September 18, 1862---Agony at Sharpsburg

SEPTEMBER 18, 1862:      

The town of Sharpsburg becomes a purgatory of tortured souls and bodies. Miller’s cornfield holds 12,000 dead or dying, and thousands of others lay dead or suffered helplessly, unfound and unseen, behind trees, in the fields, or along fencerows. 

The stench of rot is everywhere.  One cannot venture to the privy without finding a gaseous corpse. In every building for miles around, surgeons, volunteers, local farm families and total strangers wishing to help, struggle to treat the wounded. Screams and shrieks echo over the Maryland hills. Surgery is being done on parlor doors removed from their hinges. Most surgery consists of hacking men open to get at bullets, or amputating shattered limbs. Piles of torn arms, legs and hands and feet soon form small mountains near the crude operating rooms. Entrails litter the ground. The dead are laid out in neat rows, Blue and Gray together. 

 

In lieu of triage tents, pre-op and post-op wards, the wounded, treated and untreated, are laid on mattresses soon turned bloody, on carpets soaked with gore, in airless tents, or, with nothing else to suffice, on the bare ground itself, and in one case in a hay manger. 

 

The Army of Northern Virginia, bloodied and battered, hunkers down next to the Potomac River. Unable to ford the river at that point, Lee’s fate is dependent upon the next maneuvers of the Union Army, which, though likewise bloodied and battered, has 36,000 men in reserve, untaxed and willing to fight. McClellan’s unused reserves are larger than the entire exhausted Confederate army. For Lee is trapped. To escape, Lee must cross in front of Union-held Sharpsburg. Lee keeps his army on high alert and does not move, awaiting McClellan’s next assault. 

The Army of Northern Virginia has never been more vulnerable. It is down to 25,000 effectives and pinned between a river and an enemy-held town.  If McClellan moves his forces into their path, the odds are that, after a second bloody day, the war will be over---or perhaps Lee will simply surrender in order to spare his men. No one knows what might have happened. For McClellan, like Lee, does not move.