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Lee's Maryland Campaign
Appendix B: References
Antietam: The Soldier's Battle by John Michael Priest. Copyright 1989 by Oxford University Press. Highly detailed description of the battle, with emphasis on the exact positioning of the units in the battle. Priest is known for errors in his books. I mention this book due to the large number of detailed maps in it. If you use this book, make sure it is not your only reference!
Antietam 1862: The Civil War's Bloodiest Day by Norman S. Stevens. Part of Osprey Military's Campaign Series. Copyright 1994. This series has excellent color 3D maps and orders of battle. The drawbacks are factual errors — like the reference to Lee knowing about the Lost Order on September 14, 1862 — and the sometimes confusing commentary.
Antietam National Battlefield Map. Trailhead Graphics. Trailhead makes a series of maps (in paper or tearproof/waterproof coated paper) for several battlefields. These are invaluable as they give topographic information as well as the position of the battlefield markers and monuments, and the present (and historical) position of woods. I highly recommend them.
Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain by John Michael Priest. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press. Detailed description of the battle. It contains some truly ugly maps. Priest is also spotty on factual accuracy. 1) Map #58 shows all five of Colquitt's regiments behind the stone wall, when only two were present. 2) His description of the 6th Wisconsin's movement on page 268 is wrong. 3) On the same page he mentions Sergeant Ed Whaley as having been mortally wounded, when the man lived well past the war. 4) He writes, "The 2nd Wisconsin right wheeled until it was parallel to the pike. Believing it was opposite the stone wall it volleyed blindly into the right of the 7th Wisconsin." The footnote for this a reference to The Iron Brigade: A Military History by Alan T. Nolan. No such incident is mentioned anywhere in Nolan's book, regardless of Priest's footnote. 5) He includes Sgt. Bloss' (erroneous) account of the finding of the Lost Order. All of these errors lead me to suspect the book's accuracy. I've read reviews of his Overland Campaign books that suggest they are very poorly done. I mention this book only because of the level of detail (especially in the ugly maps) and because it's a fairly popular book on the battle. Do not use it as your only source!
The Bloodiest Day: The Battle of Antietam by Ronald H. Bailey. Part of the Time-Life Books "The Civil War" series, copyright 1984.
The Civil War, A Narrative – Fort Sumter to Perryville by Shelby Foote. Copyright 1958, renewed in 1986, Vintage Books. The first volume of Foote's classic three-volume study of the Civil War. Although massive, it is an easy read. It does not go into any great detail on any one campaign, but it does make for a good introduction before diving into a deeper book.
From Cedar Mountain to Antietam, 2nd Edition by Edward J. Stackpole with commentary by D. Scott Hartwig. Copyright 1993 (original copyright 1959), Stackpole Books. This book is a little out of date, though the commentary at the back of the book does clear up some of the discrepancies due to current research. It is well written and easy to read, and makes for a good primer on the 2nd Manassas and Antietam campaigns.
Landscape Turned Red, by Stephen W. Sears. Copyright 1983, Houghton Mifflin Company. This is one of the best books on the Antietam campaign. It makes use of a number of primary sources. It contains a very good account of the Lost Order, though Sears' later essay "The Last Word on the Lost Order" (see below) has additional information. The book has a very good order of battle, listing all the regiments plus the officers down to brigade level. It is written with an engaging style, though sometimes it's a bit hard to keep track of what's happening to specific brigades in the narrative. If you want just one book on the Antietam campaign, this is it.
"The Last Word on the Lost Order" by Stephen W. Sears. Military History Quarterly, Volume 4, Number 3, Spring 1992. Reprinted in Experience of War edited by Robert Cowley, copyright 1992 by MHQ, and in With My Face To The Enemy, also edited by Cowley, copyright 2001 and published by Putnam. Another version of this article was published in the 140th anniversary commemorative magazine Antietam, produced by the editors of America's Civil War, Civil War Times, and MHQ, and published in 2002. This is the best article I've found on The Lost Order. It debunks a lot of myths I found in other publications, including who actually found the order and whether or not Lee knew of the Lost Order on September 14, 1862. It is well written and well researched. The account in this article is a little bit different from Sears' account in his book Landscape Turned Red. As the article was written nine years after the book, the article's account should be considered definitive.
Second Manassas 1862: Robert E Lee's Greatest Victory by John Langellier. Part of Osprey Military's Campaign Series (number 95). Copyright 2002. This series has excellent color 3D maps and orders of battle. This volume is better written and better researched than some of their other Civil War titles, but it still suffers from editing errors that plague the entire Campaign Series.
To the Gates of Richmond, by Stephen W. Sears. Copyright 1992, Mariner Books. This book concentrates on McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. It's another excellent work by Stephen Sears.
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Also known as the Army Official Records, or simply the Official Records (the latter is not exactly accurate, as it ignores the official records of the navies involved in the conflict, which were published separately). Originally published by the Government Printing Office in 1880. Available on The Civil War CD-Rom, produced by Guild Press of Indiana, copyright 1997, and also posted online. The CD-ROM from Guild Press has the advantages that you can cut and paste the text and you don't have to be connected to the Internet. Be aware that there are errors in the Guild Press edition where their Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software made a mistake translating scanned pages into text (the text doesn't appear to have been adequately proofread). The online archive scanned each page of the books and displays the pages as graphics. You can't cut and paste, but there are no OCR errors.
Who Was Who in the Union and Who Was Who in the Confederacy by Stewart Sifakis. Copyright 1988 by Facts On File. Quick histories of the major participants of the Civil War. Two volume set, making up Who Was Who in the Civil War.