Antietam and Emancipation

CHAPTER 6 · SEP 1862–JAN 1863 · The American Civil War, 1861–1865

September 1862 is the Confederacy’s great simultaneous bid — look at the two red arrows, five hundred miles apart. Lee crosses the Potomac into Maryland; Bragg marches into Kentucky to install a Confederate governor at Frankfort. Both invasions aim at the same three targets: the border states’ men, the North’s November elections, and Europe’s recognition — London’s cabinet is literally waiting on the result. Then fortune intervenes: a Union corporal finds three cigars wrapped in a copy of Lee’s orders, dropped in a field, revealing his divided army. Even so McClellan attacks piecemeal along An

The turn: Antietam, 17 September 1862.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.