From 85 feet up in the stone observation tower, you see only a gentle country lane, worn deep into the ground by the unremarkable coming and going of horses and wagons more than a century-and-a-half ago. It startles the imagination to think of that lane as it was near midday on Sept. 17, 1862 — a lethal river brim to its banks with fresh corpses, twisted in the asymmetrical poses of sudden death, arms and legs akimbo, heads cracked and leaking brains.
On that day, that sunken lane became the Bloody Lane — the ground zero of the single costliest day of bloodletting in the American Civil War, the dead center of the battle of Antietam.
When the sun went down on that appalling Wednesday, 3,600 men from Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac were dead. Another 17,000 were wounded. That exceeds Omaha Beach on D-Day, the first day on Iwo Jima and Pearl Harbor.
Yet this inferno was not stoked by cadres of case-hardened psychotics. When the American Civil War began in 1861, the US Army had only 16,000 soldiers on its rolls, and few of even its longest-serving professionals knew much about mass warfare.
The war called into being armies of unprecedented size, but also armies of stupendously innocent amateurishness, composed of men who were deadly in earnest about the ideas that put them into uniform — the sacred ties of the Union, defense of home and hearth, race, and the abolition of slavery.
Their inexperience led them into one ill-managed showdown after another; their idealism kept them at the business of killing until farm lanes became seams of blackened dead.
The two armies that met at Antietam had been fencing across Virginia for five months. Against every expectation, Lee and his hungry, ragged Army of Northern Virginia had beaten their far larger Yankee opponents again and again.
The wonder-boy commander of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan, had been out-maneuvered and humiliated by Lee along the James River. But when Gen. John Pope was given command in northern Virginia, he was even more cruelly humiliated by Lee at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
Flushed with success, on Sept. 4 Lee and his rebel ragamuffins lunged northward into Maryland, hoping to invade Pennsylvania and convince President Abraham Lincoln that it was time to bring the war to the negotiating table.
Lincoln would rather have cut off his right arm than negotiate with the rebels. He handed command back to McClellan, and almost as if God had smiled on that decision, a copy of Lee’s campaign orders was found in a meadow near Frederick, Md. — revealing all of Lee’s planned maneuvers and letting McClellan close in for a knockout blow.
But the Army of Northern Virginia didn’t go down that easily. Lee turned and ranged his army behind the Antietam Creek in western Maryland, near the town of Sharpsburg, and defied McClellan to attack.
But McClellan’s attacks were poorly coordinated; at day’s end, both armies had little to show for it except a mutual pounding that no one else on earth could have expected from the farm boys, shopkeepers and mechanics who made up these two armies.
“In a second the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot,” wrote a soldier in the 9th New York Volunteers. “The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment . . . the whole landscape turned slightly red.”
In places whose routine names were transformed into pillars of sacrifice — the Cornfield, the West Woods, the Dunker Church, Burnside’s Bridge — men “were knocked out of ranks by dozens” in what a Wisconsin officer called “a reckless disregard of life, of everything but victory.” Out of 226 men in the 1st Texas, only 40 were left to answer roll call that night.
Lee’s army survived by the skin of its teeth and lived to retreat back into Virginia and fight another day. But even that limited success gave Lincoln the political capital he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, decreeing freedom to 3 million slaves and setting the nation’s face toward the ultimate abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment in 1865.
Looking down from the great stone tower, Antietam’s clean green fields and respectful monuments seem more like guardians of peace than tributes to war. But on that day, 150 years ago, war came to Antietam like it had never come to Americans before. And so, in its wake, would freedom.
Allen C. Guelzo is director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College.