Antietam
Antietam was a significant battle fought during the American Civil War on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with over 23,000 casualties. The Union victory at Antietam provided President Abraham Lincoln with the opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the nature of the war by making it a fight for freedom as well as preservation of the Union.
5 Key excerpts on "Antietam"
eBook - ePubLandscape Turned Red
The Battle of Antietam
- Stephen W. Sears(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Mariner Books(Publisher)
...Introduction Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red. By almost any measure, too, Antietam was pivotal in the history of the Civil War. In September 1862 events across a broad spectrum—military, political, social, diplomatic—were rushing toward a climax. The battle in Maryland would affect all of them radically, turning the course of the war in new directions. It was a time of opportunity for the South and of peril for the North. Robert E. Lee had carried the war from Richmond to Washington and now led his army northward into Maryland in a bold effort to win independence for the Confederacy. The European powers, closely debating intervention in the American contest, were watching Lee’s progress intently. Confederate armies were also on the offensive in the western theater. The Union cause was at its nadir. The Federal army girding to meet Lee, stricken with a crisis of confidence, was entrusted to George B. McClellan, a general many believed to be gravely flawed as a commander. There was growing discontent in the Northern states with the administration’s management of the conflict. Abraham Lincoln’s political support was divided and wavering even as he grappled with a revolutionary change of purpose, seeking to make this a war against slavery as well as a war for union. When the two armies finally faced one another across the shallow valley of the Antietam and prepared for battle, the sense of crisis was palpable...
eBook - ePubThe Unfinished Exhibition
Visualizing Myth, Memory, and the Shadow of the Civil War in Centennial America
- Susanna W. Gold(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The cartridge box, cap box, and bayonet in its scabbard are suspended from the waist belt that bears the large, clear letters “US” in the oval buckle in the center of the composition, the view of which is unimpeded by the soldier’s raised arms. Facing northward within the Centennial grounds, this disciple of the Northern army served as an important emblem of Union victory. Not simply a sign of the recent national troubles, this hovering sculpture served as an omnipresent sign to Northern, Southern, and international visitors that the Union had been restored only as a result of their victory. Particularly alarming was the devastating means by which the Union secured this victory. The American Soldier was conceived as a monument to be erected on the Antietam National Battlefield just north of Sharpsburg, Maryland, where General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was defeated after a day-long battle that would become known as the bloodiest day of the Civil War. On September 17, 1862, Union General George B. McClellan brought with him 75,000 troops to meet Lee’s 71,500—and both left the field with similarly devastating losses. The battle raged for nearly fourteen hours, with terrible losses of human life on both sides. Nearly twenty-three thousand troops were killed, a figure that exceeds all records of human loss suffered on any other day in the history of the nation’s combat. The carnage was astonishing. In the first three hours of the morning alone, almost one-third of the men on the field were killed, wounded, or missing. Four out of five men on the field from the 1st Texas regiment were killed or wounded in only the first twenty minutes of their entering the battle, and the Philadelphia Brigade, positioned on a vulnerable flank, lost nearly five hundred fifty men in only ten minutes...
eBook - ePubCIVIL WAR – Complete History of the War, Documents, Memoirs & Biographies of the Lead Commanders
Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant & William T. Sherman, Biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis & Robert E. Lee, The Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, Presidential Orders & Actions
- Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, James Ford Rhodes, John Esten Cooke, Frank H. Alfriend(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Madison & Adams Press(Publisher)
...President Davis was pledged to an invasion of the enemy’s country whenever it should prove practicable. Now, if ever, that policy was to be initiated. Hitherto the enemy’s power, not the will of the Confederate Government, had prevented. Now that power was shattered. The mighty fabric trembled to its base, and who would now venture to estimate the consequences of a brilliant victory by Lee, on Maryland soil, in September, 1862? What supporter of the Union can now dwell, without a shudder, upon the imagination, even, of a repetition, at Antietam, of the story of the Chickahominy, or Second Manassas? The climax of the Maryland campaign was the battle of Antietam — a drawn battle, but followed by the early withdrawal of the Confederate army into Virginia. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the causes conspiring to give this portion of the campaign many of the features of failure. With a force greatly reduced by the straggling of his weary and exhausted troops, Lee was unable to administer the crushing blow which he had hoped to deliver. 6 As a consequence, the people of Maryland, of whom a large majority were thoroughly patriotic and warm in their Southern sympathies, were not encouraged to make that effective demonstration which would inevitably have followed a defeat of McClellan. Nevertheless, there was some compensation in the terrible punishment inflicted upon the enemy at Antietam; and there was the heightened prestige, so greatly valued by the South at this period, in the eyes of Europe, arising from the temper and capacity of the weaker combatant to undertake so bold an enterprise...
eBook - ePubFamous Battles and How They Shaped the Modern World, 1588–1943
From the Armada to Stalingrad
- Beatrice Heuser, Athena S. Leoussi(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Pen & Sword Military(Publisher)
...Chapter 7 Gettysburg, 1863, and American National Identity Georg Schild This uniting of North and South in a renewed American nationalism was a fine thing, to be sure, but all too often it was characterized by forgetting what the war had been about. James McPherson, Hallowed Ground (New York: Crown, 2003), p. 45 In early July 1863, two years into the American Civil War, two large armies faced each other in the small southern Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. There was the Union army, officially called the Army of the Potomac, commanded by General George Gordon Meade, and the Army of Northern Virginia, led by the legendary Robert E. Lee. Their engagement in Gettysburg was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the war. Roughly 90,000 Northerners faced 70,000 Southerners. Of these 160,000 men, some 44,000 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The battle of Gettysburg is still very much alive in the American collective memory because it was so bloody and because Southern mythology claims that the Confederates had almost won the confrontation due to their superior virtue and exceptionally brave fighting abilities. And if they had won Gettysburg, perhaps they could have also won the war and their independence. The Gettysburg battle is one of the few cases where the defeated came to dominate the historiography of the confrontation. Southerners turned the defeat into a mythological struggle. Such a reframing of the narrative came at a price, however. In the collective memory of the Southern states, the causes of the war have been almost completely eradicated. Fighting for secession and for maintaining slavery did not fit into a post-war societal discourse of bravery and eventually, national unity. Secession and War The American Civil War is arguably the most thoroughly researched topic in all of human history. There are numerous eyewitness accounts of many of the battles, and generations of historians have gone over every detail of the confrontation...
eBook - ePub- Theodore P. Savas, David A. Woodbury, Theodore P. Savas, David A. Woodbury(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Savas Publishing(Publisher)
...Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain, by John Michael Priest. White Mane, 1992. Illus., maps, photos, notes, biblio., index. 433pp. $34.95. The Maryland Campaign of 1862 has few rivals for high drama, important military and political stakes, and gratuitous bloodshed. Arguably, it was the turning point of the American Civil War, if one campaign can represent a turning point in a war that lasted four long years and extinguished many hundreds of thousands of lives. Tucked away within Robert E. Lee’s first raid into Maryland is the obscure and largely ignored series of engagements fought on September 14, 1862, the subject of John Priest’s Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain. In the minds of most students of the war, this engagement for the mountain gaps is a confusing series of marches which culminated in a chaotic exchange of lead and iron, difficult to follow and harder still to confidently understand. The indifferent treatment accorded it in the past leads one to suspect that those writing history also found the fighting atop South Mountain difficult to easily explain. Boiled down to a simple description, the battle (or more appropriately, battles) of South Mountain was a fight for control of the passes which crossed over the wooded and rugged eminence, a critical geographic feature which separated Lee’s scattered divisions from George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. The defense of the mountain stronghold was orchestrated largely by Lee’s caustic-tongued and stout-hearted lieutenant, Maj. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill, whose gallant posturing and stubborn resistance probably saved the dangerously separated elements of the Army of Northern Virginia from a serious setback north of the Potomac River...
