whole making as pleasing and prosperous a landscape as can easily be imagined.” That description stands up well a century and a quarter later. Much of the land is still farmed, and many of the landmarks and farmsteads of 1862 have survived.

A particular feature of this battlefield, beyond the fact that it is largely unspoiled, is the special nature of the terrain. It is uncommonly easy, simply by looking at it, to understand how the Battle of Antietam took shape, how it progressed, and how it turned out as it did. The actions of some of the generals who commanded here may be puzzling, but there can be no mistaking how the battlefield itself shaped the course of events that September 17.

I favor approaching Sharpsburg along the same route the armies followed in 1862, seeing it as they first saw it. Early that September, after his victory at Second Manassas, Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac to Frederick, Maryland, where he rested his men and calculated his next move. Lincoln meanwhile called on General George B. McClellan to pick up the pieces left by John Pope’s Manassas defeat. The Army of the Potomac was returned to him, along with Pope’s army. Reorganizing these forces as he went, McClellan moved slowly into Maryland after the invaders.

By Lee’s reckoning, the Yankees were demoralized by defeat and their general was timid and ripe for a beating, and he sought to draw them after him to the north and west and force a battle somewhere in the Cumberland Valley of Maryland and Pennsylvania. First, however, he had to free his supply line from the threat of the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, at the mouth of Virginia’s Shenandoah River. He devised a complex plan to force the garrison’s surrender, and on September 10 the Rebels moved out of Frederick, scattering in all directions to carry out their assignments. Left behind was a copy of Lee’s operational plan, dropped in one of the encampments by a careless courier. Three days later, the Union army entered Frederick and an Indiana soldier stumbled on what would become famous as the Lost Order. Soon, it was in McClellan’s hands. He now knew his opponent’s intentions, where his forces were, and his timetable. It was the sort of opportunity generals dream of.

Even this spectacular good fortune did not stir McClellan out of his cautious habits, however, and he advanced too late to overwhelm any of the scattered parts of Lee’s army. On September 14 the Confederates fought delaying actions at Crampton’s Gap and Turner’s Gap on South Mountain, behind which they had been maneuvering since leaving Frederick. The two armies followed the historic National Road, the nation’s first federal highway, which ran

through Frederick and Turner’s Gap and on toward the Ohio Valley; today it is called Alternate U.S. 40. On Alternate 40 three miles west of the village of Middletown, at the intersection of Bolivar Road, the Union forces divided left and right to launch flank attacks on Turner’s Gap. The fighting that raged that day on South Mountain can be traced, but a good guidebook, such as The U.S. Army War College Guide to the Battle of Antietam, by Jay Luvaas and Harold W. Nelson, is essential. The maneuvering was complex, and historical markers are not always to be found.

Alternate 40 climbs up the mountain and across the rocky crest at Turner’s Gap, from which, in the small hours of September 15, Lee pulled back down the western face of the range to Boonsboro. Taking a left turning on the Boonsboro turnpike (today’s Maryland Route 34), he set his forces for Sharpsburg. Expecting the enemy to fall back across the Potomac, McClellan announced that Maryland and Pennsylvania were delivered from peril. But at midday word reached him that the Rebels were no longer retreating. Instead they were formed in line of battle behind Antietam Creek and in front of Sharpsburg. Capt. George Armstrong Custer, beginning his military career on McClellan’s staff, reported the sighting: “They are in full view. Their line is a perfect one about a mile and a half long. … We can employ all the troops you can send us.”

Soon, Federal troops in the thousands began massing along the east bank of Antietam Creek, swinging off the Boonsboro pike to high ground overlooking the shallow valley of the Antietam. All this ground, with the exception of the Pry house, McClellan’s field headquarters, remains privately owned today. The wooded bluff to the left (south) of Route 34 was open and under cultivation in 1862, and from this commanding spot General McClellan first glimpsed the battlefield. During the fighting on the 17th, he left the Pry house and returned here for a better view of the action.

What he saw on that afternoon of September 15 was a Confederate battle line that stretched across a patchwork of farm fields, meadows, orchards, and woodlots. Beyond the creek the ground slopes upward to a north-south ridgeline bisecting the land between the Antietam and the Potomac a few miles distant. All that could be seen of Sharpsburg, behind the ridgeline, was its church steeples. Militarily it was a concealing landscape, the ground marked by little rises and hollows, the trees in full foliage, the crops in many of the fields not yet harvested and standing at full growth.

Although McClellan knew from the Lost Order that he was facing no more than half the Confederate army, he had so inflated the enemy’s numbers that he credited Lee with 50,000 men that day. He did not suspect that he was being bluffed by hardly 15,000, and by day’s end

he further deluded himself into thinking the other half of the Rebel army had reached the field as well. In fact, Lee’s six divisions still at Harpers Ferry would only begin to reach Sharpsburg the next afternoon.

Committed to his delusion, McClellan allowed September 16 to pass while he worked out a plan to fight the 100,000 Rebels he expected to face. Against this host he could bring 75,000 men to the firing line. Lee used the gift of time to collect his forces. Even when his army was reunited—not to be fully accomplished until the afternoon of September 17—he would have hardly 38,000 men of all arms. The Army of Northern Virginia would not again be so diminished until it surrendered at Appomattox. The prudent course for Lee was to withdraw across the Potomac, content with the 11,500 Yankee soldiers and substantial armaments captured at Harpers Ferry. Yet that would signal an end to his larger ambitions for the campaign. Lee deliberately chose this good defensive ground and took his stand, confident in the fighting ability of his men and in his own ability to out-general George McClellan.

McClellan’s “design,” as he termed it, was a double envelopment of the enemy flanks, the heavier attack to fall on the better fighting ground along Lee’s left (northern) flank. The plan is made clear in displays at the Visitor Center, reached by turning off Route 34 to State Route 65 in Sharpsburg. Before one sets out to tour the battlefield, however, I commend the overview offered by Antietam’s observation tower. This modest stone structure, erected at the turn of the century, is on Richardson Avenue, at the center of the battlefield. The view from the tower reveals the compass-like symmetry of the field.

Lee ran his line in a generally north-south direction, paralleling the bisecting ridgeline on which ran the turnpike to Hagerstown. This is today’s Route 65, although the modern road follows a bypass around the section of the old turnpike running through the battlefield. Three woodlots prominent in the fighting along this line are appropriately named the North Woods, the East Woods, and the West Woods. Antietam Creek has a north-south axis as well, and it served McClellan as a defensive moat behind which he husbanded his forces, sending his columns one at a time forward (westward) across the creek to give battle.

The fighting progressed in three distinct stages, like acts in a play, starting in early morning and lasting until dark and moving from the northern end of the Confederate line to the center and finally to the southern end. This is not to suggest that the Battle of Antietam had no confusing moments or that at times the fighting did not shift around to every point on the compass.

Yet its essential features are easily seen. It is perhaps the single virtue of McClellan’s generalship on September 17 that his disjointed actions provide historians with a convenient framework for narrating the battle.

“Fighting Joe” Hooker opened the contest at first light on the seventeenth from a point on the battlefield’s Mansfield Avenue, site of the North Woods. McClellan considered Hooker one of his best combat generals, and he gave his I Corps the honor of leading the attack on Lee’s northern flank. Hooker had crossed the Antietam the afternoon before to take up this flanking position, and now he began the assault by driving due south, along the axis of the Hagerstown turnpike. His objective was the open plateau where the Visitor Center now stands, which was crowded with Confederate artillery. Off to the west beyond Route 65 can be seen the modest high ground called Nicodemus Heights, where Jeb Stuart directed additional artillery fire at the Federals all morning long, beginning with Hooker’s men.

In a matter of four hours that morning, the Federals launched three successive offensives—by the I, XII, and II corps—over this same ground, which measures hardly a mile on a side. Each one was opened along a different axis. Represented on a clock face with 12:00 as north, the I Corps came in from 12:00, the XII from 1:30, and the II from 3:00. The sustained intensity of the fighting here was unmatched in the Civil War. For me the strongest impression of these savage hours is gained by tracing the successive movements, although this sometimes means going against the grain of the battlefield tour directions.

Heading southward from Mansfield Avenue along the old Hagerstown pike for a quarter of a mile brings the visitor (as it did Hooker’s men) to the David Miller farm. This is a working farm, and corn is still grown where in 1862 Mr. Miller’s 30-acre cornfield earned a terrible distinction as simply “the Cornfield.” Hooker’s advance, stretching from the West Woods west of the turnpike through the Miller farm to the East Woods, smashed against a line Stonewall Jackson had drawn like a crossbar on a T to meet this flank attack.

Continuing southward along the turnpike, you pass two cannons on the right, marking the position of Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery, which advanced to support Hooker’s assault. Turning left (east) on Cornfield Avenue takes you into what was that morning a maelstrom of unbelievable violence and noise. Hooker’s men, crashing out of the Cornfield a few yards north of the present avenue, were met by a hail of fire from a Confederate battle line in the meadow to the south. “Men, I can not say fell; they were knocked out of the ranks by dozens,” a Federal soldier wrote. “But we jumped over the fence, and pushed on, loading, firing, and shouting as we advanced.” Attack and counterattack surged back and forth over this ground. Rock ledges and piles of fence

rails served some as cover, but for the most part the battle lines stood and faced each other in the smoky din two hundred yards or a hundred or even fifty yards apart. A war correspondent compared the volleys of musketry to “the rolling of a thousand distant drums.”

At a critical moment, John B. Hood’s reinforcing division came storming out of the West Woods and slanted across the meadow to form an attacking line that drove the Yankees back into the Cornfield. The 1st Texas Regiment pursued recklessly and was torn apart by George G. Meade’s Pennsylvania division posted in reserve along the northern edge of the corn. In twenty minutes the 1st Texas lost 82 percent of its men, including eight color bearers shot down in rapid succession.

At the same time, on the western edge of the Cornfield along the post-and-rail fence bordering the Hagerstown turnpike, there was a furious melee between Hood’s men and the Yankees who had gained a foothold in the West Woods. Battery B poured a killing fire of canisters—containers of cast-iron balls that produced the effect of huge shotgun blasts—into the Rebel attackers. In turn so many of the gunners were shot down that infantry volunteers had to serve the cannon. Finally, the momentum of Hood’s counterattack was stemmed. “Whole ranks went down, and after we got possession of the field, dead men were found piled on top of each other,” a Union officer recalled. Hooker’s men and Jackson’s had shot each other to pieces to produce a stalemate.

Continuing eastward along Cornfield Avenue and then left (north) on the Smoketown road brings the visitor into the East Woods. In 1862 this woodlot was considerably larger than it is now, extending east of the Smoketown road and north to Mansfield Avenue. For a time Hood’s men held on in here, sniping Indian-style from behind trees and piles of cordwood. The Mansfield monument, at the intersection of the Smoketown and Monument roads, marks the approximate spot where Maj. Gen. Joseph K. F. Mansfield, commander of the XII Corps, was mortally wounded. Mansfield had long sought a combat command and had arrived only two days before to take over the XII Corps. His corps contained a number of raw new regiments, with their equally raw officers, and the generals literally had to lead them to battle and show them how to form up. As one general wrote, he was lucky enough to find a fence at the spot where the regiment was supposed to go, and he simply told the rookies to line up behind it. Mansfield was doing this sort of subaltern’s work when he took a bullet through the chest. He was one of eighteen Union and Confederate general officers hit that day, six of them fatally.