On September 17, 1862, along Antietam Creek in Sharpsburg, Maryland, more Americans were killed in combat than on any other day in U.S. history. The ongoing reverberations of that battle — in the realms of medicine, military organization, women’s rights, and more — are vividly examined in historian Stephen Budiansky’s brilliantly original A Day in September.

There’s no shortage of hefty books about the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam, but Budiansky takes an admittedly unconventional approach that readers will find refreshing. Built around the experiences of nine individuals who emblemize an aspect of human existence “that was changed by what took place there,” he elevates the story of Antietam far beyond the battlefield.

Beginning with the two main adversaries who faced off that day — Confederate general Robert E. Lee and Union general George B. McClellan — the author provides illuminating, if pared-down, biographical sketches of all his subjects. Lee was an aristocratic Southerner for whom “blood was thicker than republicanism” when he resigned his U.S. Army commission in 1861 to serve the Confederacy. McClellan, a West Point graduate and engineer, took command of the Army of the Potomac in the late summer of 1861 after the Union’s disastrous rout at the Battle of Bull Run.

McClellan’s consistent exaggeration of enemy troop strength — a “well-known failing” — and his “never to be shaken belief” that war was merely an engineering problem that thorough planning could solve were problematic attributes, Budiansky says. Even the notorious “Lost Order 191,” which delivered Lee’s battle plans into McClellan’s hands, could not induce “Little Mac” to move any faster or more decisively. Though Antietam was considered a Union victory since Lee withdrew, the astronomical casualties — 6,500 dead and 15,000-16,000 wounded — made it a draw at best.

Less a tactical study than an overall evaluation of the people and practices touched by Antietam, the book offers fresh insights for even the most devoted Civil War student. Budiansky calls out the “embryonic staff organization” of the Army of the Potomac and argues that McClellan’s lack of a general staff to coordinate operations in the field can be blamed for much of the confused troop movements during the battle.

After Antietam, forces on both sides would be better organized. In a fascinating chapter, Budiansky introduces Union general Jacob D. Cox, an Ohio senator and commander of the Ohio Volunteers, “who had studied war more seriously than most West Point graduates.” Cox is the entry point into Budiansky’s skillful analysis of Civil War military weaponry and tactics, what he calls the “physics of battle.”

Along with the changes to military training and organization that Antietam wrought, Budiansky focuses on the advancements made in the medical establishment via the eyes of Union officer (and McClellan’s medical director) Jonathan Letterman. A tireless advocate of “organizing for carnage,” Letterman issued, as his first official act, regulations forming the army’s first dedicated ambulance corps. Along with this critical change, Letterman also standardized a simple system comprising three levels of care: a field-dressing station, a field hospital, and a general hospital — far from the front lines — for long-term recovery.

Budiansky underscores how important Letterman’s medical directives were not just at Antietam (where the wounded were removed from the battlefield as late as 2 p.m. the following day) but far into the future — through World War I and beyond.

The author’s approach to Antietam itself is a bit piecemeal; he weaves in the stories of his nine subjects before repeatedly returning to the fighting. His insights into Confederate general James Longstreet aren’t necessarily revelatory, but he nonetheless paints a broader picture of Lee’s so-called “old war horse” by lauding Longstreet’s preference for a combination of strategic offense and tactical defense, a “precocious instance of operational-level thinking” that Budiansky argues was “strikingly modern.”

Going beyond the battle, Budiansky includes chapters on Antietam photographer Alexander Gardner and the impact battlefield photography had on people’s ideas about death, on the death industry itself, and on how soldiers’ remains were handled. Women also feature in his account. The chapter on Clara Barton assesses her positives and negatives in a fair-handed manner while also exploring the role of female nurses during the war. Budiansky includes an amusing aside on the differences between Catholic and Protestant nurses: Surgeons preferred working with the former because they were “trained to obedience.”

Such revelations notwithstanding, the most significant outcome of the Battle of Antietam would be, of course, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, in which enslaved African Americans were declared no longer contraband but free human beings. Extensively researched, A Day in September is a luminous, humanizing study of the infamous battle that spurred Lincoln’s decree and forever changed the world.

Peggy Kurkowski is a professional copywriter for a higher-education IT nonprofit association by day and a major history nerd at night. She writes for multiple book-review publications, including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, BookBrowse Review, Historical Novels Review, Open Letters Review, Shelf Awareness, and the Independent. She hosts her own YouTube channel, “The History Shelf,” where she features and reviews history books (new and old), as well as a variety of fiction. She lives in Colorado with her partner (quite possibly the funniest Irish woman alive) and four adorable, ridiculous dogs.

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