The Final Attack

After defending the Lower (Burnside) Bridge, Confederate forces fell back to this ridge and then to the high ground west of this point. When the final Union attack started, more than 2,000 Confederate soldiers and more than forty cannon stretched from Sharpsburg south toward Millers Sawmill Road, while more than 8,000 Federal troops under Gen. Ambrose Burnside formed on the ridge 300 yards to the east. At 3:00 p.m., the attack began, and a few regiments from Gen. Isaac Rodman's division advanced to the high ground 400 yards to the west, driving Confederates from their position down the hill toward the village. When it appeared that the Federals had finally gotten the better of Lee's army, Gen. A.P. Hill and his men arrived from Harpers Ferry and struck Burnside's left flank, driving the Union troops back to the protection of the ridge to the east. That evening more than 23,000 Union and Confederate wounded and dead covered the fields around Sharpsburg, and both armies held almost the same positions as at the start of the day. Neither Lee nor McClellan renewed the battle the next day, and on the evening of September 18, 1862, Lee began his retreat across the Potomac River and back to Virginia. A.P. Hill was born in Virginia, graduated from West Point in 1847, fought in the Mexican and Seminole Wars, and served in every major Civil War battle in the east before he was killed outside Petersburg, Virginia, on April 2, 1865, at age 39, one week before Lee's surrender. Isaac P. Rodman, born in 1822, commanded a Union division of 3,200 soldiers until he was shot in the chest on the hill in front of this point; he died on September 20, 1862, at age 40 and was buried in his family's cemetery in Peace Dale, Rhode Island. Lawrence O. Branch, born in 1820, was a North Carolinian who graduated from Princeton and had only brief earlier military service as a general's aide during the Second Seminole War; at Antietam he led one of A.P. Hill's brigades and became the last of six generals mortally wounded there when a bullet passed through his cheek, killing him instantly.

Shepherdstown, Maryland · United States