The guns have been silent at Antietam for 150 years, yet the legacy of the great battle that once raged there still reverberates. The battle, fought Sept. 17, 1862, was the Civil War's bloodiest single days' fight. More than 25,000 were killed, wounded, or listed as missing.
The battle was fought in western Maryland near the sleepy village of Sharpsburg and raged across the farm fields with a fury heretofore unknown to Civil War combat. The battle made infamous the otherwise forgettable landmarks now known to history as the Miller Cornfield, the Sunken Road, the Dunker Church and Burnside's Bridge, places where the armies of North and South ferociously clashed.
The war had come to this little town for many reasons. The battle was the culmination of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Maryland Campaign of 1862. In August 1862, Lee had written Confederate President Jefferson Davis, "we cannot afford to be idle." Lee believed that bringing the war into Maryland would allow his army to forage, rally support among the neutral border state Marylanders, influence the mid-term Northern congressional elections, and demonstrate the legitimacy of the Confederacy to the European powers abroad. A decisive victory on Northern soil might even deliver the final blow to President Lincoln's war effort and encourage Northerners to press for a peace that would preserve Confederate independence.
The stakes were high in the late summer as Lee's army made its way north and crossed the Potomac into Maryland. On Sept. 11, the Union commander, Gen. George B. McClellan, had written to Lincoln: "If we defeat the army arranged before us, the rebellion is crushed, for I do not believe they can organize another army. But if we should be so unfortunate as to meet with defeat, our country is at their mercy."
Northern cities were in a panic over the invasion and home guard militia forces were brought together in places like Harrisburg and Philadelphia fearing Confederate assault. The defenses of Washington were also reinforced and telegrams from a worried President Lincoln kept the lines buzzing between the Capital and McClellan's headquarters.
When the Union army pursuing Lee's forces stumbled onto a packet found discarded in a Confederate camp that contained a copy of Lee's orders for the invasion, the fate of the Southern army seemed certain. "I have all of Lee's orders," McClellan crowed in a message to President Lincoln.
President Lincoln's excitement over the news turned to frustration when the indecisive McClellan spent days in planning before moving his army in reaction to the information contained in the "lost orders." By the time he did, the opportunity to take full advantage had passed.
The battle began on the morning of September 17, and raged for 12 brutal hours. In places like the Miller Cornfield, successive Union charges were met with stiff Confederate resistance. The Union First Corps took casualties of about 35 percent while the Sixth Corps lost about half its men. After the fight, Union Gen. Joe Hooker recalled: "every stalk of corn ... 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."
But just as the Union forces seemed poised to rout the battered Confederates, the Southern forces were reinforced by troops under the command of Gen. A.P. Hill, who had made a forced march from Harpers Ferry and had arrived on the field at precisely the right moment and in almost perfect position to counter the Union assault. Hill's soldiers met the Union advance and then slowly began pushing them back. After several hours of hard fighting, the Union line crumbled and retreated. As the sun set on the battlefield of Antietam, the battle ended in something of a draw. The Confederate invasion had been stopped, but the Union forces were battle-weary and too depleted to push for a decisive victory on the field.
President Lincoln was relieved to hear that the Confederate invasion had been repelled, and while the battle fell far short of Union victory, as Lee's army fell back toward Virginia, Lincoln determined that Antietam would be the catalyst for him to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that he had been privately discussing with his cabinet for several months. The document, which declared that all slaves in rebelling states would be free as of Jan. 1, 1863, would almost instantly redefine the Northern war effort from a war to preserve the union, as a war to defeat the Confederacy and bring an end to slavery. Lincoln's move to issue the preliminary document reinforced the power of the Union victory in the field and sent a strong message to England and France that was imbued with both military and moral authority.
The Civil War was no longer just an effort to hold together a fractured union, it was now a moral crusade to end the institution of slavery. The issue of slavery had plagued the nation from its very conception. What happened on the fields of Antietam, and forged by the blood of those who had fought and died there, allowed Lincoln by a stroke of the pen to transform the war from a battle to preserve the union into a crusade for freedom. After Lincoln's action, powers foreign or domestic that supported the Confederacy were now supporting the preservation of slavery; those who supported the North were supporting the moral cause of freedom.
William F. Howard has written several books on the Civil War, most recently, "The Civil War Memoir of William T. Levey," published by the Northshire Press.