Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle
Description
On September 13, 1862, in a field near Frederick, Maryland, four Union soldiers hit the jack-pot. There they found, wrapped carelessly around three cigars, a copy of General Robert E. Lee's most recent orders detailing Southern objectives and letting Union officers know that Lee had split his Army into four vulnerable groups. General George B. McClellan realized his opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia one piece at a time. "If I cannot whip Bobbie Lee," exulted McClellan, "I will be willing to go home." But the notoriously prudent Union general allowed precious hours to pass, and, by the time he moved, Lee's army had begun to regroup and prepare for battle near Antietam Creek. The ensuing fight would prove to be not only the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War, but the bloodiest in the history of the U.S. Army. Countless historians have analyzed Antietam (known as Sharpsburg in the South) and its aftermath, some concluding that McClellan's failure to vanquish Lee constituted a Southern victory, others that the Confederate retreat into Virginia was a strategic win for the North. But in Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle--September 16, 17, and 18, 1862--Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his "head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone." Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps--which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904--together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened. When the last cannon fell silent and the Antietam Creek no longer ran red with Union and Confederate blood, twice as many Americans had been killed in just one day as lost their lives in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined. This is a book about battle, but more particularly, about the human dimension in battle. It asks "What was it like?" and while the answers to this simple question by turns horrify and fascinate, they more importantly add a whole new dimension to the study of the American Civil War.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
By Stephen W. Sears135; Elizabeth Lindsay Lomax, Leaves from an Old Washington Diary, 1854–1863, ed. Lindsay Lomax Wood (New ... 287; September 9, Alpheus S. Williams, From the Cannon's Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams, ed.
-
Crossing Antietam: The Civil War Letters of Captain Henry Augustus Sand, Company A, 103rd New York Volunteers
By Henry Augustus Sand"Bearing aloft the flag of his country in the final charge" by Company A, 103rd New York Volunteers at the Battle of Antietam, Captain Henry Augustus Sand fell wounded.
-
The Maps of Antietam: An Atlas of the Antietam (Sharpsburg) Campaign, Including the Battle of South Mountain, September 2-20, 1862
By Bradley M. GottfriedThis magisterial work breaks down the entire campaign into 21 map sets enriched with 124 original full-page color maps.
-
Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day
By William A. FrassanitoDuring the battle that left twenty-six thousand Civil War soldiers dead or wounded, two photographers recorded the grim battlefield scenes, a study of war's carnage that horrified the American public
-
Battle of Antietam: The Official History by the Antietam Battlefield Board
By George R. Large, Joe A. SwisherThis book provides the official history of the Maryland Campaign of 1862 as prepared by the Antietam Battlefield Board. An overview of the events which occurred, along with battle maps...
-
A Field Guide to Antietam: Experiencing the Battlefield Through Its History, Places, and People
By Carol Reardon, Tom VosslerPresents a guide to the Antietam battlefield with comprehensive maps and descriptions of the action, narratives about key figures and events, and a variety of contemporary and postwar source materials offering stories and interpretations.
-
To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862
By D. Scott Hartwig... Robert H., 719n1o Anderson, Andrew, 466 Anderson, George B., 112, 300, 323, 370,3721373—74 Anderson, George T., ... 539; Garden's, 362, 486; Grimes's, 443; Hart's, 273—75; Lane's, 615, 723n3, 766n19; Latimer's, 539; Lloyd's, 479, ...
-
Antietam, South Mountain, and Harpers Ferry: A Battlefield Guide
By Ethan S. RafuseAt South Mountain, Harpers Ferry, and Antietam, North and South clashed in engagements whose magnitude and importance would earn this campaign a distinguished place in American military history.
-
Antietam, 1862: The Civil War's Bloodiest Day
By Norman S. StevensOsprey's examination of the Battle of Antietam, which was one of the critical battles of the American Civil War (1861-1865).
-
Antietam
By James Reasoner"In early 1862 the war comes within view of the Brannon family farm in Culpeper County, Virginia," affecting the lives of brothers Mac and Will, a new parson in Culpeper, and a budding romance "between the hotheaded Titus and the ...