September 17, 1862.
The Battle of Antietam had a profound impact on the rest of the war, but it's more well
known for its other title: the deadliest day of the Civil War.
Here's the truth about that bloody day.
All wars are remembered for being violent and for being bloody, but just looking at
the numbers, nothing in American history compares to the Civil War.
And this isn't to diminish any other war; the statistics just speak for themselves.
According to "American Battlefield Trust," Civil War casualties numbered somewhere around
620,000, about 2 percent of the American population at the time.
That's more than American casualties in both World Wars combined, and more than every other
war combined until Vietnam.
And that's not counting the missing, captured, or wounded.
Taken all together, the casualty number is closer to 1.5 million.
Not to mention that other sources believe the death toll to be closer to 850,000, in
which case, no other war or combined count is even close.
And battles like Antietam are a big part of why the count is so high — "Constituting
America" reports over 12,000 dead, wounded, or missing on the Union side and over 10,000
for the Confederacy.
But even with 23,000 casualties, it's still pretty far from the bloodiest battle of the
whole war.
A handful are within 10,000 casualties more, while Gettysburg has over double the casualties
at 51,000.
But Antietam has its own terrible title as the most deadly single-day battle, with 23,000
people dead or wounded in under 24 hours.
It was 1862, and things weren't going well for the Union.
There were a number of reasons why, but it mostly comes down to demoralization and a
few less-than-flattering military losses.
That gave the Confederates an opportunity, and one that General Robert E. Lee was going
to capitalize on.
He knew that invading Maryland would end up being a real blow to the Union as a whole;
the Confederacy could really go on the offensive and start encroaching on Union lands.
That spawned the Maryland Campaign, Lee's ambitious plan to pretty much sweep through
the state and capture Union-controlled areas.
Here's the thing, though: Antietam wasn't exactly part of those plans.
As NPR says, Antietam wasn't a strategic position; it's just where the Confederate army fell
back to when things went sour.
At best, it would just be a place where they could launch a larger campaign further north.
A Confederate victory up north could have meant something.
Antietam itself didn't really mean much — the actual lines only shifted about a hundred
yards total.
That said, it could've been incredibly important.
McClellan allowed Lee to retreat and regroup and refused to pursue him, feeling he'd done
his job.
But, as "History" says — and as Lincoln pointed out to him — McClellan could've
decimated the Confederate Army right then and there.
The war might've been won that day, but the chance slipped away.
Part of the Battle of Antietam took place at the Cornfield and that part of the battle
went on for a full eight hours.
But the thing about this is the fact that it was a relatively small space.
As NPR says, from the start, the gunfire was extremely concentrated, opening with just
200 yards of distance between the two armies.
Then from there, things just got even closer, even down to a 100 yards or less.
Basically, at certain points, a soldier could just pop up and immediately see the enemy,
so in the case of the Confederates at Sunken Road, they were caught in a death trap, Union
soldiers descending almost directly on top of them.
Death was quite literally upon them.
The soldiers at Antietam had plenty of vivid memories of the battle, hours on end during
which they were surrounded by death.
And that was true, no matter the side.
Sebastian Duncan recalled the fear at hearing shots whizz over their heads, the shells bursting
into splinters above them, all the men ducking on instinct, even if the shots were passing
more than a hundred feet over them.
Eventually, they realized the distance, but that didn't make anyone brave enough to try
and poke their heads up for a better view.
But for others, the bullets truly did rain down on them: Thomas Evans wrote how, sometimes,
the shells were exploding just over their heads, showering them in shattered bits of
metal.
Another soldier, Robert Kellogg, had a shell burst so close to him that it blew dirt right
into his face.
With bullets flying through the air, knowing they were hitting so close, the instinct was
just to hope for a little luck and stay out of the way.
The Confederate soldiers in particular had their share of it at Sunken Road.
Taking cover in a ditch in the road, their position soon became a death trap where shots
rained down on them from every direction, and their only salvation was escape through
the rear.
It's no stretch to call Antietam the bloodiest day in all of American military history, and
the devastation on the battlefield itself was obvious to everyone present.
But William Child, a surgeon writing from a battlefield hospital near Sharpsburg believed
that, maybe, it was the days after the battle which might be even worse.
In the aftermath of the battle, his work was never-ending, dressing wounds quite literally
from dawn until dusk for multiple days on end.
George Allen added that, in most cases, the wounded were basically piled into the hospitals,
tightly packed together, where they awaited treatment.
But the part that was really bad wasn't necessarily the exhaustion and workload, or even the nature
of the work -- it was the difference between the dead and the wounded.
Many soldiers described the carnage on the battlefield, painting horrifically vivid images
of their fallen comrades, but at least the dead were just gone.
The wounded had to suffer through intense and burning pain, and it wasn't easy for them
or the doctors who treated them.
It was all so bad, Child believed it was an act of God, punishment for a great sin.
This is one of those things that everyone knows, but deserves to be said regardless.
All of the soldiers in this battle were people, not just numbers on a casualty list.
All of them had families, and no small number of the accounts of the battle come from letters.
A lot of them missed their families back home, wanting little more than to see them again.
They were hoping for letters and the happiness they got from being able to hear from them,
at the very least.
Many times, those letters would also include individual things to tell different people
back home — personal and more intimate responses.
"Dear mother, I hope you are keeping well and not worrying about me.
You mustn't think that any of us are going to be killed."
And there are stories filled with a lot of longing.
William Child wrote to his wife about a dream he had, where he was back home, back in his
normal life, feeling like the dream was real.
Another soldier also wrote home, not sad or despairing over his wounds, but from the fact
that someone had stolen something priceless from him: a book containing a lock of his
wife's hair.
As History tells it, on September 13, the Union army under General George McClellan
was stationed just outside Frederick, Maryland.
Sergeant John Closs and Corporal Barton Mitchell happened upon a lucky find: three cigars discarded
on the ground.
But it was more than that.
A paper was wrapped around them, addressed to Confederate General D.H. Hill and titled
Special Order No. 191.
This was a major find.
McClellan and the Union had been completely confounded by Lee's strategies, but suddenly,
they had their hands on the Confederate army's exact plans, coming directly from Lee's adjutant
general.
Suddenly, they knew that Lee's army was spread thin, separated into five parts over 30 miles,
and not even that far away.
It was a massive tactical advantage.
Except, McClellan did nothing about it.
"History Daily" explains that it would've been easy for the Union to completely decimate
the Confederate army in one fell swoop.
They could've taken them out piece by piece — a bunch of small battles between a tiny
army and a much larger one.
It would've been the easiest Union victory, and one with a relatively small casualty count.
But McClellan completely squandered the opportunity.
He took a full 18 hours to mobilize his troops, at which point Lee already guessed the Union
knew about his plans and had regrouped his forces.
The Civil War saw a pretty important first in history: it was the first war to ever be
photographed.
Battlefields were generally too chaotic for photography, but photographers could document
the preparation and the aftermath.
And that's the big part: the aftermath.
The Civil War was the first war to be photographed, but Antietam was the first battlefield photographed
before the dead were buried.
It was the first battlefield that anyone could see, littered with the bodies and the dead
and all.
Those photographs went up into galleries, and for the first time, people at home could
see just how terrible battle was.
They could see how bloody and grim it was without ever being there themselves.
All of a sudden, the war was brought right to their doorstep.
The Battle of Antietam has become infamous for the amount of blood shed in such a small
amount of time, but it's also become famous for other reasons, like inadvertently changing
the tide of the Civil War.
According to Constituting America, Abraham Lincoln had been intending to find a way to
end slavery.
His solution to that problem was the Emancipation Proclamation — a document which would free
slaves in the South as a part of Lincoln's wartime powers, while exempting slaves in
the Border States, in order to keep those states from running into the arms of the Confederacy.
But the Union wasn't in a great place at the time when Lincoln first penned it.
As "History" says, Union morale was already low, the military despairing because of lost
battles, and the public at large frustrated with how long the war was taking.
So Lincoln's cabinet were worried about him delivering such a speech.
They counselled him to wait for a military victory, arguing that it would be best to
deliver the Emancipation Proclamation from a place of strength.
Antietam was exactly that.
Casualties were high to the point that many historians would actually call the battle
a stalemate, but the Union claimed it as a victory regardless.
It was the best chance the Union was going to get, and Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, freeing the slaves as of the start of 1863.
The Union had a lot to deal with in 1862: a demoralized army, disappointing military
defeats, unpopular legislation, and the like.
But there was another looming problem: Europe.
Europe imported Southern cotton, and there was a chance they might end up recognizing
the Confederacy.
Backing by a major European power could really change things for the South.
And that fear was a legitimate concern as Europe was definitely watching from the sidelines.
England and France had initially stated their neutrality, their respective governments not
willing to support rebels who believed in slavery, as both countries had already abolished
the practice.
They were expecting a quick Union victory.
But that quick victory didn't happen, and the two European powers started to reconsider.
European nobility identified with Southern gentility, and the governments thought that
the US was becoming too powerful in world affairs; the nation splitting would reset
the balance of power.
Most importantly, this war wasn't officially just about slavery.
For the European powers, supporting the Confederacy didn't necessarily have to equate to supporting
slavery, leaving them room to justify their possible support.
Antietam flipped that around, though.
It gave the Union a victory, and then it led directly to the Emancipation Proclamation.
Suddenly, the war was undeniably about slavery, and the Confederacy was the villain for supporting
it.
At that point, European powers pulled out entirely, since they couldn't support the
Confederacy without their people hating them.
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