For the Confederates, the supply situation was acute. Lee had only about 16,000 horses of mixed quality and efficiency to pull his wagons. As previously noted, a lack of shoes along with a shortage of rations rendered some soldiers unfit to continue on the march into Maryland. Accordingly, thousands fell behind and did not catch up with the army until several days or even weeks after the battle.

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Losses and Medical Care
As the sun set on the hills around Sharpsburg on the evening of September 17, the opposing forces found themselves surrounded by some of the worst carnage ever witnessed on the North American continent. Nearly 4,000 men were killed outright.

The bodies from both armies were generally buried where they fell on the field. It took Union burial parties three or four days to do the job. Even in death, the fallen warriors of these opposing American armies would lie separately. In 1867 the Union dead were reinterred in the Antietam National Cemetery. The Confederate remains would not be removed from the field until 1874. At that time, they were placed in the newly established Washington Confederate Cemetery in nearby Hagerstown.

Around 19,000 men were wounded in the battle. Of these about 12,400 were Union. Thousands would die from their wounds. Some accounts tell of soldiers lying out on the battlefield for two or three days. A revolution in combat medical care had been instituted just a few weeks prior to Antietam to alleviate this problem. Dr. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, organized an ambulance corps that moved to the front to evacuate the wounded, established field hospitals and created a procedure to prioritize casualties by the severity of their wounds (the triage system that emergency medical teams still use today). The burden of caring for the wounded posed a logistical problem that encompassed an area exceeding a 40-mile radius. One newspaper reported that the area was’one vast hospital.’

Approximately 100 area homes and farms were used, caring for anywhere from a few hundred to more than 1,000 wounded soldiers. Research indicates that several thousand wounded Confederates were left behind, to the mercy of the Union surgeons. Meanwhile, hospitals were established for Lee’s army at Winchester and other points in the Shenandoah Valley.

Antietam remains one of the great yet terrible soldiers’ battles of the Civil War. Tradition holds that visitors to the now peaceful Maryland countryside do not see elaborate statues and other memorials to the generals because of their many costly blunders. The limited monuments at Antietam National Battlefield, greatly dwarfed in size and majesty by those at sites such as Gettysburg and Vicksburg, depict the common soldier.

In 1897 General Ezra Carman, a veteran of the battle and the historian for the Antietam Battlefield Board, received a letter from James Dinkins, a Confederate veteran of the battle, concerning troop movements and locations. Carman was preparing the text for the cast iron tablets that are so familiar to visitors. In the letter’s conclusion, Dinkins inadvertently penned a fitting tribute to the men of the two great American armies that fought at Antietam:’Future generations looking at the markers, will swell with pride as they read of the heroic character of their ancestors, and they will also have more appreciation of peace when they learn of the horrors of that war.’

This article was written by Ted Alexander and originally published in the September 2006 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. Ted Alexander is a historian at Antietam National Battlefield and the author of numerous Civil War articles.

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