Across the creek, his spies told Lee that the Union Commander, General George McClellan had about sixty thousand troops ready to attack — double the number available to Lee. Still, the Confederate commander felt confident. They had yet to lose to the Yankees, and these positions were strong. At West Point, he had been taught that the attacker should outnumber the defender three to one at the point of attack and he doubted George would be able to focus his large forces for a concentrated assault. McClellan had been a cadet at the academy while Lee had been superintendent.
This was General Lee’s first invasion of the Union. He’d gone North for several reasons. First, he wanted to earn recognition from the European powers that thus far · had stayed on the sidelines of the Civil War being fought on the North American continent. Britain and France were both potential allies, and lee felt a strong military showing by the Confederacy could swing one or the other to his side and perhaps force the North to sue for peace. Lee was the only cadet ever to graduate the Military Academy without a single demerit, and he knew that the longer the war lasted, the shorter the odds of a Southern victory grew.
Lee also went North to take the battles out of his beloved Virginia, which had seen most of the fighting so far. The Second Battle of Bull Run had just ended with another Southern routing of Union forces, and he’d felt the time was right to march North. He was beginning to feel that the North could keep sending army after army into the South and take defeat after defeat with little effect. As he went to sleep in his tent on the evening of the 16th, Lee felt secure in his positions and happy that the battle the next day would take place on Northern soil. Even though next day would take place on Northern soil. Even though he had seen much war, lee had no frame of reference for what the next day would bring.
The fact that he was fighting against the country he had taken an oath to defend when getting sworn in as a cadet at West Point disturbed Lee at times, but it was a thought and feeling he fought hard to keep at arm’s distance. For him, the war was not about slavery, but about freedom. The freedom of states from a strong central government. The same type of freedom his father had fought for in the Revolutionary War against England. For him, Virginia would always take precedent over the United States.
He was a realist who knew the longer this war lasted, the smaller became the odds of the South winning. The North was simply too big, too populated, too industrialized for the rural South to expect to outlast. He needed a victory, a bloody one, to make the North howl and cause the European powers to take interest. He planned to have it tomorrow.
The battle opened on a damp, murky dawn when Union artillery on the bluffs beyond Antietam Creek began a murderous fire on Stonewall Jackson’s lines. In an attempt to roll up Lee’s left flank, McClellan sent troops toward The Cornfield north of town. Confederate troops hidden among the stalks rose up and delivered a murderous fire into the Union lines as they tried to deploy for the assault, driving them back. The Federals responded by withdrawing the infantry and training their artillery on the field, unleashing a brutal barrage. The fire was so intense that every stalk of corn was cut down as neatly as if by a massive scythe. The effect on the Confederates who had been in the field was less neat, tearing bodies apart and soaking · the ground with blood.
The Union forces assaulted and drove the Confederates from the field, only to have a reinforced Jackson drive them once more out of it. The Union counterattacked again, and the two lines stood less than two hundred yards apart among the blood-spattered corn and mutilated bodies and fired into each other for over half an hour. Loading and firing, creating a man-made cloud from powder that hung close to the ground. All day long, the battle for this piece of field went on, the terrain changing hands over fifteen times and the harvest of bodies growing deeper and deeper. The ground became so soaked with blood and bodily fluids that it turned into a nasty mud.
Pushing his Union forces farther to the north, still desiring to turn the flank and recognizing the bloody stalemate in The Cornfield, McClellan sent a division of troops into the West Woods. But they in turn were hit on their flank by Confederates who decimated the Federals with point-blank fire, killing and wounding over half the two-thousand-man division in less than fifteen minutes. It wasn’t warfare, it was slaughter.
An attempt to bolster the attack on the flank went awry when Union forces were misled and actually hit the Confederate center. As lee had predicted, McClellan was having trouble coordinating the movements of his massive army. The Rebels were hunkered down in an eight-hundred-yard-long sunken road that had been made by years of heavy wagons taking grain to a nearby mill.
Four times over the course of three hours, the Union forces charged across open fields toward the road and four times they were thrown back. By one in the afternoon, over fifty-six hundred men lay dead or dying in the vicinity of the road, which had now earned the name Bloody Lane.
Finally, two New York regiments managed to penetrate the Confederate lines and lay down a withering fire along the length of the sunken road, turning the defensive position into a trap and sending the Rebels into headlong retreat. The center of Lee’s line was now open for the · assault and disaster loomed for the South.
Unfortunately for the North and for those who would die in the next three years, McClellan decided not to throw his reserves into the attack. Perhaps the carnage of The Cornfield and Bloody Lane caused him to pause. Regardless, that decision did not end the day’s fighting or the battle as it had taken on a life of its own, out of the control of the generals who had only a vague idea of what was playing out across the fields and woods of Maryland.
On the south end of the battlefield, Union General Burnside had been trying to cross a twelve-foot-wide bridge since the morning, getting thrown back time and again by the Georgia sharpshooters on a bluff overlooking the bridge. The fact that the creek the bridge spanned could be waded was something Burnside never seemed to take into account as wave after wave of Union soldiers charged across the stone bridge, finally getting a foothold on the far side in the early afternoon only to be pinned down at the base of the bluff, now unable to retreat without facing the same withering fire they had charged into.
Between this bitter success on the left and the opening in the center, General lee appeared on the verge of defeat as Union forces closed on Sharpsburg, whose streets were crowded with retreating Confederate forces.
Then, as so often happens in war, luck intervened. General A. P. Hill’s division, which had been left behind at Harpers Ferry to salvage captured Federal property, arrived at the battlefield after an amazing forced march of seventeen miles in eight hours. They unexpectedly struck · the Union’s left flank, catching the Federals by surprise and driving them back across the bridge they had crossed earlier that day at such great cost.
As the day came to a close, both sides were exhausted and bloodied beyond anything they had experienced in the war to that date. The battle was over and neither side had won.
It was the bloodiest one-day battle of the Civil War. Federal losses were approximately 12,410, while Confederate losses were around 10,700. One in four men engaged in battle that day had fallen. This was a level of loss greater than even Napoleon and other European generals had ever experienced in their campaigns.