McPherson reconstructs the gripping Battle of Antietam, which remains the single bloodiest day in the history of American combat. Through historical newspaper accounts and the personal letters of soldiers, the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself are stunningly re-created.

Approximately 110,000 soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies fought along the banks of Antietam Creek in the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. In 12 hours of fighting, approximately 23,000 men fell, either killed, wounded, or missing, forever scarring the landscape around the town of Sharpsburg. Established as the Antietam Battlefield Site in 1890, Antietam National Battlefield became a National Park Service landmark in 1933....

The Battle of Antietam, fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland, was the bloodiest day in American history, with more than twenty-three thousand dead, wounded and missing. This book invites the reader to walk the routes of some of the units on the field through the stories of thirty-six individual soldiers who fought on that day. The images of the soldiers in this work, many of which have never been published before, give faces to the fighting men at Antietam,...

In the summer of 1862, after a year of protracted fighting, Abraham Lincoln decided on a radical change of strategy, one that abandoned hope for a compromise peace and committed the nation to all-out war. The centerpiece of that new strategy was the Emancipation Proclamation: an unprecedented use of federal power that would revolutionize Southern society.

A definitive study of the climactic and pivotal battle of Antietam offers a vivid account of the two armies, the soldiers and officers, and the bitter, bloody campaign and analyzes the impact of Antietam on the Civil War as a whole.