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A Field Guide to Antietam: Experiencing the Battlefield through Its History, Places, and People
The Battle of Antietam took place on September 17, 1862, and still stands as the bloodiest single day in American military history. Additionally, in its aftermath, President Abraham Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation. In this engaging, easy-to-use guide, Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler allow visitors to understand this crucial Civil War battle in fine detail. Abundantly illustrated with maps and historical and modern photographs, A Field Guide to Antietam explores twenty-one sites on and near the battlefield where significant action occurred. Combining crisp narrative and rich historical context, each stop in the book is structured around the following questions:
*What happened here?
*Who fought here?
*Who commanded here?
*Who fell here?
*Who lived here?
*How did participants remember the events?
With accessible presentation and fresh interpretations of primary and secondary evidence, this is an absolutely essential guide to Antietam and its lasting legacy.
*What happened here?
*Who fought here?
*Who commanded here?
*Who fell here?
*Who lived here?
*How did participants remember the events?
With accessible presentation and fresh interpretations of primary and secondary evidence, this is an absolutely essential guide to Antietam and its lasting legacy.
354 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 7, 2016
12 people are currently reading
36 people want to read
About the author
Carol Reardon
20 books7 followersCarol Reardon is an American military historian with a focus on the Civil War and Vietnam eras. She is a scholar-in-residence at the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University, and an associate professor.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 4, 2025
The field at Antietam is quiet today. The sounds one will hear there include the songs of birds, the motors of cars moving quietly along the park roads, and the muted conversations of park visitors. Some visitors will benefit from the expertise of a Licensed Battlefield Guide (LBG) who can show them the highlights of a Civil War battlefield where 83,000 Americans fought and 22,000 of them became casualties, including more than 3,600 who were killed or mortally wounded.
Antietam was anything but quiet on September 17, 1862. It remains the single bloodiest day in American history, and as such it exerts a terrible power to fascinate. And the modern-day Antietam visitor who wants to gain a greater understanding of the battle would do well to take along, on some future trip to the Western Maryland town of Sharpsburg, a copy of A Field Guide to Antietam (2010), by Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler.
Authors Reardon and Vossler bring a considerable degree of military-history authority to their composition of this guide to Experiencing the Battlefield Through Its History, Places, and People (the book’s subtitle). Reardon is a professor of U.S. history at Penn State University, and Vossler is a former director of the United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks. They had previously written a Field Guide to Gettysburg; and as I am a long-time student of the Maryland Campaign of 1862, I am glad that they turned their attention to the Battle of Antietam.
It is important to stipulate, at the outset, that this book is a field guide. While Reardon and Vossler provide helpful synthesis in the book’s introduction and conclusion, it is not a narrative history like Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (1982) or James McPherson’s Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam – The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War (2002). This is a book to take with you on your visit to the Antietam battlefield, and it will enhance your understanding of “the bloodiest day” if you do so.
For a series of stops – many but not all of which follow the park visit route established by the National Park Service – Reardon and Vossler provide answers to the following questions: “What Happened Here?”, “Who Fought Here?”, “Who Commanded Here?”, “Who Fell Here?”, “Who Lived Here?”, and “What Did They Say About It Later?” Colour photographs and well-organized colour maps – among the best that I have seen for studies of the Antietam battle and the Maryland Campaign – situate the Antietam visitor helpfully for an enhanced understanding of what happened at Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862.
The ”Who Fell Here?” feature of this field guide was particularly moving to me. Every student of Antietam knows the names of the commanding generals for the battle – George B. McClellan for the Union’s Army of the Potomac, and Robert E. Lee for the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. Many will also know the names of the subordinate commanders who fought on this field – e.g., Joseph Hooker and George G. Meade for the Union, or “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet on the rebel side.
But few would know, without the help of this book, stories like those that Reardon and Vossler tell about ordinary casualties of the war at Antietam. From the exceptionally sanguinary fighting in and around the cornfield of local farmer D.R. Miller during the morning phase of this all-day battle, one learns, for instance, about Sergeant William C. Eben of the 128th Pennsylvania Infantry. We hear that Sergeant Eben had to balance his wish to serve his country with family obligations at home: “His father, Gottfried, had died in 1856, and William had supported his mother, Maria, and younger sister, Emma, ever since. Then, on July 17, 1862, William’s mother died, leaving him the sole caregiver for his ten-year-old sister” (p. 101). These details give particular pathos to the authors’ later revelation that Sgt. Eben, seriously wounded in the “Bloody Cornfield,” was taken to a hospital in nearby Hagerstown, and died three days later.
It is good that we learn the names and stories of these ordinary soldiers. Doing so enhances the reader’s understanding of the human cost of the horrific fighting that occurred at well-known sites like the “Bloody Cornfield” in the early morning of September 17, 1862 – or the sunken farm road that came to be called “Bloody Lane” because of the carnage that filled that farm road with corpses at mid-day – or the Rohrback bridge over Antietam Creek that came to be known as “Burnside’s Bridge” for the repeated late-afternoon attacks that Union General Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps launched in attempts to take that bridge and seize the approaches to Sharpsburg.
One of the most interesting chapters of this Field Guide to Antietam is titled “McClellan’s Lost Opportunities.” This chapter focuses on a stretch of Boonsboro Pike, close to the Cemetery Hill site that is now home to the Antietam National Cemetery. Reardon and Vossler acknowledge that “This sector of the battlefield saw no combat of the scale and intensity of Antietam’s traditional tour stops”, but suggest that “The lasting legacy of this sector owes far more to unmade decisions and untaken actions than to the events that actually transpired here” (p. 203).
Major General Fitz John Porter had a substantial body of V Corps troops who had not seen significant action at Antietam and could theoretically have been sent forward against a weak Confederate line near the Middle Bridge over the Antietam – or, to put it another way, on modern Maryland Route 34. But General Porter is said to have opposed any deployment of what he called the last reserve of the last army of the Republic; and when Colonel James H. Childs, commanding the 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry, was exploring the possibility of organizing a charge across the bridge, “a Confederate artillery shell mortally wounded him”, and “Childs’s death ended any serious consideration about sending cavalry on a charge across the bridge and up the Boonsboro road” (p. 208). Whether – as a number of McClellan’s own soldiers believed, then and in later years – such a charge might have turned Antietam into a decisive Union victory will forever remain unknown.
Antietam National Cemetery, the site of that final grand charge-to-victory that was never made, is also the locale for a discussion that brings this book forward in time beyond the war years, and into the always-bracing field of Civil War memory studies. Reardon and Vossler describe the “open contentiousness” that characterized plans for an Antietam soldiers’ cemetery in 1867 “when a close reading of the cemetery charter revealed wording that could be interpreted as permitting the burial ground to be opened to both Union and Confederate dead. Several Northern governors threatened to hold back their states’ promised financial contributions” (p. 300), In the end, only Union dead from Antietam were interred in the national cemetery. The Confederate dead of Antietam were buried at three local cemeteries – two in Maryland (Mount Olivet in Frederick and Rose Hill in Hagerstown), and one in West Virginia (Elmwood Cemetery, Shepherdstown).
And there is one more haunting postscript to Stop 21B, Antietam National Cemetery. After acknowledging that “Antietam National Cemetery closed to additional burials in 1953”, Reardon and Vossler point out an exception that has been made in more recent years. With characteristically careful directions, the authors help the reader seek out “a newer headstone likely to be decorated with flags or flowers or some other ornamentation”, and then inform the reader that “The new stone you seek is the grave of U.S. Navy Fireman Apprentice Patrick Howard Roy, a Keedysville resident who died in the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000” (pp. 303-04).
This modern example of an American sailor who gave his life in the service of the United States provides a modern link with all those long-dead soldiers of the Antietam battlefield, and provides a suitable note on which to close this singularly detailed and helpful field guide.
Antietam was anything but quiet on September 17, 1862. It remains the single bloodiest day in American history, and as such it exerts a terrible power to fascinate. And the modern-day Antietam visitor who wants to gain a greater understanding of the battle would do well to take along, on some future trip to the Western Maryland town of Sharpsburg, a copy of A Field Guide to Antietam (2010), by Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler.
Authors Reardon and Vossler bring a considerable degree of military-history authority to their composition of this guide to Experiencing the Battlefield Through Its History, Places, and People (the book’s subtitle). Reardon is a professor of U.S. history at Penn State University, and Vossler is a former director of the United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks. They had previously written a Field Guide to Gettysburg; and as I am a long-time student of the Maryland Campaign of 1862, I am glad that they turned their attention to the Battle of Antietam.
It is important to stipulate, at the outset, that this book is a field guide. While Reardon and Vossler provide helpful synthesis in the book’s introduction and conclusion, it is not a narrative history like Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (1982) or James McPherson’s Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam – The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War (2002). This is a book to take with you on your visit to the Antietam battlefield, and it will enhance your understanding of “the bloodiest day” if you do so.
For a series of stops – many but not all of which follow the park visit route established by the National Park Service – Reardon and Vossler provide answers to the following questions: “What Happened Here?”, “Who Fought Here?”, “Who Commanded Here?”, “Who Fell Here?”, “Who Lived Here?”, and “What Did They Say About It Later?” Colour photographs and well-organized colour maps – among the best that I have seen for studies of the Antietam battle and the Maryland Campaign – situate the Antietam visitor helpfully for an enhanced understanding of what happened at Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862.
The ”Who Fell Here?” feature of this field guide was particularly moving to me. Every student of Antietam knows the names of the commanding generals for the battle – George B. McClellan for the Union’s Army of the Potomac, and Robert E. Lee for the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. Many will also know the names of the subordinate commanders who fought on this field – e.g., Joseph Hooker and George G. Meade for the Union, or “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet on the rebel side.
But few would know, without the help of this book, stories like those that Reardon and Vossler tell about ordinary casualties of the war at Antietam. From the exceptionally sanguinary fighting in and around the cornfield of local farmer D.R. Miller during the morning phase of this all-day battle, one learns, for instance, about Sergeant William C. Eben of the 128th Pennsylvania Infantry. We hear that Sergeant Eben had to balance his wish to serve his country with family obligations at home: “His father, Gottfried, had died in 1856, and William had supported his mother, Maria, and younger sister, Emma, ever since. Then, on July 17, 1862, William’s mother died, leaving him the sole caregiver for his ten-year-old sister” (p. 101). These details give particular pathos to the authors’ later revelation that Sgt. Eben, seriously wounded in the “Bloody Cornfield,” was taken to a hospital in nearby Hagerstown, and died three days later.
It is good that we learn the names and stories of these ordinary soldiers. Doing so enhances the reader’s understanding of the human cost of the horrific fighting that occurred at well-known sites like the “Bloody Cornfield” in the early morning of September 17, 1862 – or the sunken farm road that came to be called “Bloody Lane” because of the carnage that filled that farm road with corpses at mid-day – or the Rohrback bridge over Antietam Creek that came to be known as “Burnside’s Bridge” for the repeated late-afternoon attacks that Union General Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps launched in attempts to take that bridge and seize the approaches to Sharpsburg.
One of the most interesting chapters of this Field Guide to Antietam is titled “McClellan’s Lost Opportunities.” This chapter focuses on a stretch of Boonsboro Pike, close to the Cemetery Hill site that is now home to the Antietam National Cemetery. Reardon and Vossler acknowledge that “This sector of the battlefield saw no combat of the scale and intensity of Antietam’s traditional tour stops”, but suggest that “The lasting legacy of this sector owes far more to unmade decisions and untaken actions than to the events that actually transpired here” (p. 203).
Major General Fitz John Porter had a substantial body of V Corps troops who had not seen significant action at Antietam and could theoretically have been sent forward against a weak Confederate line near the Middle Bridge over the Antietam – or, to put it another way, on modern Maryland Route 34. But General Porter is said to have opposed any deployment of what he called the last reserve of the last army of the Republic; and when Colonel James H. Childs, commanding the 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry, was exploring the possibility of organizing a charge across the bridge, “a Confederate artillery shell mortally wounded him”, and “Childs’s death ended any serious consideration about sending cavalry on a charge across the bridge and up the Boonsboro road” (p. 208). Whether – as a number of McClellan’s own soldiers believed, then and in later years – such a charge might have turned Antietam into a decisive Union victory will forever remain unknown.
Antietam National Cemetery, the site of that final grand charge-to-victory that was never made, is also the locale for a discussion that brings this book forward in time beyond the war years, and into the always-bracing field of Civil War memory studies. Reardon and Vossler describe the “open contentiousness” that characterized plans for an Antietam soldiers’ cemetery in 1867 “when a close reading of the cemetery charter revealed wording that could be interpreted as permitting the burial ground to be opened to both Union and Confederate dead. Several Northern governors threatened to hold back their states’ promised financial contributions” (p. 300), In the end, only Union dead from Antietam were interred in the national cemetery. The Confederate dead of Antietam were buried at three local cemeteries – two in Maryland (Mount Olivet in Frederick and Rose Hill in Hagerstown), and one in West Virginia (Elmwood Cemetery, Shepherdstown).
And there is one more haunting postscript to Stop 21B, Antietam National Cemetery. After acknowledging that “Antietam National Cemetery closed to additional burials in 1953”, Reardon and Vossler point out an exception that has been made in more recent years. With characteristically careful directions, the authors help the reader seek out “a newer headstone likely to be decorated with flags or flowers or some other ornamentation”, and then inform the reader that “The new stone you seek is the grave of U.S. Navy Fireman Apprentice Patrick Howard Roy, a Keedysville resident who died in the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000” (pp. 303-04).
This modern example of an American sailor who gave his life in the service of the United States provides a modern link with all those long-dead soldiers of the Antietam battlefield, and provides a suitable note on which to close this singularly detailed and helpful field guide.
January 6, 2022
The premier field guide for touring the Antietam battlefield. The format and structure developed by Reardon and Vossler gives the visitor a comprehensive understanding of the battle from beginning to end in a way that doesn’t overwhelm. Utilizing 21 stops (with several sub points at several of the stops), the authors identify what happened, who fought, who led, who fell, who lived there, and what was said after. A significant “value add” at each stop are the individual vignettes of soldiers who died at that location on the battlefield.
One thing to know prior to purchasing is that this guide is not necessarily for the single day tourist unless one is content to do most of the narrative reading after the visit. Following just the stops and the directions in the book, and doing the reading for each stop in the moment, I spent two full days on the field. The amount of information at each stop is appropriate at 4-6 pages; there is just a lot to see to gain a good overview of the battle. For some one who is just looking for the “big picture,” the driving tour and perhaps the accompanying audio recording are the way to go. This book is for the tourist who wants a deeper understanding and a gateway into deeper study. For that, this guide is perfect.
This book more than lives up to the standard set by the authors’ Gettysburg guide. Both are excellent portals into a study of these major events in American history.
One thing to know prior to purchasing is that this guide is not necessarily for the single day tourist unless one is content to do most of the narrative reading after the visit. Following just the stops and the directions in the book, and doing the reading for each stop in the moment, I spent two full days on the field. The amount of information at each stop is appropriate at 4-6 pages; there is just a lot to see to gain a good overview of the battle. For some one who is just looking for the “big picture,” the driving tour and perhaps the accompanying audio recording are the way to go. This book is for the tourist who wants a deeper understanding and a gateway into deeper study. For that, this guide is perfect.
This book more than lives up to the standard set by the authors’ Gettysburg guide. Both are excellent portals into a study of these major events in American history.
August 26, 2019
This is a great guide if you are going to visit Antietam. It gives you a full sense of the battlefield and the various events that happened at each place. If you are going to visit the park, this is a very useful and colorful guide.
February 25, 2020
Good book
September 4, 2021
Very useful when visiting the battlefield. Maps help orient you to the participants actions.
September 29, 2024
An excellent guide and I loved the way it was laid out. Great job Carol and Tom.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews