The East Woods

In the early evening of September 16, the first infantry engagement at Antietam began in the East Woods as Federal soldiers from Hooker's First Corps clashed with Confederates under Stonewall Jackson, and the opposing picket lines exchanged fire through the damp and dismal night. Shortly before sunrise on September 17, First Corps soldiers advanced through the woods and attacked Confederates posted along Mumma Farm Lane, and during the next three hours the woodlot changed hands numerous times as both sides fed reinforcements into the fight. Near 8:00 a.m., the Union Twelfth Corps drove the Confederates from the area for the last time that day, but lost its commander, Gen. Joseph K.E. Mansfield. Mansfield had entered West Point at age fourteen and graduated second in the Class of 1822; at Antietam, at fifty-nine, he was described by one of his men as venerable but not old, white-haired yet fresh and vigorous. As the Twelfth Corps advanced amid confusion, Mansfield rode to the front telling his men to stop shooting because he believed they were firing into their own troops, but he was wrong, and a Confederate bullet passed through his chest. Carried to the rear through a tornado of deadly missiles, he died within 24 hours and was one of six generals killed at Antietam. Confederate Gen. Alexander Lawton's soldiers bore the brunt of the initial Union attacks; at dawn, Lawton's division of approximately 2,500 men stood in the open ground south of the Cornfield and the East Woods, and in the furious fighting more than 1,100 of his Confederates were killed or wounded. Lawton, who had been educated at West Point and Harvard University, was also wounded, survived the Civil War, became president of the American Bar Association in 1882, was appointed Minister to Austria in 1887, and died there in 1896.

Keedysville, Maryland · United States