Sharpsburg/Antietam: Bloodiest day in American history

Today marks the 145th anniversary of the bloodiest day in American history, the battle long known in the South as Sharpsburg, and in the North as Antietam. The Charleston Daily Courier, the oldest of several newspapers from which the Post and Courier traces its history, had a correspondent attached to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He wrote under the byline "Personne" and was an eyewitness of the battle. Some of which follows is drawn from his published accounts.

Some background: On Aug. 28 and 29, 1862, Lee routed a Union army at the Battle of Second Manassas. Determined to press his advantage and win, on Northern soil, a victory that might bring the war to an end, Lee split his army in two. Stonewall Jackson, with three divisions, would converge with two other Confederate columns to seize the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry.

This accomplished, Jackson would then rejoin the main army north of the Potomac for a campaign through the rich and unspoiled fields of Maryland and Pennsylvania. There, Lee hoped to draw Union General George McClellan into battle on Lee's chosen ground.

Orders spelling out these objectives were dated September 9th. In one of those strange twists of fate that sometimes decide the course of history, a Confederate officer lost his copy of the orders. (It appears he wrapped them around cigars that later fell out of his pocket). The lost orders quickly reached McClellan, who thus knew, in detail, Lee's planned movement during critical days when the divided Confederate army was most vulnerable to attack and destruction. In a letter hurried off to President Lincoln, McClellan wrote: "I have all the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap, if my men are equal to the emergency." It was too late for McClellan to save the garrison at Harper's Ferry, which surrendered to Jackson on Sept. 15. Desperately needed supplies were taken, along with thousands of prisoners.

Twelve miles north, on the other side of the Potomac near the small town called Sharpsburg, Lee, with 18,000 men, was in a precarious position. Facing him was McClellan, with no fewer than 87,000, and more on the way. The prudent course for Lee to have taken was to re-cross the river and return to Virginia. But retreat was not in Lee's vocabulary. The obvious course for McClellan was to attack immediately, before Lee reconstituted his army. But daring was not in McClellan's character, even with the odds so strongly in his favor.

Thus it was that the great battle was fought not on September 15 or 16, when Lee might easily have been swept away, but on the 17th, when Jackson's half of the army, after a forced march, had been hurried into line. The odds were still strongly against Lee, however. He had perhaps 40,000 men and only meager reinforcements to draw on in an emergency. McClellan outnumbered him by more than two to one, with more divisions coming up, and his army, in contrast to Lee's, was rested, well armed and well shod.

A Washington Light Infantry volunteer with the Hampton Legion recalled that the march into Maryland was made by barefoot men living on field corn and green apples.

Another was more specific: "None had any under-clothing. My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers, a stained, dirty jacket, an old slouch hat, pinned up with a thorn, a begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a cartridge box full, and a musket. I was barefoot, and had a stone bruise on each foot." How could such an army hope to stand up to the mighty force arrayed before it? The answer comes thundering down through the years: They fought with Lee.

The slaughter was horrific. When Confederate Gen. John B. Hood was asked after the battle, "Where is your division?" his reply was "Dead on the field." Yet another member of the Washington Light Infantry, this one serving with Hood, said, "As Company A was advancing, it passed a line of men lying down. One man said, 'Why don't these men get up and come on?' Another answered, 'Why they are dead men.' They were faced to the enemy lying so thick as to be taken for a line of battle. A wounded man from Company A, C.P. Popenheim, going out of the fight, heard Gen. Hood order a courier to 'go back in there and tell those men to halloo — why don't they halloo?' The courier answered, 'Great God, general, they are all dead — there's nobody there to halloo.' " ("Halloo" meant the well-known Rebel yell.)

Despite the good face the Courier's Personne tried to put on it, Sharpsburg was not a Confederate victory, only at best a draw. Lee's planned 1862 campaign north of the Potomac ended in failure. Fully a fourth of his scarecrow army fell on that one terrible day, and though Union casualties were perhaps a few thousand greater, McClellan was able to call on fresh troops, and Lee could look for reinforcements only by rounding up deserters and stragglers. In any event, it was Lee who left his dead behind on the field and, the night after, withdrew to Virginia. It is written that on that night he spent long hours in midstream shallows, astride his great horseTraveler, immersed in thoughts as deep and dark as the river, while his shattered army crossed over.

If you visit the Antietam battlefield today — it is but a short distance east of Interstate 83 just north of where it crosses the Potomac — you will see all its hallowed sites — the Sunken Road, the Corn Field, the Stone Bridge, the Dunker Church, the East Wood, the West Wood, the Hagerstown Pike — where as many as 22,000 Confederate and Union soldiers, Americans all, fell on one hellish day.

If you listen carefully, you might hear, above the drowsy fall sound of cicadas, an incessant rattle of musketry, a roar of angry cannon, the screams of mortally wounded men and horses, the long, lonely mutter of the battlefield.

R.L. Schreadley is a former Post and Courier executive editor.