On this day in 1862, near Antietam Creek and the town of Sharpsburg in Maryland, about 23,000 men were killed, wounded or listed as missing in a single day. It remains the bloodiest day in American military history. The fighting ended in a tactical stalemate; the dead and the injured were counted on both sides.
The medical record from that day is worth keeping. Barns, farmhouses, churches and corncribs within a few miles of the field were turned into hospitals, because there was nothing else. Clara Barton arrived with a wagon of bandages and other supplies while the fighting was still going on, and stayed to help the surgeons work through the night by lantern light. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, had reorganised the ambulance service only weeks before, with trained crews, dedicated wagons and dressing stations set back from the line. Antietam was its first large test. It was not enough for the numbers that came, but it moved men off the field faster than anything used before, and the system he built shaped battlefield medicine long afterwards.
Most of the names from the barns and farmhouses that night were never written down. The number, 23,000, stands for people who had families waiting to hear.
Thank you, Ada. Five days later Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation; he had been holding it in a drawer, waiting for something he could call a Union success before he put it before the country.
Alexander Gardner and James Gibson photographed the field before the burials, and the plates were shown in New York that October. It was the first time the public saw the dead of a battle in photographs rather than in engravings, and visitors reportedly bent close to the small prints, looking for faces.