is rational his beaming face was then and there permitted to shine upon me I knew not. Was he tired out? Not a bit tired. Father never tired when he had something to his fancy to put through. Into a hack Ned and Lieutenant-Colonel Palfrey and I were hustled. . . .  Ned carried on pretty hard, pulling at the curtains, and starting at uniformed men who he thought were after him for desertion. We were driven to Hagerstown. There father put us into an empty freight car. . . . The thought came into his mind that the floor of a freight car would not be a suitable place for him. Through an open door of a house near by he espied a rocking-chair. No one was in the room to consent. The train might start at any moment. Promptly he appropriated the chair, and made off with it. His triumph was cut short by a pursuing woman. Her he pacified by a token of good will big enough to put a rocking-chair into every room of her house.

As the train started, a little contraband boy begged to be taken along. Father yanked him into a dark corner of the car, and off we started on an all-night journey to Philadelphia. Lieutenant-Colonel Palfrey, under pressure of great suffering, begged hard to be put off at the several stations where the train stopped. Altogether it was a great night for father as he sat contented, comfortable, and satisfied in that rocking-chair, with three officers and one little contraband under his masterful control. At Philadelphia the contraband disappeared. The others were taken to our home, the House called Beautiful, as Doctor O. W. Holmes has written. Wounded officers of the 20th had been there before.  Our home was a hospital, so to speak, whose matron was your Grandmother Hallowell, and whose nurses were your three sister aunts, Anna, Emily, and Susan. 

Holmes and Hallowell were taken to the Hallowells’ home in Philadelphia, referred to as the “House called Beautiful” by his father, the Hallowell's family friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who said it “was a haven of rest and refreshment for wounded soldiers of the Union Army."




Within a few days after the battle, Clara Barton collapsed from lack of sleep and a case of typhoid fever. She returned to Washington lying in a wagon, exhausted and delirious.

Tactically, the battle ended in a draw.  Strategically it was a victory for the Union only

because McClellan retained the field while Lee's invasion had end.  Officials were dubious

about McClellan's reports of a great victory. Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, wrote in

his diary:

September 18, Thursday. The last two or three days have been pregnant with rumors and speculations of an exciting character. . . .We have authentic news that a long and sanguinary battle has been fought. McClellan telegraphs that the fight between the two armies was for fourteen hours. The Rebels must have been in strong position to have maintained such a fight against our large army  

. . . McClellan telegraphs that our loss is heavy, particularly in generals, but gives neither names nor results.  His dispatches are seldom full, clear, or satisfactory. "Behaved splendidly," "performed handsomely," but wherein or what was accomplished is never told. Our anxiety is intense.

Welles later wrote about the origins of the Emancipation Proclamation:

Gideon Welles

On Sunday, the 13th of July, 1862, President Lincoln invited me to accompany him in his carriage to the funeral of an infant child of Mr. Stanton. Secretary Seward and Mrs. Frederick Seward were also in the carriage. . .  It was on this occasion and on this ride that he first mentioned to Mr. Seward and myself the subject of emancipating the slaves by proclamation in case the Rebels did not cease to persist in their war on the Government and the Union, of which he saw no evidence. He dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy of the movement, said he had given it much thought and had about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued, etc., etc. This was, he said, the first occasion when he had mentioned the subject to any one, and wished us to frankly state how the proposition struck us. Mr. Seward said the subject involved consequences so vast and momentous that he should wish to bestow on it mature reflection before giving a decisive answer, but his present opinion inclined to the measure as justifiable, and perhaps he might say expedient and necessary. These were also my views. Two or three times on that ride the subject, which was of course an absorbing one for each and all, was adverted to, and before separating the President desired us to give the question special and deliberate attention, for he was earnest in the conviction that something must be done. It was a new departure for the President, for until this time, in all our previous interviews, whenever the question of emancipation or the mitigation of slavery had been in any way alluded to, he had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government with the subject.

Lincoln had said in January 1862:

I cannot imagine that any European power would dare to recognize and aid the Southern Confederacy if it became clear that the Confederacy stands for slavery and the Union for freedom.

The Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln had drafted back in July, was given life by the Battle of Antietam. The president seized on the battle as the closest thing he was likely to get to a victory and announced his Emancipation Proclamation, which, if the states in rebellion did not return to the Union within 100 days, would take effect January 1.  

Lincoln and his Cabinet

On September 22, five days after the Antietam battle,  Lincoln called a special cabinet meeting to announce, as Secretary Gideon Welles entered in his diary, "that he had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation."  Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. The Proclamation was issued in two parts. The first part, issued on September 22, 1862, was a preliminary announcement outlining the intent of the second part, which officially went into effect 100 days later on January 1, 1863. It was Abraham Lincoln's declaration that all slaves would be permanently freed in all areas of the Confederacy that had not already returned to federal control by January 1863. The ten affected states were individually named in the second part (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina). Not included were the Union slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky.  Also not named was the Confederate state of Tennessee, in which a Union-controlled military government had already been set up, based in the capital, Nashville. Specific exemptions were stated for other areas under Union control on January 1, 1863. Union-occupied areas of the Confederate states where the proclamation was put into immediate effect by local commanders included Winchester, Virginia; Corinth, Mississippi; the Sea Islands along the coasts of the Carolinas and Georgia; Key West, Florida; and Port Royal, South Carolina.

On January 1, 1863, around 20,000 to 50,000 slaves in regions where rebellion had already been subdued were immediately emancipated. Although people then and now have claimed that the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave, thousand of slaves were freed during the course of the war, beginning with the day it took effect.  Eyewitness accounts at places such as Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Port Royal, South Carolina, record celebrations on January 1 as thousands of slaves were informed of their new legal status of freedom. Estimates of the number of slaves freed immediately by the Emancipation Proclamation are uncertain; one contemporary estimate put the 'contraband' population of Union-occupied North Carolina at 10,000, and the Sea Islands of South Carolina also had a substantial population. Those 20,000 slaves were freed immediately by the Emancipation Proclamation. This Union-occupied zone where freedom began at once included parts of eastern North Carolina, the Mississippi Valley, northern Alabama, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a large part of Arkansas, and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Although some counties of Union-occupied Virginia were exempted from the Proclamation, the lower Shenandoah Valley, and the area around Alexandria were covered. Emancipation was immediately enforced as Union soldiers advanced into the Confederacy. Slaves fled their masters and were often assisted by Union soldiers.  Booker T. Washington, as an 7 year-old enslaved boy in Virginia, remembered the day:

As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom.... Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation could not be enforced in areas still under rebellion, as the Union army took control of Confederate regions, the Proclamation provided the legal framework for freeing more than 3 million more slaves in those regions. 

The Proclamation also announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

The Union victory and Lincoln's proclamation played a considerable role in dissuading the governments of the United Kingdom and France from recognizing the Confederacy, which some people suspected they were planning to do so in the aftermath of another Union defeat. When the issue of emancipation was linked to the progress of the war, neither government had the political will to oppose the United States, since it linked support to the Confederacy to support for slavery. Both countries had already abolished slavery, and the public would not have tolerated the government militarily supporting a sovereignty upholding the ideals of slavery. Lincoln earlier had predicted that Europe would not dare to recognize a Confederacy that stood for slavery if the Union clearly stood for freedom, and his prediction was borne out.

The Emancipation Proclamation outraged white Southerners who envisioned a race war.  Slaves had been part of the "engine of war" for the Confederacy. They produced and prepared food; sewed uniforms; repaired railways; worked on farms and in factories, shipping yards, and mines; built fortifications; and served as hospital workers and common laborers. News of the Proclamation spread rapidly by word of mouth, arousing hopes of freedom, creating general confusion, and encouraging thousands to escape to Union lines. George Washington Albright, a teenage slave in Mississippi, recalled that like many of his fellow slaves, his father escaped to join Union forces. According to Albright, plantation owners tried to keep the Proclamation from slaves but news of it came through the "grapevine". The young slave became a "runner" for an informal group they called the 4Ls ("Lincoln's Legal Loyal League") bringing news of the proclamation to secret slave meetings at plantations throughout the region.

Many white Northerners who supported the war for union were angry that Lincoln was apparently changing the purpose of the war to freedom for slaves. Even used as a war power, emancipation was a risky political act. Public opinion as a whole was against it; there was strong opposition among "Copperhead" Democrats and a divided reaction in loyal border states. 

In the summer of 1863, McClellan had warned Lincoln that if the abolition of slavery became federal government policy, the men in the army would protest and probably desert or revolt.  When Lincoln issued the proclamation, reaction in the military varied widely; some units were nearly ready to mutiny in protest, and some desertions were attributed to it. Other units were inspired by the adoption of a cause that ennobled their efforts, such that at least one unit took up the motto "For Union and Liberty."

Robert E. Lee saw the Emancipation Proclamation as a way for the Union to bolster the number of soldiers it could place on the field, making it imperative for the Confederacy to increase their own numbers.  Jefferson Davis called the Emancipation Proclamation ''the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.''

George Washington Whitman, 10 years young than his older brother, Walt Whitman, wrote to his mother after the battle:

George Washington Whitman

On the Potomac River Near the Village of Antietam Md 

Sunday Sept 21/62

Dear Mother

I had just commenced to write you a letter the day before yesterday when the order was given for our regt to fall in for an advance, and I had only time to let you know that I was alive and well when I have to stop writing and get ready to move.

. . . I will tell you of what we have done for the last two weeks. We left Washington by the road leading to Frederick Md, on Sunday Sept 7th . . Early on the morning of the 17th the first and second Brigades of our Division was ordered down to take the bridge. The first Brigade was ordered to take a position, at our end of the bridge and try and drive the enemy from behind his shelter while our Brigade which is the 2nd was to be held in reserve. The 1st did not seem inclined to advance to the position assigned them, but rather held back, so Burnside who was looking on ordered Sturgis to send our Brigade there saying, (so the story goes) that he knew we would take it. As soon as we were ordered to forward we started on a double quick and gained the position, although we lost quite a number of men in doing it. . . Things began to look rather squally and although our Brigade, was nearly out of ammunition we were ordered to the front again. We formed line of battle and advanced over the hill untill we met the enemy who was moveing down towards us, when both parties took a position, and we went at it again for the 2d time in one day.

Our Regt fired every round of ammunition we had, and took from all the dead and wounded on the field and then we lay down as we would not leave the field untill we were ordered. We lay there about half an hour without fireing a shot which seemed to puzzle the rebels very much as they did not come any closer to us, but kept up a pretty brisk fire from where they were.

After a while another regiment was sent in to relieve us and we were ordered back to the bridge where we were suplied with ammunition, and something to eat, and as it was almost night and the fireing had ceased on both sides, we were ordered to lay down and rest ourselvs and tired enough we was after our days work as you can imagine. . . . The next morning niether side seemed inclined to commence opperations, so we remained all day each party occupying the same position they did when the fighting ceased the night before. During the day we took an account of stock, and found we had about 180 men left. . . . At daylight on the morning of Sept 19th we found the enemy had left and we moved foreward about 3 miles to the Potomac River where we are now and as near as I can find out the enemy are all out of Md. 

Wel Mother I guess you will get tired before you get through reading this letter. You must not think strange when you do not hear from me often, for sometimes I do not get a chance to write for weeks. I received last week a letter from you dated the 7th and one from Jeff of the 8th. I was very glad to hear you are all getting along well. I hope Mother you will take good care of yourself and not worry and frett, for that troubles me more than anything else. I supose you know more about the situation of affairs than I do as I do not see the papers often, but it seems to me the rebels have been terribly cut up within the last few days and as near as I can find out they are all driven out of Md. I dont know how soon I will have a chance to send this, but I am pretty sure that we will move from here in the course of a day or two, and will probably go to Harpers Ferry so I shall have a chance to send it from there, if not before. I heard General Burnside say the other day that our regt would now have a chance to go in camp and rest awhile so I think likely we shall stay at Harpers Ferry awhile. . . I have talked with a number of rebel prisoners lately and the more inteligent of them say that the late raid into Md. was a desperate thing, but they had to do something as they were in such a bad fix in Virginia that the war will soon have to be brought to a close. Well Mother I am about tired of writing so I will stop. I will write again soon if I have a chance I would like to see you all very much and mabe I will get a chance to come home before a great while. Good bye Mother Much love to Mattie, the Baby and all the rest. G.W. Whitman

Near Antietam Md.

Sept 30th 1862

Dear Mother

We are still laying quietly at the place from which I dated my last letter. I thought when I wrote you last which was 5 or 6 days since that we should cross over into Virginia before now, but as we are comfortably situated, I think very likely we will remain here for some time. Everything now is quiet and it is quite a releif to be out of the sound of canon after hearing it almost daily, and sometimes nightly, for two or three weeks. I think the late rebel movement into Maryland has been a very unfortunate one for them, as they did not meet with anything like the encouragement from the Marylanders that they expected, and I believe that after the battle of Bull Run they firmly expected to invade Pennsylvania if not capture Washington and Baltimore, and now to be badly beaten twice, and driven back with such terrible loss, must be very discouraging and had it not been for bad management, cowardice, or treachery at Harpers Fery, I believe we could have bagged the most of their army. 

We are now about 8 miles from Harpers Fery and are in the midst of Mountains, from which the view is very fine indeed. We have enough to eat and plenty of good cool spring water. We have been provided with shelter tents, which are made of two peices of light canvas about 6 ft square each which button togather in the centre and make one tent to accomodate two men, they are very good on account of the heavy dews we have here, and for a shade, but as the two ends are open they are not much use in a storm. . . .

Mother the last letter I received from home is dated Sept 8th and I hope if you have not writen you will write as soon as you get this. . . . I think I stand a good chance to be made a 1st Lieut. I think, after Cap gets back if everything remains quiet I shall try for a furlough to come home for a few days and see you all. I have stuck pretty close to buisness since I have been sogering, and the regt never went on a march or into a fight without my being on hand.

I see by the papers that Uncle Abe has issued a proclamation declaring the slaves free in all the States that are in rebellion on the first of next Jan. I dont know what effect it is going to have on the war, but one thing is certain, he has got to lick the south before he can free the niggers, and unless he drives ahead and convinces the south, before the first of January, that we are bound to lick them, and it would be better for them to behave themselvs and keep their slaves, than to get licked and lose them, I dont think the proclamation will do much good.

Mother I have three months pay due me to day so dont deprive yourself of anything you need. . . I often think that I can imagine just what you are all doing at home and ile bet now, that Mother is makeing pies. I think Mat is putting up shirt bosoms like the deuce so as to get through before dinner I guess Sis is down stairs helping Mother mix the dough, Walt is up stairs writing, Jeff is down town at the Office, Jess is pealing Potatoes for dinner, and Tobias has gone down cellar for a scuttle of coal, Bunkum I guess is around somewhere looking for a good chance to go sogering.Well Mother take good care of yourself and dont get exciteded.

Much love to all G. W. Whitman

George Whitman was wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg in December, and his brother Walt went to Washington, D.C. to find and nurse him.  Walt Whitman later wrote to their mother back in New York:

Walt Whitman, 1863

Washington,Monday forenoon,  

December 29, 1862.

Dear, dear Mother,

Friday the 19th inst. I succeeded in reaching the camp of the 51st New York, and found George alive and well— 

In order to make sure that you would get the good news, I sent back by messenger to Washington (I dare say you did not get it for some time) a telegraphic dispatch, as well as a letter—and the same to Hannah at Burlington. I have staid in camp with George ever since, till yesterday, when I came back to Washington—about the 24th George got Jeff's letter of the 20th. 

Mother, how much you must have suffered, all that week, till George's letter came—and all the rest must too. As to me, I know I put in about three days of the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life. I wrote to Jeff how I had my pocket picked in a jam and hurry, changing cars, at Philadelphia, so that I landed here without a dime. 

The next two days I spent hunting through the hospitals, walking all day and night, unable to ride, trying to get information, trying to get access to big people, &c—I could not get the least clue to anything. . . But Thursday afternoon, I lit on a way to get down on the government boat that runs to Aquia creek, and so by railroad to the neighborhood of Falmouth, opposite Fredericksburgh — So by degrees I worked my way to Ferrero's brigade, which I found Friday afternoon without much trouble after I got in camp. 

When I found dear brother George, and found that he was alive and well, O you may imagine how trifling all my little cares and difficulties seemed—they vanished into nothing.  And now that I have lived for eight or nine days amid such scenes as the camps furnish, and had a practical part in it all, and realize the way that hundreds of thousands of good men are now living, and have had to live for a year or more, not only without any of the comforts, but with death and sickness and hard marching and hard fighting, (and no success at that,) for their continual experience—really nothing we call trouble seems worth talking about. 

One of the first things that met my eyes in camp, was a heap of feet, arms, legs, &c. under a tree in front a hospital, the Lacy house.

George is very well in health, has a good appetite—I think he is at times more wearied out and homesick than he shows, but stands it upon the whole very well. Every one of the soldiers, to a man, wants to get home. . . You have no idea how letters from home cheer one up in camp, and dissipate home sickness.

While I was there George still lived in Capt. Francis's tent—there were five of us altogether, to eat, sleep, write, &c. in a space twelve feet square, but we got along very well—the weather all along was very fine—and would have got along to perfection, but Capt. Francis is not a man I could like much—I had very little to say to him. George is about building a place, half-hut and half-tent, for himself—(he is probably about it this very day)—and then he will be better off, I think. Every Captain has a tent, in which he lives, transacts company business, &c. has a cook, (or man of all work,) and in the same tent mess and sleep his Lieutenants, and perhaps the 1st sergeant. They have a kind of fire-place, and the cook's fire is outside, on the open ground. George had very good times while Francis was away—the cook, a young disabled soldier, Tom, is an excellent fellow, and a first-rate cook, and the 2d Lieutenant, Pooley, is a tip-top young Pennsylvanian. 

Tom thinks all the world of George—when he heard he was wounded, on the day of the battle, he left every thing, got across the river, and went hunting for George through the field, through thick and thin. I wrote to Jeff that George was wounded by a shell, a gash in the cheek—you could stick a splint through into the mouth, but it has healed up without difficulty already. Every thing is uncertain about the army, whether it moves or stays where it is. There are no furloughs granted at present. I will stay here for the present, at any rate long enough to see if I can get any employment at any thing, and shall write what luck I have. Of course I am unsettled at present. Dear mother, my love, Walt.

After the release of the draft Emancipation Proclamation, it came to President Lincoln's attention that Major John J. Key from Kentucky, brother of General McClellan's aide, Colonel Thomas Marshall Key, had said that defeating the Confederate army on the battlefield was not the army's objective:

That is not the game . . the object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.

Key's comment was the answer to a question by Major Levi Turner: "Why was not the rebel army bagged immediately after the battle near Sharpsburg?"  After the battle, rumors circulated that McClellan's objective had not been victory but a stalemate that might lead to a negotiated peace, restoring the union and leaving slavery intact in the the South.  

Lincoln called in Key and interviewed him, because there was concern that Key's comments represented a broader feeling among McClellan and the officer corps. On September 26, President Lincoln sent Key a note requesting him to furnish evidence that he had not made the statement in question. Key did not contest Turner's testimony.  Lincoln wrote:

In my view it is wholly inadmissable for any gentleman holding a military commission from the United States to utter such sentiments as Major Key is within [a packet of documents] proved to have done. Therefore let Major John J Key be forthwith dismissed from the Military service of the United States. 

Later, Lincoln said to his secretary John Hay, "I dismissed Major Key for his silly treasonable talk because I feared it was staff talk & I wanted an example." 

McClellan was furious about Lincoln's proclamation; he wrote to his wife, Ellen, on September 25:

I cannot make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection - it is to infamous . . . almost impossible to retain my commission & self respect at the same time.

On September 26, he wrote a letter to a Democratic colleague, William Aspinwall of New York:

I am very anxious to know how you and men like you regard the recent Proclamations of the Presdt inaugurating servile war, emancipating the slaves, & at one stroke of the pen changing our free institutions into a despotism . . .

Montgomery Blair

McClellan's friend on Lincoln's cabinet, Montgomery Blair, aware of  Lincoln's meeting with  John Key and how that reflected on McClellan, wrote to the general on September 27 to caution him against public criticism of the president and his policies: "Even if you had the ambitions to be President this would be the best course to adopt . . . "  His letter was followed a few days later by one from his father, Francis P. Blair, echoing his son's advice.

At the end of September, McClellan hosted a dinner for three of his generals, Ambrose Burnside, Jacob Cox, and John Cochrane; he told them that political figures had encourage him to lead a public fight against emancipation.  Although he believed the army would follow his lead, he asked their opinions and advice about what he should do.  Cox later wrote:

We pointed out very clearly that any public utterance by him in his official character criticising the civil policy of the administration would be properly regarded as a usurpation.

 McClellan soon received a surprise visit from the president.

Abraham Lincoln at Antietam on Friday, October 3, 1862, during his visit to McClellan
Lincoln is posed standing by a chair and facing McClellan with other officers. Lincoln wrote a letter to his wife, Mary, saying that "Gen McClellan and myself are to be photographed…if we can be still long enough. I feel Gen. M should have no problem…" 

Early on Wednesday morning, October 1, Lincoln left Washington by train en route to Harpers Ferry, from which he would travel by horse and wagon to Sharpsburg. Accompanying him were his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon; a close friend, Ozias M. Hatch; John W. Garrett, the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; and General John McClernand.  McClellan’s autobiography, McClellan’s Own Story, published in 1887, tells in his own words McClellan’s recollections and perceptions about the visit:

Oct. 1, Sharpsburg, 7.30 P.M.--… Received this morning a mysterious dispatch from which I inferred that the President was on his way hither. Went to Harper’s Ferry and found him with half a dozen Western officers. He remains at Harper’s Ferry tonight….

Oct. 2, A.M.--… I found the President at Gen. Sumner’s headquarters at Harper’s Ferry; none of the cabinet were with him, merely some Western officers, such as McClernand and others. His ostensible purpose is to see the troops and the battlefield; I incline to think that the real purpose of his visit is to push me into a premature advance into Virginia. I may be mistaken but think not. The real truth is that my army is not fit to advance. The old regiments are reduced to mere skeletons and are completely tired out. They need rest and filling up. The new regiments are not fit for the field. The remains of Pope’s army are pretty well broken up and ought not to be made to fight for some little time yet. Cavalry and artillery horses are broken down. So it goes. These people don’t know what an army requires, and therefore act stupidly…

Oct. 3.-- …  I was riding with the President all yesterday afternoon, and expect to do the same today. He seems in quite a good humor; is accompanied only by Western people.

Lincoln was up early on Friday, October 3, and before the morning sun had melted the fog around Sharpsburg, he took a stroll with his friend Ozias Hatch. While they walked among hundreds of white army tents stretching from Sharpsburg to the Potomac, Lincoln waved his arms and asked, “Hatch, Hatch. What is all of this?”  Mr. Hatch did not understand the question and answered, “Why, Mr. Lincoln, this is the Army of the Potomac.” After a moment’s thought, the president said, “No, Hatch, no. This is McClellan’s bodyguard.”

The Grove Farm 

Around noon, Lincoln and McClellan rode together in an army ambulance to the Stephen Grove farm near Mount Airy. The homestead was one mile west of Sharpsburg, and was being used as a field hospital.  The Groves, Stephen and his wife Maria, had remained at Mount Airy during the battle to protect their property; their young daughter, Louisa, was sent to safety across the Potomac to stay with friends in Shepherdstown. By early October, the 7-year-old girl had returned home in time to see Mr. Lincoln; she remembered for the rest of her life how “Old Abe” placed his large hand on her head and apologized to her mother and father for the destruction the war had brought to their home.  Then the president began slowly walking down a wide hallway leading to a back room full of wounded Rebels. A newspaper correspondent jotted down what happened next:

The president remarked to the wounded Confederates that if they had no objection he would be glad to take them by the hand. 

Lincoln walked to those too seriously wounded to stand and “bid them good cheer, assuring them that every possible care should be bestowed upon them.”

There is evidence to support the opinion that the photograph of Lincoln, McClellan and

Lincoln with Chair

other army officers was taken at the Grove farm: Fitz John Porter’s 5th Corps headquarters was at Mount Airy following the battle, and over half the members of his staff are in the photograph. Second, according to a Grove descendant, the chair in the picture on which the president leans with his left hand once belonged to Stephen and Maria Grove and is still in the family’s possession.

Lieutenant James Abrahams of the West Virginia Cavalry later recalled his impression of Lincoln's visit:

President Lincoln visited and reviewed the troops.  In appearance, Lincoln was not a prepossessing figure, especially on horseback: tall, think and angular, with arms and legs that seemed out of all proportion to his body, but with a kindly, anxious face, furrowed with care and anxiety.  As he passed along the lines his black cloth suit and high plug hat contrasted strangely with the gold and glitter of McClellan and his staff, but he seemed to look right into the soul of each individual soldier and although he uttered not a word, yet he left an abiding impression that he was our fast and sympathizing friend.

General Alpheus Williams described Lincoln in a letter to his daughter, dated October 1862 from Antietam:

The President was here a few days since. I had quite a long talk with him, sitting on a pile of logs. He is really the most unaffected, simple-minded, honest, and frank man I have ever met.

McClellan's account of the visit continued:

Oct. 4.-- The President is still here and goes to Frederick this morning. I will probably accompany him as far as the battlefield of South Mountain, so that my day will be pretty well used up.

Lincoln & McClellan at Antietam

Oct. 5. -- . . . The President left us about eleven yesterday morning. I went with him as far as over the battlefield of South Mountain, and on my way thither was quite surprised to meet Mr. Aspinwall en route to my camp…. The President was very kind personally; told me he was convinced I was the best general in the country, etc etc. He was very affable, and I really think he does feel very kindly towards me personally. I showed him the battlefields, and am sure he departed with a more vivid idea of the great difficulty of the task we had accomplished. 

Mr. Aspinwall is decidedly of the opinion that it is my duty to submit to the President’s proclamation and quietly continue doing my duty as a soldier. I presume he is right, and am at least sure that he is honest in his opinion. I shall surely give his views full consideration. He is of the opinion that the nation cannot stand the burdens of the war much longer, and that a speedy solution is necessary. In this he is no doubt correct, and I hope sincerely that another successful battle may conclude my part of the work.

Pry House

Lincoln stopped at the Pry house to check on a friend, General Israel B. Richardson, who had suffered a wound while leading his division in the Bloody Lane. After a warm welcome from the Pry family, Lincoln went upstairs to the general. On his return to the kitchen, he was greatly surprised to find breakfast, which Mrs. Pry had prepared for her honored guest. One of the first things the president did on returning to Washington was to convey his appreciation to her.  The small note, signed “A. Lincoln,” remained in the Pry household for many years.

Following the battle, General John Gibbon had written to his wife, "I am as tired of this

George Armstrong Custer

horrible war as you are, and would be perfectly willing never to see another battle field."  However, George Armstrong Custer, who was an officer on McClellan's staff, felt differently; he wrote a letter to a cousin on October 3, 1862:

You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought. . . So far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end.

I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life. Now do not misunderstand me. I speak only of my own interests and desires . . . but as I said before, when I think of the pain & misery produced to individuals as well as the miserable sorrow caused throughout the land I cannot but earnestly hope for peace, and at an early date.

In October, the Antietam photographs taken by Alexander Gardner, titled "The Dead of Antietam," were exhibited at Matthew Brady's gallery in New York City. Many images in this presentation were photographs of corpses, a graphic presentation new to Americans. It was the first time that many Americans saw the realities of war in photographs as distinct from previous "artists' impressions."  The New York Times published the following review:

The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement. There would be a gathering up of skirts and a careful picking of way; conversation would be less lively, and the general air of pedestrians more subdued.  

As it is, the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. The roll we read is being called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling lips are answering to it. Shadowy fingers point from the page to a field where even imagination is loth to follow. 

Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. 

It is a thunderbolt that will crash into some brain -- a dull, dead, remorseless weight that will full upon some heart, straining it to breaking. 

There is nothing very terrible to us, however, in in the list, though our sensations might be different if the newspaper carrier left the names on the battle-field and the bodies at our doors instead.

We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. The crape on the bell-pull tells there is death in the house, and in the close carriage that rolls away with muffled wheels you know there rides a woman to whom the world is very dark now. But you only see the mourners in the last of the long line of carriages -- they ride very jollily and at their case, smoking cigars in a furtive and discursive manner, perhaps, and, were it not for the black gloves they wear, which the deceased was wise and liberal enough to furnish, it might be a wedding for all the world would know. It attracts your attention, but does not enlist your sympathy. 

But it is very different when the hearse stops at your own door, and the corpse is carried out over your own threshold -- you know whether it is a wedding or a funeral then . . . Those who lose friends in battle know what battle-fields are, and our Marylanders, with their door-yards strewed with the dead and dying, and their houses turned into hospitals for the wounded, know what battle-fields are.

Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.

At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard, "The Dead of Antietam." Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them, and you find them bending over photographic views of that fearful battle-field, taken immediately after the action.  . . You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men's eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is.

 . . . These pictures have a terrible distinctness. By the aid of the magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished. We would scarce choose to be in the gallery, when one of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the gaping trenches. 

The Dead of Antietam

Meanwhile, McClellan, who had frequently referred to Lincoln as a "gorilla" or "baboon, wrote to his wife that

the good of my country requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be greatly my inferior socially, intellectually and morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the “Gorilla”.

At the same time, President Lincoln was concerned that from September 17 to October 26, despite repeated entreaties from the War Department, McClellan not pursued the Confederate forces across the Potomac, citing shortages of equipment and the fear of overextending his troops. Lincoln had discussed this issue with McClellan during his visit at the beginning of October; in mid-October he wrote a long letter to McClellan:

Executive Mansion, Washington, Oct. 13, 1862.

Major General McClellan

My dear Sir 

You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness. Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim? 

As I understand, you telegraph Gen. Halleck that you can not subsist your army at Winchester unless the Railroad from Harper’s Ferry to that point be put in working order. But the enemy does now subsist his army at Winchester at a distance nearly twice as great from railroad transportation as you would have to do without the railroad last named. He now wagons from Culpepper C.H. which is just about twice as far as you would have to do from Harper’s Ferry. He is certainly not more than half as well provided with wagons as you are. I certainly should be pleased for you to have the advantage of the Railroad from Harper’s Ferry to Winchester, but it wastes all the remainder of autumn to give it to you; and, in fact ignores the question of time, which can not, and must not be ignored.

Again, one of the standard maxims of war, as you know, is “to operate upon the enemy’s communications as much as possible without exposing your own.” You seem to act as if this applies against you, but can not apply in your favor. Change positions with the enemy, and think you not he would break your communication with Richmond within the next twenty four hours? You dread his going into Pennsylvania. But if he does so in full force, he gives up his communications to you absolutely, and you have nothing to do but to follow, and ruin him; if he does so with less than full force, fall upon, and beat what is left behind all the easier.

. . . You know I desired, but did not order, you to cross the Potomac below, instead of above the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge. My idea was that this would at once menace the enemies’ communications, which I would seize if he would permit. If he should move Northward I would follow him closely, holding his communications. If he should prevent our seizing his communications, and move towards Richmond, I would press closely to him, fight him if a favorable opportunity should present, and, at least, try to beat him to Richmond on the inside track. 

I say “try”; if we never try, we shall never succeed. . .  

It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.

This letter is in no sense an order. 

Yours truly 

A. LINCOLN

Darius Couch

McClellan showed the letter to General Darius Couch and said that he did not expect to be in command much longer: "Lincoln is down on me."  He wrote back to the president on October 17, saying he would give Lincoln's suggestions "full and respectful consideration . . . the moment my men are shod and my cavalry are sufficiently renovated . . . "  On October 25 McClellan forwarded a report by one of his cavalrymen that the horses were "absolutely broken down from fatigue."  Lincoln wired back:

Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?

Lincoln waited until after the fall elections in the North, and finally relieved McClellan of his command of the Army of the Potomac on November 7.  McClellan wrote to his wife:

11 ½ pm Another interruption — this time more important. It was in the shape of dear good old Burnside accompanied by Genl Buckingham, the Sec’s Adjt Genl — they brought with them the order relieving me from the command of the Army of the Potomac, & assigning Burnside to the command. No cause is given.  I am ordered to turn over the command immediately & repair to Trenton N.J. & on my arrival there to report by telegraph for future orders!!

Poor Burn feels dreadfully, almost crazy — I am sorry for him, & he never showed himself a better man or truer friend than now. 

Of course I was much surprised — but as I rad the order int he presence of Genl Buckingham, I am sure that not a muscle quivered nor was the slightest expression of feeling visible on my face, which he watched closely. They shall not have that triumph. They have made a great mistake — alas for my poor country — I know in my innermost heart she never had a truer servant. 

. . . Do not be at all worried — I am not. I have done the best I could for my country — to the last I have done my duty as I understand it. That I must have made many mistakes I cannot deny — I do not see any great blunders — but no one can judge of himself. Our consolation must be that we have tried to what was right — if we have failed it was not our fault.

George G. Meade wrote in March 1863:

We must encounter risks, if we fight, and we cannot carry on war without fighting. That was McClellan’s vice. He was always waiting to have everything just as he wanted it before he would attack.

The 1864 election was the first time since 1812 that a presidential election took place while

the nation was at war. For much of 1864, Lincoln himself believed he had little chance of being re-elected. Confederate forces had triumphed in several battles, and the war was taking a very high toll in casualties. The prospect of a long, bloody war began to make the idea of "peace at all cost" offered by the Copperhead Democrats look more desirable. After the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Democrats proposed a negotiated peace that would secure Union victory. They believed this was the best course of action, because an armistice could finish the war without devastating the South. Radical Peace Democrats declared the war to be a failure and favored an immediate end to hostilities without securing Union victory.

At the August 1864 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Democratic Party nominated George McClellan; Ohio Congressman George Pendleton, a Copperhead Democrat, was nominated for vice-president.  Pendleton, a close associate of the Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham, was known for strongly opposing the Union war effort.  The Democrats called for a speedy conclusion to the war and an end to notions of emancipation. Negotiations with the Confederacy were discussed in what came to be known as the "Chicago Platform."

Cartoon about the "Chicago Platform"

Some "War Democrats" joined the Republicans to form the National Union Party. With the outcome of the Civil War still in doubt, many political leaders, including Salmon Chase and Horace Greeley, opposed Lincoln's renomination on the grounds that he could not win. Chase himself became the only candidate to actively contest Lincoln's re-nomination, but withdrew in March when Republican officials, including some from his home state of Ohio, endorsed Lincoln's renomination. Lincoln was still popular with most members of the Republican party, and the National Union Party nominated him for a second term as president at their convention in August.  With the fall of Atlanta, Georgia on September 2, there no longer was any question that a Union military victory was inevitable and close at hand.

In early November, Lincoln was re-elected president.  Lincoln won by more than 400,000 popular votes on the strength of the soldier vote and military successes.  Lincoln was highly popular with soldiers and they in turn recommended him to their family back home. Out of the 40,247 army votes cast, Lincoln received 30,503 (75.8%) and  McClellan 9,201 (22.9%).  McClellan won just three states: Kentucky, Delaware, and his home state of New Jersey.  After the election, McClellan wrote to a friend, 

For my country’s sake I deplore the result, but the people have decided with their eyes wide open and I feel a great weight has been removed from my mind.

To ensure the abolition of slavery in all of the U.S., Lincoln pushed for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment; the United States Congress passed it by the necessary two-thirds vote on January 31, 1865, and it was ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.

Norwood "Pen" Hallowell later wrote in his Reminiscences:

In 1868 your mother and I made our wedding trip to Antietam and other places. Of course we hunted up the Nicodemus house, where we found a worthy couple of that name. They proved to be Union people who had fled upon the approach of battle on September 17, 1862. I startled the old lady by asking after a little clock which had stood in a certain place on that day. She showed us the clock in an adjoining room, to which it had been removed. 

Her curiosity was further excited when I asked her what she had intended to dowith all those jars of preserves. She replied that their business was to make preserves, and that a large supply was just ready for market when the battle came on, and the soldiers took it all. I confessed the theft, and was forgiven even before she was induced to accept twenty dollars. 

As we departed your mother stubbed her toe against a bit of iron embedded in the yard, which proved to be an exploded Hotchkiss shell. She brought it home. The shell now stands upon the mantelpiece of our library.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. gave a speech on Memorial Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, New Hampshire, before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic:

To the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate. . .Although desire cannot be imparted by argument, it can be by contagion. Feeling begets feeling, and great feeling begets great feeling. We can hardly share the emotions that make this day to us the most sacred day of the year, and embody them in ceremonial pomp, without in some degree imparting them to those who come after us. . . . Accidents may call up the events of the war. You see a battery of guns go by at a trot, and for a moment you are back at White Oak Swamp, or Antietam, or on the Jerusalem Road. You hear a few shots fired in the distance, and for an instant your heart stops as you say to yourself, “The skirmishers are at it!” and listen for the long roll of fire from the main line. You meet an old comrade after many years of absence; he recalls the moment that you were nearly surrounded by the enemy, and again there comes up to you that swift and cunning thinking on which once hung life and freedom—Shall I stand the best chance if I try the pistol or the sabre on that man who means to stop me? Will he get his carbine free before I reach him, or can I kill him first? 

These and the thousand other events we have known are called up, I say, by accident, and, apart from accident, they lie forgotten.

But as surely as this day comes round we are in the presence of the dead. For one hour, twice a year at least—at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves—the dead come back and live with us.  I see them now, more than I can number, as once I saw them on this earth. They are the same bright figures, or their counterparts, that come also before your eyes; and when I speak of those who were my brothers, the same words describe yours. I see a fair-haired lad, a lieutenant, and a captain on whom life had begun somewhat to tell, but still young, sitting by the long mess-table in camp before the regiment left the State, and wondering how many of those who gathered in our tent could hope to see the end of what was then beginning. For neither of them was that destiny reserved. I remember, as I awoke from my first long stupor in the hospital after the battle of Ball’s Bluff, I heard the doctor say, “He was a beautiful boy,” and I knew that one of those two speakers was no more. The other, after passing through all the previous battles, went into Fredericksburg with strange premonition of the end, and there met his fate. I see another youthful lieutenant as I saw him in the Seven Days, when I looked down the line at Glendale. The officers were at the head of their companies. The advance was beginning. We caught each other’s eye and saluted. When next I looked, he was gone. I see the brother of the last—the flame of genius and daring on his face—as he rode before us into the wood of Antietam, out of which came only dead and deadly wounded men. 

. . . Grief is not the end of all. . . . Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death—of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

A Lone Grave 
Antietam, Maryland
Alexander Gardner, 1862
The grave of Private John Marshall, 28th Pennsylvania Volunteers
Marshall, who was 50 years old, was one of the oldest privates in the army; he was an Irish immigrant who worked as a stonemason in Pennsylvania.  He left behind a wife and 3 small sons under the age of 10 years.  His body was later exhumed and reburied in the Antietam National Cemetery.

The last Civil War soldier to witness the fighting at Burnside Bridge during the Battle of Antietam died nearly a century ago.  But a 170-year-old eastern sycamore tree that abuts the north end of the stone bridge continues to thrive. 

Joe Calzarette, natural resources manager at Antietam National Battlefield, said the tree undoubtedly was hit by gunfire as thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers fought for control of the bridge on Sept. 17, 1862.  “Boy, if it could talk,” Calzarette said of the tree, known as a witness tree because it was there at the time of the battle. “We knew there was heavy action. It’s a relatively healthy tree. It’s in good shape.” Calzarette said he believed that the tree wasn’t planted, but naturally sprouted near the northwest corner of the bridge about 170 years ago, about the same time the bridge was built in 1836. He said the tree has difficulty getting nutrients because the soil is compacted at the base — caused in part by tourists who stand there to have their pictures taken. Calzarette said rangers also are worried that the tree might lose root mass as the soil erodes near the bank of Antietam Creek. 

He said the tree was about 15 years old at the time of the battle and could live for another 500 years. “If you look at trees in human terms, it’s like 30,” he said. “Our job here at the park is to preserve and protect this tree, and keep it as alive as we possibly can.”