“Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red.”
Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
There were 22,720 casualties that day, about a third of them dead or dying.
And now the fields around Sharpsburg are a beautiful place to visit.