Stormi Nyx

September 17, 1862, Sharpsburg, Maryland. In one day, 22,726 men killed, wounded, or missing.

Lee's army had come north to win on Union soil. Two Union soldiers found his orders wrapped around three cigars. McClellan read them and waited eighteen hours.

The fighting turned around a whitewashed church built by pacifist Dunkers. Its windows were shot out; the site later held a gas station.

Two days after, Alexander Gardner walked the field with a wet-plate camera: the first battlefield ever photographed before the dead were buried. Ninety images, printed in newspapers as woodblocks.

In October, Mathew Brady hung a placard at his New York gallery door: “The Dead of Antietam.” Crowds went up the stairs. The Times said he had brought the war home: if he had not “brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets,” he had “done something very like it.”

Five days later, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He had waited for a victory; without one, Seward said, it would read as “the last shriek of retreat.” Antietam was that victory, and barely one.

It was the bloodiest day in American history, and the first one the country ever saw.

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