History & Significance
Sharpsburg occupies a narrow neck of land between Antietam Creek to the east and the Potomac River to the west, in the western Maryland farm country of Washington County. The town was founded in 1763, platted on a hundred-acre tract, and spent its first century as a modest agricultural service community along a main road that connected the Chesapeake with the Ohio country. Nothing in its geography or its history suggested that it would become the site of the most lethal single day of fighting in American history.
On September 17, 1862, General George McClellan's Army of the Potomac attacked General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which had crossed the Potomac River into Maryland two weeks earlier on Lee's first invasion of the North. The battle opened at dawn with a Confederate assault through a cornfield north of town and did not end until darkness. By nightfall, more than 22,700 men were dead, wounded, or missing from both sides combined.
Lee's army was badly damaged but not destroyed. McClellan, who had a significant numerical advantage throughout the day, chose not to commit his reserves and did not attack the following morning. Lee withdrew back across the Potomac that night. The battle was not a Union victory in the tactical sense, but the Confederate retreat gave President Lincoln the military event he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, transforming the war's stated purpose.
The farms that bore the battle's names, Miller's Cornfield, the Sunken Road, Burnside Bridge, belonged to Washington County families whose land records trace back to the original Maryland land patent system. The ground was ordinary working farmland on September 16th and a killing field on the 17th, then farmland again for the decades that followed, before the federal government began acquiring parcels for what became Antietam National Battlefield.
The cornfield, the lane, and the bridge
The battle divided itself, loosely, into three phases across three different parts of the field. To the north, fighting raged from dawn through mid-morning through a cornfield belonging to farmer David Miller, across the Hagerstown Pike, and into a small white church used by a congregation of German Baptist Brethren. The fighting in and around the Miller Cornfield changed hands fifteen times in the course of a few hours, and the corn was so thoroughly flattened by bodies and gunfire that observers reported the field looked from a distance as if it had been mowed.
At the center of the Confederate line, a worn farm lane had been reinforced into a defensive position. The Confederates held what became known as the Sunken Road for three hours against repeated Union assaults. When a flanking movement finally collapsed part of the Confederate position and Union troops looked down into the lane from above, they saw a line of dead and wounded lying so thick that witnesses described the lane as a river of men. The Sunken Road is now known as Bloody Lane.
At the southern end of the field, Union General Ambrose Burnside spent much of the day attempting to cross Antietam Creek on a stone bridge that has carried his name ever since. A few hundred Georgia riflemen held the bluffs on the opposite bank and repulsed three separate assaults before Burnside's corps finally crossed in the early afternoon. A Confederate counterattack from reserves arriving from Harpers Ferry drove them back before nightfall.
The farms and their owners
Washington County's land records document the ownership of the battlefield ground in considerable detail. The farms that bore the fighting bore their owners' names as well: Miller, Mumma, Piper, Roulette, Otto, Sherrick. The Mumma farm was burned by retreating Confederates on the morning of the battle to prevent Union forces from using the buildings for cover. The family returned to a ruin. The insurance claim and subsequent rebuild are documented in Washington County deed and probate records.
Samuel Piper's farm occupied the center of the Confederate line, and the Piper farmhouse itself became a Confederate headquarters. The Roulette family sheltered in their cellar while the fighting passed over their land. Several families lost livestock, fences, crops, and equipment and filed claims with the state afterward. The material destruction of the battle was concentrated on a very small number of farms within a few square miles of Sharpsburg.
The federal government began acquiring land for the Antietam battlefield park in 1890, the same year the National Park Service's predecessor organization was established. The acquisitions proceeded in stages over more than a century. Land transaction records at the Washington County Register of Deeds show the parcels transferring from the farms that had worked them since the eighteenth century into federal ownership, a process that assembled the modern battlefield from dozens of private holdings.
The proclamation that followed
Abraham Lincoln had drafted a preliminary emancipation proclamation by the summer of 1862, but his Cabinet counseled him to wait for a military success before releasing it. The Union cause had endured a series of reverses, and issuing the proclamation from a position of weakness risked making it appear an act of desperation rather than principle. Secretary of State William Seward's advice was to hold the document until the armies could speak for it.
The Confederate retreat from Maryland after Antietam provided that moment. Five days after the battle, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all enslaved persons in states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863 would be declared forever free. The final Emancipation Proclamation took effect on that date.
The connection between the ground at Sharpsburg and the proclamation is direct and documented in Lincoln's own account. The battle did not end the war and did not immediately free a single enslaved person. But it reframed what the war was, transforming a conflict to preserve the Union into a war against slavery itself. That transformation had its legal origin in a document Lincoln signed five days after 22,700 men became casualties in the fields along Antietam Creek.