The discovery of a historical battle map recontextualizes "the bloodiest day in American history."

The Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, was the scene for the bloodiest day in United States military history. During the Maryland Campaign in the American Civil War, 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing after 12 hours of combat.

Now, a 150-year-old and recently digitized map shows the location of some 5,800 soldiers' graves who lost their lives on the 12-square-mile battlefield outside Sharpsburg, Maryland. The map was created by cartographer Samuel G. Elliott around 1864 and features more detail than historians have had to work with previously. Elliott's map has notations marking graves as Union or Confederate soldiers and, in some cases, even specifies the deceased’s regiment or brigade. Around 45 graves are labeled with the names of individual soldiers. The Washington Post says the map paints the scene in a different light, "not with the usual scenes of charge and countercharge, but as one vast cemetery."

The (Re)-Discovery

The New York Public Library probably acquired the map when it was published in 1864, says NYPL map division curator Ian Fowler. Then, from 2015 to 2018, the library's map digitization project made more than 3,000 antique charts available to the public online. It was in this virtual archive that historian Timothy Smith happened upon the map while searching for a similar kind of map for the Battle of Gettysburg.

“I searched for ‘S.G. Elliott’ and ‘Gettysburg,’ then downloaded the results, so I could look at them in detail. When I opened up the file, I was utterly taken aback, and knew I was looking at something extraordinary," Smith tells the Culpeper Star-Exponent.

“It’s a visual representation of the carnage from the battle. It’s startling to look at," Smith adds. "Elliott deserves credit for compiling this valuable information and having it published. It may well be the closest historians come to understanding the physical aftermath of America’s costliest battles.”

The full-length map, courtesy The New York Public Library.

Garry Adelman, chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust, told Washington Post:

“Every one of us who’s looked at this absolutely flips out. This will reverberate for decades."

"This discovery reveals truths about the Battle of Antietam lost to time. It’s like the Rosetta Stone: By demonstrating new ways that primary sources already at our disposal relate to each other, it has the power to confirm some of our long-held beliefs—or maybe turn some of our suppositions on their heads.”

“On a scale from one to 10 of Civil War battlefield discoveries … I’d call it a 9.5.”

The Fate of the Fallen

Antietam was a Union invasion and victory, though it cost 7,000 American lives. Five days after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln used the momentum from the victory and announced the Emancipation Proclamation.

American historian James M. McPherson says of that day at Antietam:

"No other campaign and battle in the war had such momentous, multiple consequences as Antietam."

After the war's conclusion, Union soldiers buried at Antietam were moved from their temporary resting place on the battlefield to the newly established Antietam National Cemetery. Confederate casualties were reburied in local cemeteries. 

Elliott's map gives a lucky glimpse into the lives of Civil War soldiers, many of which are forgotten to time. Antietam casualties were buried hastily, and efforts to identify them all weren't made until the war was over. 

“The dead were identified by letters, receipts, diaries, photographs, marks on belts or cartridge boxes, and by interviewing relatives and survivors,” the Park Service says on the Antietam National Cemetery website. More than 4,500 Union soldiers killed in the Maryland Campaign are buried there.

Eighteen hundred of them remain unidentified.

What do you feel about the Battle of Antietam? What does this map's discovery say to you? Leave a comment with your thoughts!