General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North collided with George McCellan's Army of the Potomac along Antietam Creek. Fighting surged through a cornfield, a sunken farm road that became known as Bloody Lane, and a stone bridge later called Burnside Bridge. The battle ended in tactical stalemate, but Lee's retreat gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation days later.
Dawn fog still clung to the ground when Union artillery opened up on Confederate positions near David Miller's cornfield, beginning a battle that would claim more American lives in a single day than the Revolution, War of 1812, and Mexican-American War combined. Waves of soldiers marched into a thirty-acre field of corn that was, by mid-morning, mowed down to stubble by rifle and cannon fire, the stalks and the men who fell among them cut alike.
By afternoon the fighting had shifted to a sunken farm lane where Confederate defenders held for hours before Union troops finally broke through, leaving the road so thick with bodies that soldiers on both sides remembered being unable to walk without stepping on the dead. Photographer Alexander Gardner arrived within days and photographed the corpses still lying in the lane, images that shocked civilians unaccustomed to seeing the war's true carnage.
McClellan, characteristically cautious, failed to commit his reserves or pursue Lee's battered army as it withdrew across the Potomac. Lincoln was furious at the missed opportunity to destroy Lee's army, but the strategic result, a Confederate retreat, was enough. Five days later, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, transforming the war's purpose and ensuring Britain and France would not recognize the Confederacy.
Key people: Robert E. Lee, George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln