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Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle
On September 13, 1862, in a field near Frederick, Maryland, four Union soldiers hit the jack-pot. There they found, wrapped carelessly around three cigars, a copy of General Robert E. Lee's most recent orders detailing Southern objectives and letting Union officers know that Lee had split his Army into four vulnerable groups. General George B. McClellan realized his opportunity to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia one piece at a time. "If I cannot whip Bobbie Lee," exulted McClellan, "I will be willing to go home." But the notoriously prudent Union general allowed precious hours to pass, and, by the time he moved, Lee's army had begun to regroup and prepare for battle near Antietam Creek. The ensuing fight would prove to be not only the bloodiest single day of the entire Civil War, but the bloodiest in the history of the U.S. Army.
Countless historians have analyzed Antietam (known as Sharpsburg in the South) and its aftermath, some concluding that McClellan's failure to vanquish Lee constituted a Southern victory, others that the Confederate retreat into Virginia was a strategic win for the North. But in Antietam: TheSoldiers' Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle--September 16, 17, and 18, 1862--Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his "head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone."
Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps--which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904--together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened.
When the last cannon fell silent and the Antietam Creek no longer ran red with Union and Confederate blood, twice as many Americans had been killed in just one day as lost their lives in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined. This is a book about battle, but more particularly, about the human dimension in battle. It asks "What was it like?" and while the answers to this simple question by turns horrify and fascinate, they more importantly add a whole new dimension to the study of the American Civil War.
Countless historians have analyzed Antietam (known as Sharpsburg in the South) and its aftermath, some concluding that McClellan's failure to vanquish Lee constituted a Southern victory, others that the Confederate retreat into Virginia was a strategic win for the North. But in Antietam: TheSoldiers' Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle--September 16, 17, and 18, 1862--Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his "head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone."
Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps--which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904--together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened.
When the last cannon fell silent and the Antietam Creek no longer ran red with Union and Confederate blood, twice as many Americans had been killed in just one day as lost their lives in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined. This is a book about battle, but more particularly, about the human dimension in battle. It asks "What was it like?" and while the answers to this simple question by turns horrify and fascinate, they more importantly add a whole new dimension to the study of the American Civil War.
424 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
March 28, 2022
The bloodiest day in American history with over 24,700 killed, wounded or missing speaks for itself. Add a thoroughly researched book with many individual reports and you have a 4-star book. While the many different divisions of the armies are impossible to keep straight, I was surprised at how many officers were roaring drunk during the battle. The field hospital doctors and nurses bravely did what they could under horrific circumstances.
The National Park Service has somber videos describing this bloody event that enhances the reading of the book.
The National Park Service has somber videos describing this bloody event that enhances the reading of the book.
November 15, 2014
I enjoyed this author's other book, Before Antietam: The Battle of South Mountain, so much that I had to read this book as well and I was not disappointed. I found it hard to compare this book with Stephen Sear's book Landscape turned Red as I enjoyed that book just as much if not more.
The two authors present this battle in their own way and I would not say one book was better than the other, I'd leave that to the individual to decide. This is a still a well researched and well written book, the narrative flowed along gracefully with numerous maps to assist the reader in locating each action and the flow of the battle.
The only criticism which I found in this book as well as his other title was the standard of his maps, I think they could have been better. Other than that this is a great book of a terrible battle, buy it and enjoy!
The two authors present this battle in their own way and I would not say one book was better than the other, I'd leave that to the individual to decide. This is a still a well researched and well written book, the narrative flowed along gracefully with numerous maps to assist the reader in locating each action and the flow of the battle.
The only criticism which I found in this book as well as his other title was the standard of his maps, I think they could have been better. Other than that this is a great book of a terrible battle, buy it and enjoy!
September 17, 2017
Antietam, like any battle, was fought by soldiers – in this instance, a great many soldiers. When the Union and Confederate armies met amid the rocky hills around Sharpsburg in Western Maryland on September 17, 1862, and lined up along Antietam Creek, over 125,000 soldiers were present. By the end of the day, 22,000 of those soldiers were casualties, including almost 3700 soldiers who were dead or fatally wounded by the end of the day. It remains the bloodiest day in all of American history; and in Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle, John Michael Priest sees it squarely from the ordinary soldier’s perspective.
Seeing the Battle of Antietam, or any Civil War battle, as first and foremost a “soldiers’ fight” is not as elementary a thing as it might at first seem. Students of the American Civil War, whether they are eminent scholars or casual “buffs,” often engage in a certain degree of metonymy or synecdoche when describing the great battles of the conflict. We hear that McClellan attacked Lee, or that Hood put up a fierce defense against Mansfield, or that Hooker and Jackson bloodied each other. In fact, however, most of the attacking and defending and bloodying at Antietam – and most of the dying – was done by the ordinary combat soldier of the Union’s Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia; and Priest puts his emphasis squarely on that ordinary combat soldier.
Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle does not really offer much in the way of synthesis; the action goes back and forth from the North Woods to the Cornfield to the West Woods to the Dunker Church to the Nicodemus House to the Middle Bridge to the Lower Bridge in a way that might seem somewhat fragmented to the reader who is not already a knowledgeable student of the Maryland Campaign and the Battle of Antietam.
Nonetheless, certain themes do emerge in Priest’s recounting of the battle, one of which is the disconnect between the experiences and perspectives of the generals and those of the ordinary soldiers. In the American Civil War, generals and other high-ranking officers were expected to set an example for their enlisted personnel by displaying courage on the battlefield; accordingly, generals sometimes seemed to try to outdo each other in demonstrating Alexander the Great-style fearlessness. Consider, in that regard, the behavior of Union General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker just before he was wounded in the early morning’s fighting along the Smoketown Road:
Hooker, red faced and blustery, pointed dramatically toward the Dunker Church. “Advance and hold that woods.” Snipers rudely interrupted the general’s performance. His fine white horse reared in pain as several dying rounds thumped into its body. “General,” [Colonel Jacob] Higgins said, “You had better get out of this.” “Guess I had,” the general numbly replied. Within seconds, a ball whizzed over Colonel Higgins’ shoulder and smacked into the general’s left instep. Without muttering a word, Hooker wheeled his horse about and rode away….No one commanded the Army of the Potomac upon the field.” (p. 99)
Is Priest criticizing Hooker’s actions? After all, “Fighting Joe” could be said to have been showboating in his role as the heroic warrior-general, sitting atop a white horse within sniper-rifle range of the enemy; and then, once he had been wounded, he just rode off, without assigning command to a subordinate officer, or giving any directions or orders at all! If Priest doesn’t approve of Hooker’s actions in this phase of the battle, he keeps quiet about it, and lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions. He knows that Hooker was lucky to survive Antietam, and to fight in later battles such as Chancellorsville and Chattanooga. Eight generals (four Union, four Confederate) were fatalities during the Maryland Campaign; six (three U.S., three C.S.) were killed or fatally wounded on the single day of the Antietam battle alone.
Declaiming loudly in the language of battlefield glory seems to have been the order of the day among the officers on both sides. During the fighting in a swale near the Mumma farm, in the central part of the battlefield during the middle of the day, the predominantly German-American soldiers of the 20th New York made a point of waving their regimental colors, drawing fire from the rebel lines opposing them. As Priest tells it, “Major [Thomas] Hyde [of the 7th Maine], a pragmatic man, could not condone such foolish bravado. Crouching low to avoid sniper fire from the West Woods, he trotted over to Colonel [Ernest] Von Vegesack, who was still mounted, and yelled at him to lower his colors – to stop the Rebs from singling out his regiment. ‘Let them wave,’ the Swede vainly exploded. ‘They are our glory.’ Before the aghast Hyde could mutter a reply, Von Vegesack had spurred away, pistol in hand to pick off shirkers” (p. 200).
There was plenty of the language of battlefield grandiloquence on the Confederate side as well, as when Colonel John R. Cooke offered this colorful response when Major Moxley Sorrel, aide-de-camp to General James Longstreet, asked for a battlefield report regarding the situation along the Hagerstown Pike. The devoutly religious Sorrel seems to have been a bit scandalized by Cooke’s not-terribly-reverent reply: “Major, thank General Longstreet for his good words, but say, by God almighty, he needn’t doubt me! We will stay here, by Jesus Christ, if we must all go to hell together! That damn thick line of the enemy has been fighting all day, but my regiment is ready to lick the whole damn outfit” (p. 299).
That language of officers’ battlefield confidence is contrasted, throughout Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle, with ordinary soldiers’ frank admissions of the fear they felt during battle, the horror they experienced upon witnessing the carnage of war, the agony of battlefield wounds. Priest’s feelings regarding the long day of bloodshed at Antietam are well summed-up when he writes that “Neither side had gained an advantage of any sort. Only the wounded, the dead, the dying, and the looters possessed the fields” (p. 300).
We know, of course, that the Union side did gain an advantage through the Army of the Potomac's victory at Antietam. While the battle was a tactical draw, it put a stop to Robert E. Lee's intended invasion of Pennsylvania, and forced the rebel army to retreat, back across the Potomac into Virginia. Moreover, the Union victory at Antietam enabled President Abraham Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation -- putting the war on an entirely new moral footing, making it a fight not only for Union but also against slavery. But none of that long-term significance would have been apparent that day, to the wounded and the dying upon that bloody battlefield.
While it may not offer the degree of interpretive synthesis offered by other studies of the Battle of Antietam – e.g., Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red, or James Murfin’s The Gleam of Bayonets -- John Michael Priest’s Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle does well in giving a great many ordinary soldiers the opportunity to share, in their own words, their first-hand impressions of that singularly terrible day of combat.
Seeing the Battle of Antietam, or any Civil War battle, as first and foremost a “soldiers’ fight” is not as elementary a thing as it might at first seem. Students of the American Civil War, whether they are eminent scholars or casual “buffs,” often engage in a certain degree of metonymy or synecdoche when describing the great battles of the conflict. We hear that McClellan attacked Lee, or that Hood put up a fierce defense against Mansfield, or that Hooker and Jackson bloodied each other. In fact, however, most of the attacking and defending and bloodying at Antietam – and most of the dying – was done by the ordinary combat soldier of the Union’s Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia; and Priest puts his emphasis squarely on that ordinary combat soldier.
Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle does not really offer much in the way of synthesis; the action goes back and forth from the North Woods to the Cornfield to the West Woods to the Dunker Church to the Nicodemus House to the Middle Bridge to the Lower Bridge in a way that might seem somewhat fragmented to the reader who is not already a knowledgeable student of the Maryland Campaign and the Battle of Antietam.
Nonetheless, certain themes do emerge in Priest’s recounting of the battle, one of which is the disconnect between the experiences and perspectives of the generals and those of the ordinary soldiers. In the American Civil War, generals and other high-ranking officers were expected to set an example for their enlisted personnel by displaying courage on the battlefield; accordingly, generals sometimes seemed to try to outdo each other in demonstrating Alexander the Great-style fearlessness. Consider, in that regard, the behavior of Union General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker just before he was wounded in the early morning’s fighting along the Smoketown Road:
Hooker, red faced and blustery, pointed dramatically toward the Dunker Church. “Advance and hold that woods.” Snipers rudely interrupted the general’s performance. His fine white horse reared in pain as several dying rounds thumped into its body. “General,” [Colonel Jacob] Higgins said, “You had better get out of this.” “Guess I had,” the general numbly replied. Within seconds, a ball whizzed over Colonel Higgins’ shoulder and smacked into the general’s left instep. Without muttering a word, Hooker wheeled his horse about and rode away….No one commanded the Army of the Potomac upon the field.” (p. 99)
Is Priest criticizing Hooker’s actions? After all, “Fighting Joe” could be said to have been showboating in his role as the heroic warrior-general, sitting atop a white horse within sniper-rifle range of the enemy; and then, once he had been wounded, he just rode off, without assigning command to a subordinate officer, or giving any directions or orders at all! If Priest doesn’t approve of Hooker’s actions in this phase of the battle, he keeps quiet about it, and lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions. He knows that Hooker was lucky to survive Antietam, and to fight in later battles such as Chancellorsville and Chattanooga. Eight generals (four Union, four Confederate) were fatalities during the Maryland Campaign; six (three U.S., three C.S.) were killed or fatally wounded on the single day of the Antietam battle alone.
Declaiming loudly in the language of battlefield glory seems to have been the order of the day among the officers on both sides. During the fighting in a swale near the Mumma farm, in the central part of the battlefield during the middle of the day, the predominantly German-American soldiers of the 20th New York made a point of waving their regimental colors, drawing fire from the rebel lines opposing them. As Priest tells it, “Major [Thomas] Hyde [of the 7th Maine], a pragmatic man, could not condone such foolish bravado. Crouching low to avoid sniper fire from the West Woods, he trotted over to Colonel [Ernest] Von Vegesack, who was still mounted, and yelled at him to lower his colors – to stop the Rebs from singling out his regiment. ‘Let them wave,’ the Swede vainly exploded. ‘They are our glory.’ Before the aghast Hyde could mutter a reply, Von Vegesack had spurred away, pistol in hand to pick off shirkers” (p. 200).
There was plenty of the language of battlefield grandiloquence on the Confederate side as well, as when Colonel John R. Cooke offered this colorful response when Major Moxley Sorrel, aide-de-camp to General James Longstreet, asked for a battlefield report regarding the situation along the Hagerstown Pike. The devoutly religious Sorrel seems to have been a bit scandalized by Cooke’s not-terribly-reverent reply: “Major, thank General Longstreet for his good words, but say, by God almighty, he needn’t doubt me! We will stay here, by Jesus Christ, if we must all go to hell together! That damn thick line of the enemy has been fighting all day, but my regiment is ready to lick the whole damn outfit” (p. 299).
That language of officers’ battlefield confidence is contrasted, throughout Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle, with ordinary soldiers’ frank admissions of the fear they felt during battle, the horror they experienced upon witnessing the carnage of war, the agony of battlefield wounds. Priest’s feelings regarding the long day of bloodshed at Antietam are well summed-up when he writes that “Neither side had gained an advantage of any sort. Only the wounded, the dead, the dying, and the looters possessed the fields” (p. 300).
We know, of course, that the Union side did gain an advantage through the Army of the Potomac's victory at Antietam. While the battle was a tactical draw, it put a stop to Robert E. Lee's intended invasion of Pennsylvania, and forced the rebel army to retreat, back across the Potomac into Virginia. Moreover, the Union victory at Antietam enabled President Abraham Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation -- putting the war on an entirely new moral footing, making it a fight not only for Union but also against slavery. But none of that long-term significance would have been apparent that day, to the wounded and the dying upon that bloody battlefield.
While it may not offer the degree of interpretive synthesis offered by other studies of the Battle of Antietam – e.g., Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red, or James Murfin’s The Gleam of Bayonets -- John Michael Priest’s Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle does well in giving a great many ordinary soldiers the opportunity to share, in their own words, their first-hand impressions of that singularly terrible day of combat.
June 22, 2011
I would estimate that I have read over 100 books about the American Civil War. My own (as yet un-agented) novel, set in the Army of the Potomac, climaxes with the Battle of Antietam.
As with his other books, John Priest gives a lucid and fun-to-read (if a book about war could be fun) look at the life and times of the ordinary soldier in the Antietam campaign. The book is wonderful narrative backed with meticulous research and scholarship. It is a companion to its predecessor, Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31...). The two Priest works, plus Katherine Ernst's Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...), give a wonderful feel for how this campaign played out for so many soldiers and civilians alike. If you are interested in the Civil War, or in this area of the country, you won't get better insights than you will from reading these books. I give them each five stars, and would give them 10 if it would let me.
As with his other books, John Priest gives a lucid and fun-to-read (if a book about war could be fun) look at the life and times of the ordinary soldier in the Antietam campaign. The book is wonderful narrative backed with meticulous research and scholarship. It is a companion to its predecessor, Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31...). The two Priest works, plus Katherine Ernst's Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...), give a wonderful feel for how this campaign played out for so many soldiers and civilians alike. If you are interested in the Civil War, or in this area of the country, you won't get better insights than you will from reading these books. I give them each five stars, and would give them 10 if it would let me.
January 27, 2013
Considerably impressed with how Priest has assembled so much detail pulled from so many different direct accounts and organized them into such a specific and well organized timeline. This book truly accomplishes what so many other "battle books" never come close to: eyewitness accounts at the ground level, in the ranks (or trenches) perspective, from the soldiers within the firing lines. The generals appear in this book, but only as witnessed from the soldiers and in episodic fashion. I wish that every battle had been covered in this format, low-level detailed maps every 5-10 pages showing troop movements, as it's the only one that focuses more on the battle and less on the figures and strategizing generals, etc. Maps could have been better, and Priest should have improved upon those he utilized. The only real flaw is that the book is too assembled, without some basic and very brief overviews to frame all the wonderful detailed accounts would have been beneficial.
June 15, 2024
As a worm's eye view of the battle, this book is pretty good, with loads of soldiers' first person accounts of the fighting. However, since the author didn't analyze the command decisions, this might not be the best first book to read about the battle. I also have mixed feelings about the structure of the book; on the one hand, it is almost like following the battle in "real time", but it can also be hard at times to remember who the people mentioned are.
January 11, 2022
Antietam by John Michael Priest is aptly subtitled “The Soldier’s Battle” since it is a distillation of many letters, journal entries, diaries and various other contemporary personal accounts of the battle. The battle itself has the dubious distinction of recording the most casualties American armed forces have ever sustained in a single day, 24,412; nearly 30% of all the forces engaged. Of course, all the forces engaged were American. But that is the terrible added cost of a Civil war. What Mr. Priest has done with this account is set the reader in the rank and file of the soldiers who paid that cost.
There is no preamble or introductory set up. There is no elucidation of the grand strategy or how the forces came to meet. There is not even an explanation of what each armies’ goals were or what their commanders hoped to accomplish. In fact, aside from a very few almost cameo appearances by General Robert E. Lee, the commanders – in – chief are pretty much absent. Instead, we are placed almost as silent observers in the rank and file of those doing the fighting. The narrative, drawn from meticulously researching thousands of documents, follows along minute by minute from brigade to brigade as the first shots are fired from the West Woods through the Cornfield and across Bloody Lane finally to end in the fields between the Lower Bridge and Sharpsburg. It is a horrible journey through bravery, heroics, confusion, and, above all, extreme carnage. As the battle unfolds soldiers tell their experiences. They come either through journals or letters written directly afterward, in some cases during, or through memoirs and reminisces from later years. Either way, the sensation of being in the thick of the action is palpable.
Throughout the book, the reader has very little idea how the battle is going, much like the trooper in the field. Except, no matter which side is currently being described, the losses are staggering. Also staggering is the compassion. Scenes are described where moments before soldiers were mowing each other down with minie-balls and canister shot, are now offering water and binding wounds.
It takes a while to get into the rhythm of the author’s style but once you get used to it, the story flows very well. There are certain sections of the book that are definite can’t-put-it-down page-turners, particularly the fight at Bloody Lane. The maps, while helpful and abundant, could have been done better; perhaps in color and with more description.
It would be a very difficult task to find a work that better describes and makes the reader actually know and feel what it was like to be a soldier on a 19th century battlefield. I highly recommend this account.
There is no preamble or introductory set up. There is no elucidation of the grand strategy or how the forces came to meet. There is not even an explanation of what each armies’ goals were or what their commanders hoped to accomplish. In fact, aside from a very few almost cameo appearances by General Robert E. Lee, the commanders – in – chief are pretty much absent. Instead, we are placed almost as silent observers in the rank and file of those doing the fighting. The narrative, drawn from meticulously researching thousands of documents, follows along minute by minute from brigade to brigade as the first shots are fired from the West Woods through the Cornfield and across Bloody Lane finally to end in the fields between the Lower Bridge and Sharpsburg. It is a horrible journey through bravery, heroics, confusion, and, above all, extreme carnage. As the battle unfolds soldiers tell their experiences. They come either through journals or letters written directly afterward, in some cases during, or through memoirs and reminisces from later years. Either way, the sensation of being in the thick of the action is palpable.
Throughout the book, the reader has very little idea how the battle is going, much like the trooper in the field. Except, no matter which side is currently being described, the losses are staggering. Also staggering is the compassion. Scenes are described where moments before soldiers were mowing each other down with minie-balls and canister shot, are now offering water and binding wounds.
It takes a while to get into the rhythm of the author’s style but once you get used to it, the story flows very well. There are certain sections of the book that are definite can’t-put-it-down page-turners, particularly the fight at Bloody Lane. The maps, while helpful and abundant, could have been done better; perhaps in color and with more description.
It would be a very difficult task to find a work that better describes and makes the reader actually know and feel what it was like to be a soldier on a 19th century battlefield. I highly recommend this account.
September 27, 2022
Antietam: The Soldiers Battle goes through the Battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862 from the soldiers perspective. Their accounts really show how bloody this battle was, how intense it was, the unrelenting and unreedeming violence, and the horrors of combat and the battles aftermath. What is nice about this book is it's soldiers accounts, the specific times and areas that they fought in, as well as it's appendix where it shows the casualties of both armies. When looking at the numbers, it really shows how soldiers on both sides said that this battle was the worse they ever fought in. Each number of killed, wounded, and missing reminds you that despite the Confederacy fighting for slavery, killing U.S. soldiers, and trying to destroy the United States. The numbers remind you that there are human beings behind those numbers and how this battle affected every family across the nation after that day. Great book!
March 18, 2019
I'm partial to the common soldier's side of events. This book wove a story - but it also had a lot of conjecture that left me wondering what came from the people experiencing the event versus the author.
October 5, 2020
Good telling of the soldiers’ stories in the Battle of Antietam. Although something like Stephen Sears’ book would be better for an overall understanding of the battle, this book excels at telling how the individual regiments moved and what the soldiers went through.
August 25, 2023
I wish some of the maps were a little more detailed but nonetheless, still a really good read. Very in-depth.
April 22, 2025
A great resource for first hand accounts!
February 23, 2023
What makes this an excellent book is we see the perspective of the men who fought this battle. John Michael Priest provides us what the men who fought on September 17th, 1862 witnessed at one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. In fact, Antietam is the bloodiest battle in a day of the war. The men saw absolute carnage and things that nobody should ever have to witness.
As I stated, Priest focuses mostly on the common soldier, not necessarily Lee and McClellan or other higher-ranking officers. We are given the views of the men who marched through the Cornfield, the Sunken Road, and what would become known as Burnside's Bridge. Here's an example: Ezra Stickley (A Co., 5 th VA) went to mount as a Federal battery rapidly walked three explosive rounds toward the brigade. The first struck about one hundred fifty yards to the south. The second fell seventy-five yards closer. The third burst in Stickley’s horse as he prepared to mount. The explosion violently hurled the aide to the ground and splattered the horse all over the field. Looking up from his gory puddle, the young man realized that what was left of his horse was going to fall on him. He immediately jumped up and stumbled into the horrified line of infantry, where two men caught him to keep him from collapsing.
Another example is a Virginia regiment that only had 19 men out of 68 survive the battle. If you want to see what the every day foot soldier experienced at Antietam, I highly recommend this book. I recommend Stephen Sears Landscape Turned Red if you want more information about strategy and tactics. I hope more Civil War books are written like this one.
As I stated, Priest focuses mostly on the common soldier, not necessarily Lee and McClellan or other higher-ranking officers. We are given the views of the men who marched through the Cornfield, the Sunken Road, and what would become known as Burnside's Bridge. Here's an example: Ezra Stickley (A Co., 5 th VA) went to mount as a Federal battery rapidly walked three explosive rounds toward the brigade. The first struck about one hundred fifty yards to the south. The second fell seventy-five yards closer. The third burst in Stickley’s horse as he prepared to mount. The explosion violently hurled the aide to the ground and splattered the horse all over the field. Looking up from his gory puddle, the young man realized that what was left of his horse was going to fall on him. He immediately jumped up and stumbled into the horrified line of infantry, where two men caught him to keep him from collapsing.
Another example is a Virginia regiment that only had 19 men out of 68 survive the battle. If you want to see what the every day foot soldier experienced at Antietam, I highly recommend this book. I recommend Stephen Sears Landscape Turned Red if you want more information about strategy and tactics. I hope more Civil War books are written like this one.
September 17, 2014
This is a very well researched account of the bloodiest battle in American History. Drawing on a detailed knowledge and many primary sources the author weaves the tale from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier. While it is impossible for anyone who was not there to imagine the horrendous hell these men went through it gives a pretty evocative hint. The book lived up to its title. The disappointment was the poor use of poorly drawn and poorly interpreted maps. That was a great shame. They could have been such a useful adjunct to allow someone unfamiliar with the ground to have followed the course of the battle. No doubt a limited budget was probably part of the problem but this was a signal failure of what was otherwise a good piece of historical writing.
September 7, 2016
A different view of the battle, entirely from soldiers letters, diaries etc. Some of the stories are absolutely astounding and jaw dropping. Rarely is one taken into the very ranks of the soldiers slugging it out in the field and experiencing all the horror and grim humor. An excellent author
February 10, 2013
Outstanding, "play-by-play" account of the bloodiest day in American history. Priest, a fellow public school history teacher, has brought fourth a wealth of primary source and first person accounts from the diaries and letters of the soldiers involved in this pivotal battle -- both blue and gray. One of the most thoroughly researched books on the American Civil War.
December 25, 2014
it was kind of hard to follow at the start never really read a book in this type of format before but after few chapters it came together. loved how the author puts all the information together with the information from the common soldier
April 18, 2011
great story about the soldiers of antietam not the tactics or the generals but the basic soldjer
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June 1, 2014signed by the author
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