Battle of Antietam
© Civil War glass negative collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, PLC-DIG-cwpb01109
The bloodiest single day in American history, the Battle of Antietam was fought near
Sharpsburg, Maryland on September 17, 1862. Though the fighting ended in a draw, the
Confederate retreat was seized upon as a Union victory, enabling Abraham Lincoln to issue
the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederacy’s failure to invade the North also issued a
severe political cost. Lacking confidence in General Robert E. Lee’s troops, Great Britain
postponed its recognition of the Confederate Government, which severely hampered the
Rebels’ war effort.
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Stephen W. Sears, author of Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam states, “Of all the
days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any
measure was September 17, 1862” (Sears xi). In the summer of 1862, General Robert E.
Lee’s army was making its way North through Maryland. On September 17, the Union and
Confederate forces met in Sharpsburg, Maryland. The battle opened in Miller’s cornfield
when Union General Joseph Hooker began firing on Stonewall Jackson’s men. Hooker
recalls “every stalk in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could
have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their
ranks a few moments before. It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal
battlefield” (Cannan 119).
Meanwhile, in the Sunken Road, Union General William H. French’s division battled with
General D.H. Hill’s troops. The fighting was so gruesome that the battlefield would later be
known as Bloody Lane. Southeast of Sharpsburg, General Ambrose Burnside was
attempting to cross a narrow bridge over Antietam Creek while facing crossfire from a
group of 400 Georgians. The attempt lasted for four hours before the Union troops crossed
the bridge and drove back the Georgians. At the end of the day, nearly 23,000 soldiers had
died, the most casualties of any single day in the war. Federal losses were numbered at
12,410 and Confederate losses numbered at 10,700. Captain Emory Upton of the 2nd U.S.
Infantry stated, “I have heard of ‘the dead lying in heaps,’ but never saw it till this battle.
Whole ranks fell together.” After the battle, Lee’s Army retreated south across the Potomac,
and the Confederate’s first northern campaign was ended.
One enslaved onlooker, Hillary Watson, recalled the battle first hand: “The shells soon
begun flying over the house and around here, and while I was out in the yard there was one
that appeared like it went between our house and the next, and busted. I could see the blue
blaze flying, and I jumped as high as your head” (reprinted in Ward 96).
Although the Battle of Antietam was not regarded as a victory for the Union, it instilled
enough confidence in Lincoln to proceed with the unveiling of a massively important
document.
On September 22, 1862 Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which
said, “That on the first day of January, in the year of our lord one thousand eight hundred
sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, the
people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then,
thenceforward, and forever, free.”
Despite the fact that the battle was a draw militarily, the aftermath was a tremendous
political victory for the Union. Not only was Lincoln encouraged to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation, one of the single most important documents in American History, but the
Confederates also suffered a substantial political loss. Because of Lee’s failure to invade the
north, Great Britain decided to postpone their recognition of the Confederate Government.
If Great Britain had allied with the Rebels during the war, the result may have been
completely different.
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Works Cited & Further Reading
Cannan, John. The Antietam Campaign. New York: Gallery, 1990.
Sears, Stephen W. Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. New York: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2003.
Ward, Andrew. The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
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