Battle of Antietam
It
remains the single bloodiest day of fighting on American soil and it
was fought 150 years ago this week in the Civil War: The Battle of
Antietam began on Sept. 17, 1862, when Union forces led by Maj. Gen.
George B. McClellan clashed with Confederates under the command of Gen.
Robert E. Lee in a cornfield at Sharpsburg, Md., or Antietam. The
bitter battle raged around such spots now burned into the American
history books as Dunker Church and the Sunken Road. Marked by attacks
and counterattacks, the pitched 12 hours of fighting claimed at least
23, 000 wounded, missing and disappeared. When the roar of combat was
over, Lee's limping Army of Northern Virginia was forced to withdraw on
Sept. 18 amid last skirmishing to cross the Potomac River southward to
the safety of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Neither side could claim
this as an outright tactical victory. Yet Antietam was, nonetheless, a
turning point in the Civil War and quickly was seized upon as a
strategic victory for the Union. The federal forces, though they failed
to pursue Lee's retreating army, had shown they could stop the savvy
Confederate commander's opening invasion of the North. Historically, the
battle's aftermath gave President Abraham Lincoln the opening he needed
to announce his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Within days,
Lincoln would declare the Civil War had the double aim of both keeping
the Union intact and abolishing slavery. The Associated Press, reporting
on the fighting soon after the shooting subsided, said hundreds of
civilians watched from surrounding hills. "The sharp rattle of 50,000
muskets and the thunder of a hundred pieces of artillery is not often
witnessed," AP's correspondent wrote. "It is impossible at this writing
to form any correct idea of our losses or that of the enemy. It is heavy
on both sides." AP added that so fierce was the fighting that the dead
were "thickly strewn over the field and in many places lying in heaps."
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