“I saw an awful sight,” Private Joseph Workman of the 96th Pennsylvania wrote to his father in Wiconisco Township ten days after the guns went quiet along Antietam Creek. He had walked the battlefield while the dead still lay on it, and struggled to describe what he had witnessed.
September 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest single day in American history. Nearly 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing in 12 hours of fighting outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, and the Coal Region had men in the middle of it – soldiers from Schuylkill, Luzerne, Northumberland, Carbon, and Dauphin counties in the ranks of the 50th, 96th, and 132nd Pennsylvania and numerous other regiments.
But the Maryland Campaign was not something that happened only to soldiers. When Lee’s army crossed the Potomac River that September, the Coal Region prepared for war to come to their doorsteps.
Pottsville raised emergency companies, drilled in the streets, and braced for a Confederate invasion that ultimately never came. Families waited on newspaper casualty lists from the fighting in Maryland that arrived days late and often wrong. Letters came home describing things the writers could barely put into sentences, and were read aloud in kitchens in Wiconisco and Shamokin and Scranton. Coffins came home, too, the human wreckage of one of the most horrific moments in the nation’s history.
These are the stories of Antietam as the Coal Region experienced it – in the field, on the home front, and its long aftermath.
Ten days after Antietam, a young soldier from Wiconisco Township, PA sat down to put it into words for his father back home.
Private Joseph Workman of the 96th Pennsylvania had just walked the battlefield days earlier.
On the blood-soaked fields of Antietam, a captain from Scranton, PA wrote home of the horrors of a Civil War battlefield and the fall of the regiment’s colonel.
Bullets tore through bodies, faces masked in smoke and dust, boys became veterans in minutes.
Private Edward Harner’s epitaph, written in German, notes the young man’s service for the Union.
The 24-year-old Schuylkill County man was killed by a shell during the Battle of Antietam in one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War.
When Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army threatened Pennsylvania in September 1862, the citizens of Pottsville, PA jumped into action.
They also felt the harsh hand of war.
Samuel Schwalm of the 50th Pennsylvania was slightly wounded in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862.
The sergeant wrote home to describe the horrors he’d witnessed.
A Civil War soldier’s letter from the Battle of Antietam was discovered under a floorboard in a home in Shamokin, PA in 1917, preserving a firsthand account of the bloodiest day in American history.
In the wake of the Battle of Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, changing the scope of the Civil War from a fight to put down a rebellion into a war against slavery itself.
That document and the escalation of the conflict carried political and military consequences that reached the Coal Region directly. Immigrant mineworkers rose up against federal policy, fearing that formerly enslaved people would come north and take their jobs. They also fought back against efforts to enroll men for conscription – the draft.
This opposition, combined with a rising labor movement in the anthracite fields, brought military forces to key points across the region. The consequences outlasted 1862, reshaping the political and social landscape across a swath of eastern Pennsylvania from northern Dauphin County to the Wyoming Valley.
Events in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam
In September 1862, Irish immigrants living near Scranton rose up to resist efforts to enroll local men for the draft and service in the Civil War in the aftermath of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Explore the 1862 coal miners’ rebellion in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, where Irish miners resisted the Civil War draft. Uncover how labor unrest, ethnic tensions, and anti-war sentiments ignited one of the first Northern uprisings, shaping the region’s history during a tumultuous era in Coal Region history.
Some white residents of Schuylkill County believed formerly enslaved people were going replace them in the coal mines during the Civil War.
This theory spread through the patch towns and villages in the wake of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
The gripping story of a failed 1863 assassination attempt on US Army General William Whipple in Pottsville, PA.
A New York Times reporter’s observations about the Schuylkill County mining village of Heckscherville in 1863 as the region experienced political and labor turmoil.
In the summer of 1865, victory won in the Civil War, Pennsylvania’s soldiers expected to go home – except the 202nd regiment.
Sent instead to the Coal Region to guard mine operators and intimidate striking workers, they called it “disgraceful duty.”
Subscribe to the latest from Jake Wynn – Public Historian
Enter your email below to receive the newest stories.