Antietam

The clash fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek is known as the Battle of Antietam, though many in the Southern United States call it the Battle of Sharpsburg. It pitted Confederate General Robert E. Lee, commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, against Union Major General George B. McClellan, leading the Army of the Potomac. As a component of the Maryland Campaign, this engagement marked the first time a full field army clashed on Union soil within the Eastern Theater of the war. No single day in American history has proven bloodier: combined losses among the dead, wounded, and missing reached 22,726. Union forces bore the heavier toll, yet the outcome tilted the war's momentum toward the Union side.

McClellan had chased Lee's forces into Maryland before striking at the Confederates, who held defensive ground behind the creek. As daylight broke on September 17, the corps under Major General Joseph Hooker struck hard at the left end of Lee's line. Waves of attack and counterattack rolled through Miller's Cornfield, while combat churned near the Dunker Church. Federal troops managed to break through the Confederate center by storming the Sunken Road, though commanders failed to press this opening. Later that day, Major General Ambrose Burnside's Union corps joined the fight, seizing a stone bridge spanning Antietam Creek and pushing toward the Confederate right. Just as the battle hung in the balance, A. P. Hill's Confederate division reached the field from Harpers Ferry and struck an unexpected blow that threw Burnside back and brought the fighting to a close. Despite facing odds of two to one, Lee threw every last soldier into the strugg

Battle

At roughly 5:30 in the morning on September 17, Joseph Hooker's Union I Corps launched the fighting with an advance southward along the Hagerstown Turnpike. Hooker aimed to seize the plateau where the Dunker Church stood, a plain whitewashed structure used by a German Baptist Brethren congregation. His force numbered about 8,600, only slightly more than the 7,700 Confederates under Stonewall Jackson defending the ground, and whatever edge Hooker held in numbers was erased by the strength of the Confederate positions. Abner Doubleday's division advanced on the right side of Hooker's line, James Ricketts pushed into the East Woods on the left, and George Meade's Pennsylvania Reserves took up a central position slightly behind the front. Jackson arrayed his defenders, the divisions of Alexander Lawton and John R. Jones, from the West Woods across the turnpike and down to the southern edge of Miller's Cornfield, keeping four brigades back in the West Woods as reserves.

The moment Union soldiers stepped out of the North Woods toward the Cornfield, artillery on both sides opened up. Jeb Stuart's horse artillery fired from the west, while four batteries under Colonel Stephen D. Lee bombarded from elevated ground south of the church, across the pike. Union guns answered from nine batteries positioned on the ridge behind the North Woods, joined by twenty 20-pounder Parrott rifles stationed two miles east of Antietam Creek. Losses mounted quickly under this exchange, which Colonel Lee later called "artillery Hell."

When Hooker spotted Confederate bayonets glinting among the corn stalks, he stopped his infantry's advance and called forward four artillery batteries to rake the field with shell and canister fired over his own men's heads. What followed was chaos, close combat fought with rifle butts and bayonet thrusts because the tall corn obscured vision. Officers shouted commands that vanished into the din, and rifles grew hot and clogged from constant firing as bullets and shells filled the air.

Truman Seymour's brigade of Pennsylvanians, part of Meade's command, pushed through the East Woods and traded fire with Colonel James Walker's brigade, made up of Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina soldiers. Walker's men, helped by Lee's cannon, drove Seymour back, and when Ricketts's division moved into the Cornfield it too came under withering artillery fire. Abram Duryée's brigade walked straight into volleys unleashed by Marcellus Douglass's Georgians. Taking heavy losses at a range of just 250 yards with no reinforcements arriving to help, Duryée pulled his men back.

The support Duryée anticipated, brigades led by George L. Hartsuff and William H. Christian, struggled to reach him in time. A shell wounded Hartsuff, while Christian abandoned his horse and fled rearward in fear. Once rallied and sent forward again, these troops faced the identical storm of artillery and rifle fire that had battered the units before them. As Union numbers began to overwhelm the defenders, Harry Hays brought his Louisiana "Tiger" Brigade into the fight and pushed the Federals back toward the East Woods. No regiment suffered worse that day than the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, which lost 67 percent of its men. Eventually the Tigers themselves were repelled when Union gunners wheeled a battery directly into the Cornfield; firing at point-blank range, they cut down 323 of the brigade's 500 soldiers.

Even as the Cornfield turned into a deadly standoff, Union forces found more success several hundred yards to the west. John Gibbon's brigade of Doubleday's division, soon to earn the name Iron Brigade, advanced along and beside the turnpike, through the corn, and into the West Woods, driving Jackson's men before them. A charge of 1,150 soldiers from Starke's brigade, firing from just 30 yards away, halted their progress. But return fire from the Iron Brigade proved so devastating that Starke's men had to p

Aftermath

Lincoln found little to praise in McClellan's conduct of the fight. He judged that the general's excessive caution and disjointed maneuvers on the field had turned what might have been a devastating Confederate rout into a mere standoff. What troubled the president further was McClellan's refusal, from September 17 through October 26, to chase Lee's army back across the Potomac, even as both the War Department and Lincoln pressed him repeatedly. McClellan pointed to equipment shortfalls and worried about stretching his troops too thin. General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck later put his frustration in writing, describing the army's prolonged idleness before a beaten enemy, during weather ideal for swift movement and an aggressive campaign, as a source of deep disappointment and regret. On November 5, Lincoln removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac, effectively closing out his military career, and Burnside took over four days later, on November 9.

The two armies suffered roughly equal losses, though Lee's casualties represented a larger share of his total force. Since Lee pulled his troops off the field first, he technically met the Civil War's standard for a tactical defeat. Yet in the broader, strategic picture, Antietam stands as a pivotal moment and a Union success, even if tactically inconclusive, because it brought to a halt Lee's push into Union territory, his first such invasion. Historian James M. McPherson captured the