A Day in September by Stephen Budiansky

A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

By Stephen Budiansky

WW Norton 2024

To the thousand books that have been written about the great signpost American Civil War battle of Antietam, Stephen Budiansky adds his latest, A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind. It’s a look at the battle and its aftermath through the focus of nine characters ranging from Clara Barton to Abraham Lincoln, the battle itself sitting in the center of the narrative and sending out broad ripples forward and backward in time from the day in September of 1862 when North and South collided in Maryland. More than 20,000 people died on that single day, which not only served as the mother of all disillusionments to civilians thinking the war would be a brief and fairly painless tussle but also provided President Lincoln with a Northern victory (albeit a piteously Pyrrhic one) on which he could hang his war-changing Emancipation Declaration. 

Budiansky’s book is barely 300 pages long, which is usually just about long enough for most writers to get to 10 or 11 in the morning on the day of the battle. And of course he gives pride of place to the generals at the heart of it all: Robert E. Lee, combining canny husbanding of resources with an often uncanny tactical agility in the face of an opponent outnumbering him nearly three to one, and George McClellan, pompous, over-confident, displaying what Budiansky calls a “fatal combination of hubris and insecurity.” And right at the heart of the story there’s a turn from a cheap Victorian serialized melodrama: copies of Lee’s battle plans, accidentally left behind, come to McClellan, giving him the priceless intelligence that his enemy’s army was divided all over the nearby landscape and could thus easily be destroyed piecemeal if McClellan struck before the security breach was known. “No one knows to this day exactly how a copy of Lee’s orders miscarried and landed in a field of clover a mile outside of Frederick, where troops of the Union Twelfth Corps stopped to rest around 9 am on September 13 as they approached the city from the south,” Budiansky writes. “What is certain is that by early afternoon the document was in McClellan’s hands.”

“Now I know what to do!” McClellan exultantly shouted – but he didn’t do it. Amazingly, instead of immediately ordering his forces to strike at Lee, Longstreet, Jackson, or anybody else, he wrote memos and sent out cautious feelers to some of his commanders. 

Budiansky’s decision to locate that one day in September as a hinge for both halves of his narrative makes for an Antietam book that might strike battle-map fans as more than a little beside the point, and that’s probably a good thing. The battle is far more interesting, after all, when set in its broader context, although Budiansky is sometimes less comprehensive and even, worryingly, less interesting when attempting to widen the focus. His goal in including people like Clara Barton or Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr is to look at how the Antietam changed the societal perception of medicine or the rule of law, and he chooses some of his focal characters specifically in order to highlight these changes. What we would now recognize as trauma, for instance, is traceable in carefully-read personal records of the later 19th century:

The restlessness of postwar America is usually seen as a product of the opening of the West, and the opening of the eyes of soldiers to new opportunity that the war had shown them, as they traveled far and wide from small hometowns for the first time during its campaigns. But for thousands of veterans of the war, continual relocation was an escape from the traumas that pursued them. 

The “world it left behind” part of the book’s subtitle applies far more to the war as a whole than to a single day in September 1862, but when Budiansky fascinatingly points out that “the war had marked a definable turning point from revelation to experience as a guide to truth,” he’s certainly touching on something that applied in the starkest terms possible to Antietam itself. Civil War buffs won’t find anything in A Day in September they haven’t read many times before, but newcomers to both the battle and its context could scarcely do better than to start here. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News