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In September 1862 two Union soldiers resting in a Maryland meadow found three cigars wrapped in a copy of Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191, which showed his army divided to capture Harpers Ferry. Lee had invaded Maryland to feed his men and to win recognition from Britain and France. George McClellan, with about 87,000 men against Lee's 38,000 but trusting Allan Pinkerton's inflated estimates, waited 18 hours, giving Lee time to concentrate behind Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg.

The battle of September 17 unfolded in three separate phases. At dawn Joseph Hooker attacked through Miller's cornfield toward the Dunker Church, and the corn changed hands about 15 times. At midday Union divisions assaulted D.H. Hill's men in the Sunken Road, later called Bloody Lane, until Francis Barlow's troops flanked it, but McClellan held back more than 20,000 reserves. In the afternoon Ambrose Burnside spent hours forcing a stone bridge over a fordable creek, then A.P. Hill arrived from Harpers Ferry at 3:30 p.m. after a 17-mile march and drove him back.

• The Louisiana Tigers lost about 323 of 500 men, and the 12th Massachusetts suffered 67 percent casualties.
• Joseph K.F. Mansfield massed his green troops in a dense column and was shot almost immediately.
• Father William Corby rode the line giving absolution to the Irish Brigade, which lost 540 men.
• The day produced over 22,000 casualties, and five days later Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
• Alexander Gardner's photographs of the dead drew silent crowds at a New York gallery a month later.

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In July 1864, with Ulysses S. Grant's armies concentrated around Petersburg, Jubal Early led 14,000 to 16,000 Confederate veterans into Maryland toward Washington. The only force in the way belonged to Major General Lew Wallace, blamed by Grant for arriving late at Shiloh and exiled to an administrative command in Baltimore with about 2,300 hundred-days men. Warned by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad president John W. Garrett, Wallace moved to Monocacy Junction near Frederick without orders and was joined by James B. Ricketts' Sixth Corps veterans, bringing his force to about 6,800.

On July 9 Wallace defended a six-mile stretch of river at the iron railroad bridge, the Georgetown Pike bridge, the stone bridge and nearby fords. Captured Union soldiers claimed the whole Sixth Corps was present, slowing Early, and Ricketts' infantry, hidden behind a fence between the Worthington and Thomas farms, broke John McCausland's cavalry. John B. Gordon's afternoon assault forced a retreat around 5 p.m., but the delay cost Early a full day, and Sixth Corps reinforcements reached Fort Stevens before he could attack.

• Wallace had a single 24-pound howitzer to cover the line.
• Union troops repulsed five separate charges before their right flank gave way.
• Union losses were about 1,300, while Early lost between 700 and 1,000.
• Grant relieved Wallace after the defeat, then reinstated him once the timeline became clear.
• In his memoirs Grant wrote that the defeat brought a greater benefit than many victories, and Wallace later wrote Ben-Hur.

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On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was asked by organizer David Wills only to offer a few appropriate remarks at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, where the July battle had produced more than 50,000 casualties. The main speaker, former Harvard president Edward Everett, spoke for two hours and more than 13,000 words. Lincoln, who felt weak and dizzy and developed fever and headache on the train home, is believed by clinicians to have been in the early stage of smallpox, and he delivered 271 words in about two minutes.

Scholars debate whether the speech echoes Pericles' funeral oration or the King James Bible, and its definition of government of, by and for the people has roots in Theodore Parker, Daniel Webster and Lajos Kossuth. Reactions ranged from reverent silence to scattered applause, and partisan papers split, with the Chicago Times calling it dishwatery. Only two photographs show Lincoln there, one by David Bachrach identified in 1952, and 3D analysis suggests the platform stood at the Evergreen Cemetery fence rather than the Soldiers National Monument.

• The story that Lincoln told Ward Hill Lamon the speech would not scour is considered unreliable.
• William Rathvon, a boy who stood 15 feet from Lincoln, recorded his memories on a record in 1938.
• A Harrisburg newspaper retracted its negative 1863 review in 2013, on the 150th anniversary.
• Five handwritten copies exist, and the Bliss copy is the version carved into the Lincoln Memorial.
• The phrase under God is missing from the earliest drafts but appeared in reporters' dispatches, suggesting Lincoln added it while speaking.

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Edwin Stanton, born in 1814 in Steubenville, Ohio, suffered severe asthma, left school at 13 when his physician father died, and passed the bar in 1835. After his wife Mary died of fever in 1844, he had her burial clothes altered to match their wedding day and wandered the house at night asking for her. In court he had a steamboat ram its smokestack into the Wheeling Bridge, used a reaper part rusted with salt and vinegar in the 1855 McCormick case, where he snubbed Abraham Lincoln as a long armed ape, and won Daniel Sickles an acquittal with a temporary insanity defense.

As Buchanan's attorney general he resisted abandoning Fort Sumter, and in 1862 Lincoln made him Secretary of War. Stanton voided bad contracts, moved the telegraph office next to his own, sent 20,000 troops 1,200 miles in 10 days to relieve Chattanooga, and furloughed soldiers to vote in 1864. On the night Lincoln was shot he directed the government from the Petersen House. He later publicly attacked William T. Sherman's lenient surrender terms, then barricaded himself in the War Department when Andrew Johnson fired him, leading to Johnson's impeachment.

• In California he exposed forged signatures and fake Mexican government stamps behind a land claim to parts of San Francisco.
• He pressed for George McClellan's removal and lobbied to replace Joseph Hooker before Gettysburg.
• At the Grand Review in Washington, Sherman refused to shake Stanton's hand.
• Johnson survived removal by a single Senate vote, and Stanton resigned.
• Confirmed to the Supreme Court on his 55th birthday, December 20, 1869, he died four days later.

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Before 1865 the Constitution gave a president no power to abolish slavery in peacetime, with the three-fifths compromise, the fugitive slave clause and the Dred Scott decision treating enslaved people as property. Early in the war General Benjamin Butler declared escaped slaves contraband of war, a wartime seizure the administration backed. In the summer of 1862 Lincoln read a draft proclamation to his cabinet, and William Seward warned that issuing it amid defeats would look like a last shriek of retreat.

In August Lincoln answered Horace Greeley publicly that saving the Union was his paramount object, while the draft sat in his desk. After Antietam he issued the preliminary proclamation on September 22, giving the Confederacy 100 days, and quietly sent envoys to Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas offering to let them keep slavery if they rejoined. The final order of January 1, 1863 applied only to areas in rebellion, exempting loyal border states, Tennessee and occupied counties and parishes, because it rested on his war powers as commander in chief.

• Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment for compensated emancipation phased in by 1900.
• The proclamation immediately freed roughly 25,000 to 75,000 people in occupied areas such as the Sea Islands.
• Nearly 200,000 Black men ultimately joined the Union ranks.
• News spread through networks such as the 4Ls, Lincoln's Legal Loyal League.
• Copperhead backlash cost Republicans seats in 1862, while Manchester textile workers backed the Union through the cotton famine.

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Elmer E. Ellsworth, born in 1837 in Malta, New York, the son of a tailor, swapped his first and middle names as a teenager. After the wealthy father of his fiancee Carrie Spafford demanded he find respectable work, he studied law in Chicago and built the Zouave Cadets of Chicago, a drill team in baggy trousers, sashes and fezzes modeled on French colonial troops, which toured the country. In 1860 he studied law with Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, worked on the campaign, and traveled with the president-elect to Washington.

After Fort Sumter he raised the 11th New York, the Fire Zouaves, from New York's volunteer firefighters. On May 24, 1861, as Union troops occupied Alexandria, Virginia, Ellsworth and seven men climbed to the roof of the Marshall House and cut down the large Confederate flag visible from Washington. On the stairs, innkeeper James W. Jackson, who had posed as a boarder, killed him with a shotgun, and Private Francis E. Brownell shot and bayoneted Jackson. Ellsworth, 24, lay in state in the East Room of the White House.

• Lincoln called Ellsworth the greatest little man he ever met.
• Remember Ellsworth became a recruiting slogan, and the 44th New York called itself the Ellsworth Avengers.
• Souvenir hunters stripped the Marshall House of stair pieces, bloodstained oilcloth and a letter from its sign.
• Brownell received the Medal of Honor, and in 1894 his widow sold fragments of the flag for $10 to $15.
• A 1936 Ellsworth flagpole in Christopher Park stands within the Stonewall National Monument and has flown a Pride flag since 2017.

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In June 1864 Robert E. Lee sent Jubal Early's Second Corps, more than 10,000 veterans, north through the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Washington and draw Ulysses S. Grant's troops away from Richmond. Early's men marched through a 47-day drought with temperatures above 90 degrees, lost a day fighting Lew Wallace at Monocacy on July 9, and reached Fort Stevens near Silver Spring on July 11. The capital's ring of 160 forts and more than a thousand guns was held by about 9,600 fit men, including raw recruits, the Invalid Corps and clerks of Montgomery Meigs's emergency division.

Exhausted Confederates stalled after finding barrels of whiskey in the cellar of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair's Silver Spring estate, while veterans of the Sixth and Nineteenth Corps arrived by steamship and marched to the trenches. Abraham Lincoln, who had ridden out with Mary, stood on the parapet under sharpshooter fire until a surgeon beside him was hit. On July 12 Daniel Bidwell's brigade cleared the orchards at a cost of more than 300 casualties, and Early withdrew across the Potomac on the night of July 13.

• Engineer John G. Barnard found that only about 9,600 of 31,000 men on paper were fit to hold a rifle.
• Alexander McCook organized the defense while sidelined generals in the city worked against him.
• Accounts differ on who ordered Lincoln down, naming Horatio Wright or a young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
• Early later joked that he had not taken Washington but had badly scared Lincoln.
• Forty Union dead lie in a small national cemetery on Georgia Avenue and 17 Confederates at Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring.

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Libby Prison began as a three-story brick warehouse on the James River in Richmond, leased by Captain Luther Libby and his son for a ship grocery and supply business. The Confederacy requisitioned it, and by 1862 it held captured Union officers in eight rooms about 100 by 40 feet, with barred windows that had no glass. Meant for about 700, it held well over 1,000 by 1863, as men from battles like Chickamauga arrived and meat disappeared from the diet in favor of sweet potatoes and poor cornbread.

Prisoners kept up morale with the Libby Chronicle, read aloud every Friday, and could send letters only six lines long. After two failed tunnels, officers dug more than 50 feet from the basement to a carriage shed, and on February 9, 1864, 109 men escaped, just over half reaching Union lines. After Richmond fell, Lincoln visited and favored keeping the building as a memorial, but in 1889 candy maker Charles F. Gunther moved it brick by brick to Chicago as a war museum, which was torn down by 1899.

• Captured Black soldiers were denied prisoner of war status and sent to forced labor on Richmond's fortifications.
• Union officials declined to send food into Richmond, fearing it would ease the Confederacy's supply burden.
• The tunnelers reached the basement by cutting through a hospital room floor to a closed-off stairway.
• Gunther rebuilt the prison inside a castellated wall and charged admission.
• The Chicago site later held a coliseum used for political conventions, and some prison nails were melted into a souvenir bell for the Jamestown Exposition.

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In early 1863 Joseph Hooker took over a demoralized Army of the Potomac after Fredericksburg, fixed its supply and hospital systems, introduced furloughs, and created the Bureau of Military Information under George H. Sharpe, which used spies, signal stations and telegraph-equipped balloons. His plan sent cavalry to cut Lee's railroad, left a force at Fredericksburg, and marched more than 70,000 men across the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers to Chancellorsville. His army of about 134,000 faced a Confederate force of barely 60,000.

Lee split his army, then split it again, sending Stonewall Jackson with about 28,000 men on a 12-mile march around Hooker's open right flank. Warnings from pickets and Captain Hubert Dilger were dismissed by Oliver O. Howard, and at 5:30 p.m. Jackson's men routed the 11th Corps. That night Jackson was shot by the 18th North Carolina and died of pneumonia a week later. Hooker, concussed when a cannonball split a pillar of the Chancellor house, kept command and withdrew on May 6, with about 17,000 Union and 13,000 Confederate casualties.

• Hooker pulled his troops off open ground into the Wilderness, dense second growth left by clear-cutting for iron furnaces.
• The largely German 11th Corps, many of them refugees of the 1848 revolutions, faced distrust at headquarters.
• Deer, foxes and rabbits burst out of the woods just ahead of Jackson's attack.
• Jeb Stuart took over Jackson's infantry command, and Confederate guns at Hazel Grove shelled the Union center.
• Lee turned part of his army east to stop John Sedgwick's advance at Salem Church.

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Major General John Sedgwick, born in 1813 in Cornwall, Connecticut, taught school before graduating 24th of 50 from West Point in 1837. He fought in the Seminole Wars, earned brevet promotions at Contreras, Churubusco and Chapultepec in Mexico, and in 1860 kept his men alive on the Colorado frontier by having them quarry stone and build shelters when supplies never arrived. His troops called him Uncle John.

At Antietam, Edwin Sumner sent Sedgwick's division into the West Woods without reconnaissance, where Stonewall Jackson's hidden troops caught it in a three-sided ambush; nearly half the division fell and Sedgwick was hit in the wrist, leg and shoulder. Later criticized for caution, nearly removed by Edwin Stanton, and longing to go home to New England, he led the Sixth Corps at Spotsylvania. On May 9, 1864, he told flinching men the enemy could not hit an elephant at that distance, seconds before a sharpshooter's bullet struck him below the left eye.

• He missed First Bull Run while recovering from cholera and was wounded at Glendale.
• His open admiration for George McClellan and criticism of Benjamin Butler made him enemies in Washington.
• The sharpshooters fired from about 1,000 yards, using Whitworth rifles with hexagonal barrels and bullets.
• Chief of staff Martin McMahon tried to catch him as he fell, and Grant said the loss was worse than losing a division.
• West Point cadets spin the rowels on the spurs of his statue for luck on final exams.