Despite the ghastly events of September 11, 2001, another September day 139 years earlier remains the bloodiest single day in American history. The 6,300 to 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers killed and mortally wounded near the Maryland village of Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862, were more than twice the number of fatalities suffered in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.1 Another 15,000 men wounded in the battle of Antietam would recover, but many of them would never again walk on two legs or work with two arms. The number of casualties at Antietam was four times greater than American casualties at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More American soldiers died at Sharpsburg (the Confederate name for the battle) than died in combat in all the other wars fought by this country in the nineteenth century combined: the War of 1812, the Mexican–American War, the Spanish–American War, and all the Indian wars.
Even at the distance of 140 years, such statistics send a shiver down one’s spine. Yet these cold facts pale in comparison with descriptions of the battlefield by participants and witnesses—mainly Northerners, because the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia retreated across the Potomac River on the night of September 18–19, leaving most of their dead and many wounded to be buried or treated by the Union Army of the Potomac. “I was on the battlefield yesterday where we were engaged,” wrote a Union artillery officer on September 19, “and the dead rebels strewed the ground and in some places were on top of each other. Two hundred dead could be counted in one small field.” Another Northern officer counted “hundreds of dead bodies lying in rows and in piles . . . looking the picture of all that is sickening, harrowing, horrible. O what a terrible sight!”2 A Union lieutenant in charge of a burial party where his regiment (57th New York) fought described the dead “in every state of mutilation, sans arms, sans legs, heads, and intestines, and in greater number than on any field we have seen before.” A local resident who rode over the battlefield on September 19 traced the Confederate line “by the dead lying along it as they fell. . . . The line I suppose was a mile long or more. . . . Down in the corn field I saw a man with a hole in his belly about as big as a hat and about a quart of dark-looking maggots working away.”3
The most concentrated carnage took place in a sunken farm road in the center of the Confederate line, known ever after as Bloody Lane. A Union lieutenant colonel whose New York regiment was in the thick of the fighting at Bloody Lane described the scene there after the battle: “In the road the dead covered the ground. It seemed, as I rode along, that it was the Valley of Death. I think that in the space of less than ten acres, lay the bodies of a thousand dead men and as many more wounded.” An enlisted man in this regiment who had captured a Confederate battle flag in the sunken road wrote in his diary on September 19: “Today I was given detaile to burry the Dead Rebels, just where I captured the flag at 2:00 pm of the 17th. 12 lengths of fence being counted off for my station & in 10 rods [55 yards] we have piled and burried 264 . . . & 4 Detailes has been obliged to do likewise, it was a Sight I never want to encounter again.” A lieutenant in the 14th Connecticut, which also fought at Bloody Lane, described “hundreds of horses too, all mangled and putrefying, scattered everywhere.”4
By September 24 the bodies were buried and some of the horses had been dragged into piles, doused with coal oil, and burned. But the battlefield still presented a scene from hell, as described by an official of the United States Sanitary Commission who had brought medical supplies for the wounded. “No words can convey” the “utter devastation and ruin,” he wrote, but he tried to find words anyway. “For four miles in length, and nearly half a mile in width, the ground is strewn with . . . hats, caps, clothing, canteens, knapsacks, shells and shot.” Scattered around were “long mounds of earth, where, underneath, five thousand men, wrapped in their blankets, were laid side by side. . . . Visit a battlefield and see what a victory costs!”5
A week after the battle a newspaper in Hagerstown (a dozen miles from the battlefield) reported that in an area of seventy-five square miles “wounded and dying soldiers are to be found in every neighborhood and in nearly every house. . . . The whole region of country between Boonsboro and Sharpsburg is one vast hospital” and “nearly the whole population” were trying to take care of the wounded. This was no pleasant task. “The odor from the battlefield and the hospitals is almost insupportable,” wrote the surgeon of a New Hampshire regiment. “No one can begin to estimate the amount of agony after a great battle. . . . The poor mutilated soldiers that yet have life and sensation make a most horrid picture.”6
Months after the battle, Sharpsburg continued to disgorge new forms of hideousness. During Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in June 1863, which culminated in the battle of Gettysburg, part of his army marched over the Antietam battlefield. A private in the 23rd Virginia described “the most horrible sights that my eyes ever beheld,” hundreds of bodies that had been buried in shallow graves the previous September “just lying on top of the ground with a little dirt throwed over them and the hogs rooting them out of the ground and eating them and others lying on top of the ground with the flesh picked off and their bones bleaching.”7
Major Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin, a regiment in the famous Iron Brigade, fought through the war in most of the Eastern theater’s deadliest battles: Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the battles around Petersburg as well as at Antietam. Looking back after the war, he wrote that Antietam “surpassed all in manifest evidence of slaughter.” Many other veterans on both sides echoed this conclusion. A survey of thousands of surviving Union and Confederate soldiers after the war found that for an extraordinary number of them, no matter how many other battles they had fought, Antietam stood out as the worst.8
Stark memories of Antietam haunted many for the rest of their days. A private in the 1st Delaware, which suffered 230 casualties in the battle, recalled a Union soldier “stumbling around with both eyes shot out, begging someone ‘for the love of God’ to put an end to his misery.” A nearby lieutenant asked him if he really meant what he said. “Oh yes,” the blinded soldier replied. “I cannot possibly live, and my agony is unendurable.” Without another word the lieutenant drew his revolver, “placed it to the victim’s right ear, turned away his head, and pulled the trigger. A half-wheel, a convulsive gasp, and one more unfortunate had passed over to the silent majority. ‘It was better thus,’ said the lieutenant, replacing his pistol and turning toward [me], ‘for the poor fellow could—’ Just then a solid shot took the lieutenant’s head off.”9
The shock of such scenes caused psychiatric casualties among even the most hardened and experienced soldiers. Colonel William R. Lee of the elite 20th Massachusetts, who had gone through a half-dozen previous battles without losing his poise, rode away from his regiment the morning after Antietam without telling anyone and was later found, according to one of his subordinates, “without a cent in his pocket, without anything to eat or drink, without having changed his clothes for 4 weeks, during all which time he had this horrible diarrhea. . . . He was just like a little child wandering away from home.”10
Soldiers who wrote home to family members eager to hear about their experiences told them that they could not begin to depict the enormity of it. “Words are inadequate to portray the scene,” wrote one. “I will not attempt to tell you of it,” inscribed another.11 For Northern civilians who wanted to see something of the “ghastly spectacle” without actually going there, an opportunity soon presented itself. Within two days of the battle, Northern photographers Alexander Gardner and James Gibson arrived at Antietam and began taking pictures. For the first time in history, the graphic and grisly sight of bloated corpses killed in action could be seen by those who never came close to the battlefield. Gardner and Gibson worked for Mathew Brady, whose studio in New York City exhibited the photographs a month after the battle.
The unburied soldiers in these photographs were nearly all Confederates—probably because the Union dead were interred first, before Gardner and Gibson arrived, but perhaps also because pictures of Union dead might have had a dampening effect on Northern morale. In any event, a New York Times reporter who saw this exhibit on “The Dead of Antietam” wrote sympathetically of their Southern families whose grief invited empathy rather than enmity. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” he informed readers of the Times on October 20, 1862. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.” But “there is one side of the picture that . . . has escaped photographic skill. It is the background of widows and orphans. . . . Homes have been made desolate, and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been quenched forever. All of this desolation imagination must paint—broken hearts cannot be photographed.”
What had been accomplished by “all of this desolation”? The surgeon of a New Hampshire regiment, who remained in the vicinity of Sharpsburg for more than a month to treat the wounded, could find no answer to this question. “To the feeling man this war is truly a tragedy but to the thinking man it must appear a madness,” he wrote. “We win a great victory. It goes through the country. The masses rejoice, but if all could see the thousands of poor, suffering, dieing men their rejoicing would turn to weeping. . . . I pray God may stop such infernal work—though perhaps he has sent it upon us for our sins. Great indeed must have been our sins if such is our punishment.”12
A Massachusetts officer who fought at Antietam also was troubled to fathom its meaning. Robert Gould Shaw was a captain in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry, one of the best Union regiments on the field. “Every battle makes me wish more and more that the war was over,” Shaw wrote to his father four days after the carnage. “It seems almost as if nothing could justify a battle like that of the 17th, and the horrors inseparable from it.”13
Shaw’s next battle was the assault on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, in which he was killed at the head of the 54th Massachusetts, the first black regiment recruited in the North. His family believed that the courage Shaw and his men demonstrated in that battle justified his death. But Shaw’s question about Antietam lingers; what could justify such slaughter and desolation as occurred there? Two men who would have agreed on little else answered that question in a similar way. From London, where he followed the American Civil War with close attention, Karl Marx wrote in October 1862 that Antietam “has decided the fate of the American Civil War.” And looking back some years later, Colonel Walter H. Taylor of Robert E. Lee’s wartime staff described Sharpsburg as the decisive “event of the war.”14
Many soldiers who fought there would have agreed that Antietam was “the event” that decided “the fate of the American Civil War.” They believed that the destiny of their respective nations—the United States and the Confederate States—rested on the outcome of this battle. They fought as if there would be no tomorrow. That was why for so many of them there was no tomorrow. For the others, of course, there were many more tomorrows and much more bloodshed as the war continued for two and one-half years after Antietam.
No single battle decided the outcome of the Civil War. Several turning points brought reversals of an apparently inexorable momentum toward victory by one side and then the other during the war. Two such pivotal moments occurred in the year that preceded Antietam. Union naval and military victories in the early months of 1862 blunted previous Southern triumphs and brought the Confederacy almost to its knees. But Southern counteroffensives in the summer turned the war around. When the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River into Maryland in September 1862, the Confederacy appeared to be on the brink of victory. Antietam shattered that momentum. Never again did Southern armies come so close to conquering a peace for an independent Confederacy as they did in September 1862. Even though the war continued and the Confederacy again approached success on later occasions, Antietam was arguably, as Karl Marx and Walter Taylor believed, the event of the war. To understand why, we must turn back the clock to the first year of the conflict.