The Advance Was Made With the Utmost Enthusiasm

After finally driving the Confederates from the bluffs overlooking the Lower Bridge, close to 10,000 Federal troops crossed Antietam Creek and formed on a ridge 300 yards to the east. At approximately 3:00 p.m., a mile-wide battle line of Union soldiers swept forward across extremely rugged terrain against about 2,500 Confederate soldiers and forty cannon. Burnside's men moved through withering artillery and infantry fire and surged to the high ridge to the west. At about 4:00 p.m., the last of Lee's Confederate reinforcements arrived. Though exhausted and footsore after marching seventeen miles from Harpers Ferry, Gen. A.P. Hill's Confederate soldiers struck the exposed Union left flank and drove it back. As darkness fell, the battlefield finally grew quiet, and one Ninth Corps soldier remembered it as an afternoon in the valley of death.

Shepherdstown, Maryland · United States