Battle of Antietam

Lee invades the North. A Union soldier finds Lee’s battle plan wrapped around three cigars, and McClellan sits on it for eighteen hours.

Dawn slaughter at Miller’s Cornfield and the Dunker Church; 2,200 men fall in the West Woods in about twenty minutes.

The center breaks at the Sunken Road, but the reserves never move. A. P. Hill (South) arrives from Harpers Ferry just in time to save Lee.

22,726 casualties in a single day. Brady photographs the dead, and five days later comes the Emancipation Proclamation.