While Lee waited, Union troops under General George
McClellan attacked and the resulting battle changed the farm communities
surrounding Sharpsburg and the
tenor of the rest of the war.
is a small and sleepy town surrounded by vast stretches of farm fields, not
much different than it was on September
17 150 years ago.
a quiet farming community like many, many others here in Washington
County,” Tom Clemens, local
historian, said. Clemens recently published a book about the battle of Antietam.
“People had of course been aware of the war; many of the
young men had gone off to war on both sides,” Clemens said, “but it hadn’t
really touched Sharpsburg much.”
“And Lee had a decision to make: is he even going to stay at
all?” said Keith Snyder, park ranger, Antietam National Battlefield.
“But Lee is a very aggressive officer; I think he was
convinced that he could defeat the Union army once and for all. In his mind he’s
going to end the war here,” Snyder said.
Lee’s decision resulted in a 12-hour battle that involved up
to 120,000 soldiers resulting in 23,000 casualties, the bloodiest one day
battle on American soil.
“There are approximately 50,000 rounds of artillery fired
onto the field,” Snyder said. “There are three
to four million bullets fired in one day.”
“You have two, very large, very confident armies that come
to this very concentrated field intent on destroying each other,” Snyder added
“And then you throw in very effective weaponry fired by the tens of thousands,
that’s a bad result, you’re going to get a lot of people hurt.”
But the battle didn’t end at Antietam.
It continued across the Potomac River near Shepherdstown
when the Confederates retreated.
“You might call it the final bloody exclamation point to a
very bloody campaign and it also basically is the end of Lee’s first invasion
of northern territory,” Mark
Snell, director, Shepherd University’s
for the Study of the Civil War, said.
Snell said the Confederates were able to get one last blow
in against a new Union regiment caught in a ravine on the Virginia
side of the river during the Battle of Shepherdstown on September 20, 1862. Snell said what began as an
orderly Union retreat soon became chaotic.
“Union soldiers were thrust off the bluffs a couple hundred
feet above the river falling to their death, they were bayoneted, they
scrambled back towards the river, they were shot in the river, they came under
fire from their own cannons on the Maryland side of the river,” Snell said. “The
118th Pennsylvania’s going
to lose 40 percent of its men in that one sharp engagement.”
The battles at Antietam and
Shepherdstown wreaked havoc on the surrounding community. Snell estimates more than 100,000 soldiers
from both sides passed through Shepherdstown before the battles and in the
Snell said the Union army remained on the Maryland
side of the river in Washington County, Md.,
for more than a month while hundreds of Confederate soldiers passed through in
the days after the battle.
“They’re going to take all of the livestock, they’re going
to burn all the fence rails for wood, they’re going to take all the flour,
grain and so forth to feed their army,” Snell said.
“The Union army is going to pay for it, the Confederate army
perhaps might pay for it with basically worthless Confederate money, but it’s
going to leave the people of Jefferson
County fairly destitute,” he said.
“So Jefferson County
economically is hurting at the time.”
Clemens says it’s not coincidence that many farms in the
area were auctioned in the spring of 1863 because the owners could not make a
“We live in something of an insulated life now where when
some disaster happens almost immediately the state and the federal government
come in and the Red Cross comes in and all these organizations,” Clemens said.
“There’s nothing like that in 1862.”
Clemens said the people living around Sharpsburg
and Shepherdstown are left with nothing.
“It’s September and you can’t get another crop in the field
and harvested before winter,” he said. “How are you going to feed your family
until next harvest season in the summer or fall? Where are you going to live if
your house has been destroyed? How can you get anywhere if your horses have
been confiscated, your wagon has been destroyed?”
“It was just dire, dire emergency and these people got by on
charity and credit,” Clemens added.
“What an army also brings with it, even more destructive
than any weapon ever created in the Civil War was disease,” Snyder said. “All
those diseases travel with the army and the Union Army stayed here for six
weeks and the community suffered terribly from that, diseases ravaged the
community after the battle.”
Snyder points out there were also four thousand graves and
thousands of dead horses; the water was tainted and soldiers took all the food.
“(It was) just an incredibly destructive two months for the
people who lived here and it took them years and years and years to recover,”
It was this devastation that greeted President Lincoln when
he visited Sharpsburg two weeks
after the battle. Snyder said Lincoln
spent the first four days in October 1862 touring the battlefield with Gen.
McClellan and visiting wounded soldiers from both sides of the conflict.
“And a big part of his mission was to assess the Army of the
Potomac and see where they are because Lincoln wants them to keep moving, keep
going, keep this offensive, go back after the Confederates back into Virginia
and he wants to see for himself the condition of the army,” Snyder said.
“The one thing that I do know is that it was an incredibly
emotional experience for the President because ultimately he’s responsible for
what happened here,” Snyder said. “And by the time he got here most of the
graves have been established but there are 4,000 graves, there are19,000 people
hurt in 75 field hospitals over a 10 mile radius. It’s destruction that we’ve
never seen before or since in this nation’s history.”
Despite the great emotion Lincoln
must have felt when he saw the devastation; Snyder points out Lincoln
still went through with a plan to create revolutionary change.
That came in the form of a preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation which was issued by Lincoln
on September 22, 1862.
Tomorrow we’ll hear about the politics involved and the
pitfalls of issuing that document.
Antietam National Battlefield will commemorate the
sesquicentennial of the battle with a series of events running September 14- 22.
The Shepherdstown 250 organization is also hosting
commemorative events next week including a remembrance walk from Sharpsburg
to Shepherdstown on September 16.