Antietam was McClellan’s last battlefield command. He himself believed he had displayed the highest military artistry, but President Lincoln had taken enough of the Young Napoleon’s timidity and new generals would now take over the North’s army. McClellan went on to make himself a political nuisance. He ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1864, but, fortunately for the Union, he failed to unseat Lincoln. To his dying day the Young Napoleon would defend his appalling leadership, but the truth is that with McClellan’s dismissal the rebels lost one of their strongest military assets.

The story of the Lost Order is famous. No one knows how the copy was lost, and after the war, when survivors conducted endless autopsies on their campaigns, everyone involved denied any knowledge of the order. All that we know is that the two soldiers from the 27th Indiana regiment found the order wrapped around three cigars and its discovery was enough to prod McClellan out of his customary caution. If the order had not been found, Lee would probably have reached the Susquehanna as he planned, but once his strategy had been revealed the invasion was doomed. The two soldiers who found the order, Bloss and Mitchell, were both wounded in the cornfield.

The fight in the cornfield and the battle for the sunken lane were the two bloodiest episodes in the battle, with the struggle for the Rohrbach Bridge (now named the Burnside Bridge) coming close behind. To walk the terrain today is to marvel at the bravery of men who could attack across such open country in the face of terrible fire. The battlefield is well preserved, though the East and West Woods are much shrunken from their former sizes. A road, heavily lined with regimental memorials, now runs south of the cornfield while an observation tower stands at the dogleg corner of the sunken lane. Anyone wanting to know more about the campaign and battle should read Stephen Sear’s Landscape Turned Red, a book that was constantly by my side during the writing of The Bloody Ground and, to my mind, the finest book on a single Civil War battle, maybe on any nineteenth-century battle, ever written.

Antietam was indeed a ghastly affair. The North was badly led and its men’s bravest efforts were wasted, but the rebel retreat afforded President Lincoln the opportunity to proclaim a victory and, in its wake, to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. The war, which had been ostensibly about states’ rights, was now firmly a moral campaign to abolish slavery. But to proclaim the slaves free was one thing, to liberate them was another, and the road to Richmond would prove to be hard and long. Lee had been rebuffed at Antietam, but he was far from beaten. Starbuck will march again.

About the Author

BERNARD CORNWELL is a native of England, where he worked as a journalist in newspapers and television. In addition to Rebel, Copperhead, Battle Flag, and The Bloody Ground, the four novels in the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles, he also wrote the bestselling Sharpe series, featuring the adventures of Captain Richard Sharpe of the British Army in the wars against Napoleon, which has been dramatized for television by Masterpiece Theatre; the Warlord Chronicles, about Arthurian England; Stonehenge: 2000 B.C., a Novel; and The Archer’s Tale. A resident of the United States for fifteen years, Bernard Cornwell now lives with his American wife on Cape Cod.