Destroy the Rebel Army

Two days before the battle, President Abraham Lincoln sent Gen. George B. McClellan a telegram urging him to destroy the rebel army if possible. On these rolling farm fields, McClellan and the Army of the Potomac tried to do so after Gen. Robert E. Lee gathered his Confederate army here and decided to make a stand. Lee's 40,000 soldiers spread out in a roughly three mile line, and near the center of his men, as one faced north, Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's soldiers primarily held this end of the battlefield and bore the brunt of McClellan's initial assaults. The night before the battle was rainy and dreary. Over 15,000 Union soldiers crossed Antietam Creek and moved into position on the far north end of the field. At dawn on September 17, they attacked south toward the Dunker Church and Jackson's Confederates. For the next four hours, the woods and fields in front changed hands countless times in horrendous combat, as George Gordon of the Union 12th Corps recalled waves of battle ebbing and flowing from sunrise to sunset, units fading away under terrible fire, long lines of dead marking where the living had stood, cornfields trampled into shreds, forests battered and scathed, huge limbs crashing to the earth, and grape and canister adding their hissing scream.

Keedysville, Maryland · United States