After the decisive Confederate victory at Second Manassas (Second Bull Run) in late August 1862, Robert E. Lee, having pushed the beaten Federal Army into the Washington, DC, fortifications, decided to take the war out of Virginia. His plan was to enter Maryland, get that state to join the rest of the South and, possibly later, invade Pennsylvania. The re-organized Federal Army under McClellan pursued Lee and brought him to battle at Antietam (Sharpsburg) on 17 September 1862.
The most costliest battle in American history. In just over 8 hours of battle, somewhere in the neighborhood of 27 thousand soldiers were either dead, injured, or missing. To put it in perspective, In World War two during the D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy France, an estimated three to five thousand American soldiers died while storming the designated beachhead code-named Omaha beach. This happened with the use of machine guns, Tanks, huge artillery pieces, Land Mines, ships, various sorts of high calibered weaponry, and explosives. So consider what happened in Antietam, The guns they used were muskets, and not all rifled for distance and accuracy. And at best, a good soldier well trained could manage to only load and fire his gun 3 times in a minute using a Civil War era musket. They had none of the advanced weapons being used in World Wa two, and despite this, look at the amount of carnage that occured on that battle-field as opposed to Omaha Beach. Just thinking of it staggers the imagination.
And by the way, their were more huge battles to come.
The Battle of Antietam was marked by the bloodiest day of the entire course of the American Civil War. It was fought in the year 1862 on the 17th of September, which was initiated by the Confederate army in order to win the moral and financial support of Great Britain during the Civil War.
The leader of the Confederate army led his soldiers to fight against the Union in close geographical proximity with Antietam Creek, which was located outside Sharpsburg, which was a small town in the state of Maryland. It was the most disastrous day of the American Civil War resulting in the deaths of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and many more were wounded too. The Battle of Antietam earned its name from the town (Antietam Creek) near which it was fought. It eventually resulted in the victory of the Union and the defeat of the Confederacy.
