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FLASHSALE
“Dead on the field.”
—Confederate General John Bell Hood, commander of the Confederate division of which the 1st Texas was a part, late in the Battle of Antietam when asked by General Robert E. Lee as to the location of his division
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The Tragic Sacrifice of the 1st Texas Regiment at the Battle of Antietam
The 1st Texas Regiment, a foundational piece of the William Wofford’s Texas Brigade of John Bell Hood’s division in Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in September 1862, earned three ominous distinctions at the Civil War Battle of Antietam, fought in southern Maryland on September 17, 1862. These distinctions consisted of the 1st Texas:
I. Playing a key role in the Battle of Antietam. This twelve-hour maelstrom of fire and lead resulted in approximately 12,400 Union soldiers and 10,300 Confederate soldiers being killed, wounded, or captured. This staggering one-day butcher’s bill distinguishes September 17, 1862 as the bloodiest day in American history.
[Photo: Mathew Brady’s Famous “The Dead of Antietam”]
II. Swarming and briefly capturing D.R. Miller’s cornfield on the northern end of the battlefield for the Confederacy. Known to survivors and students of the battle simply as “the Cornfield,” Miller’s large patch of brownish-green cornstalks was perhaps the deadliest and most infamous landscape on a killing field replete with bloody and notorious landscapes. The more than five-hours-long melee in this section of the battlefield left Joseph Hooker, commander of the Union I Corps, the 8,500-man contingent which led George B. McClellan’s massive dawn assault on the Cornfield and other nearby landmarks, with extraordinarily grim memories.
[Photo: Union and Confederate Soldiers Clash Almost Nose-to-Nose in Miller’s Cornfield]
“Every stalk of corn,” Hooker remembered after the war, “was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before.” Though he led from the front of the Union lines in some of the other of the Civil War’s most gruesome battles, Hooker would assert without hesitation that “it was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battlefield” than the Cornfield at Antietam.
[Photo: Union General Joseph Hooker]
III. Suffering the highest casualty rate—a staggering 82%—of any regiment fighting for either side in any battle of the Civil War.
The Civil War not only resulted in the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans; it also served as a horrifying portent for future soldiers fighting wars across the globe due to the industrialized way in which technologically cutting-edge weaponry killed and maimed soldiers at an unprecedented rate. The sad fate of the 1st Texas at Antietam reflected the enormous and harrowing sacrifices made not just by the soldiers of that regiment, but by other soldiers fighting on both sides throughout the Civil War more generally.
Ultimately, however, what stung the few survivors of the 1st Texas at the Battle of Antietam as much as the loss of most of their comrades was the fact that, somewhere in the midst of all of this bloody confusion, the regiment lost its treasured flag.
The Creation and Reception of the 1st Texas Regiment’s Flag
At the Civil War’s outbreak, thousands of young Texas men rushed to Richmond, Virginia to fight for the South’s independence. By August 1861, around 500 of these Texans were organized as the 1st Texas Regiment and placed under the command of politician-turned-soldier Colonel Louis Wigfall.
[Photo: Confederate Colonel Louis Wigfall]
Although he commanded the regiment for only about three months, Wigfall made two lasting contributions to the Texans of whom he was briefly in charge. These lasting contributions were:
I. Convincing his daughter Lula to sew a regimental flag to serve as a means of identification and a rallying symbol for his Texans in battle.
Lula Wigfall stitched together a banner which featured a white rectangle in its upper right-hand section, a red rectangle in its lower right-hand section, and a streak of blue spanning from the top to the bottom of the left third of the flag. Within this tall blue rectangle on the left side of the flag, the names of two battles in which the 1st Texas performed admirably—“SEVEN PINES” and “GAINES FARM”—were eventually inscribed in white letters close to the banner’s top and bottom.
[Photo: Lula Wigfall]
However, the most memorable aspect of the flag the 1st Texas carried into battle at Antietam was certainly its large white star—representative of Texas’ self-identification as the “Lone Star State”—Lula Wigfall stitched into the center of the blue section. According to Colonel Wigfall, Lula created the star by using the white fabric from her mother’s wedding dress. [
[Photo: The 1st Texas’ Original Regimental Flag, as Sewn by Lula Wigfall, Credit to Texas State Library and Archives Commission]
II. Arranging for Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, to present this new flag to his troops.
In a ceremony which took place before the 1st Texas ever saw combat, the First Couple of the Confederacy paid Wigfall’s regiment a high compliment by formally delivering to its members Lula Wigfall’s creation. Now, these green Texas soldiers possessed a token of not just unit identification but of unit pride, as well.
A roll call in April 1862 listed 477 members of the 1st Texas as fit for duty, but by the break of dawn on September 17, 1862, disease and battlefield casualties had reduced this number to 226. In the meantime, the 1st Texas had earned itself a fearsome reputation as a regiment full of relentless warriors who would stop at nothing to attain their objectives. It achieved its most outstanding successes at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill (referred to as “GAINES FARM” on the regiment’s flag) and the Battle of Second Manassas.
[Photo: Confederates Prepare to Smash Union Resistance at Second Manassas]
The Campaign and Battle of Antietam Just Prior to Hood’s and the 1st Texas Regiment’s Attack in the Cornfield
After crushing John Pope’s Union army at Second Manassas, Robert E. Lee’s confidence skyrocketed, and he decided to press his dearly won advantage and invade the North. Lee’s plan for his invasion was fairly simple, yet it involved dividing his already badly outnumbered army. This highly risky decision to separate large portions of the Army of Northern Virginia almost resulted in catastrophe for the Confederates when a Federal cavalryman found a copy of Lee’s invasion plan wrapped around cigars and apparently dropped on the ground by a gray-clad messenger in southern Maryland. “If I cannot whip Bobby Lee now,” Union Army of the Potomac commander George B. McClellan asserted when he gained possession of these orders, “I will be willing to go home.”
[Photo: A Modern Photograph of Robert E. Lee’s 1862 Lost Campaign Orders]
This frankly inexcusable Confederate blunder of dropping a copy of Lee’s campaign outline which spelled out exactly where each portion of the Army of Northern Virginia was headed forced Lee to drastically adjust his plans. With an army already reduced to 38,000 men—the smallest number of troops Lee would command until near the time of his surrender in 1865—being pursued aggressively by a force of more than twice its number, most commanders of the era would have simply abandoned the invasion and raced back to Virginia.
But Lee was not like most commanders. Instead, this prim-appearing Southern aristocrat was already legendary for taking risks which not only made him seem more daring than a riverboat gambler, but, at times, seemed to push the boundary between extraordinary boldness and sheer insanity. After James Longstreet’s rear guard held off McClellan’s attacks at the Battle of South Mountain, Lee moved Longstreet’s portion of his army westward in search of good ground on which he could once again defiantly challenge the Army of the Potomac, for whose commander and fighting men he had little to no respect.
[Photo: Confederate General Robert E. Lee]
Lee chose a patch of rolling farmland just west of the swiftly flowing Antietam Creek and just east of the Maryland town of Sharpsburg. Stonewall Jackson arrived with most of his troops on the night of September 16-17, and Lee ordered him to form the left, or northern, flank of the Confederate defensive line. While Hood’s division with the 1st Texas usually served under Longstreet, at Antietam, Lee assigned it to help Jackson.
At 5:30 AM on September 17, Hooker’s Union I Corps advanced astride a road known as the Hagerstown Pike and trod resolutely toward Jackson’s wing of Lee’s army, which Jackson had bent back to face north to protect his left flank. Due south of the Union I Corps’ jumping-off point, Hooker’s objective was a one-room whitewashed Protestant house of worship known as the Dunker Church. To reach it, however, his corps would have to capture the Cornfield and the forests on both its sides, all of which were heavily defended by confident Southern veterans.
[Photo: Map Showing Troop Placements in the Cornfield]
To initiate the battle, many of Hooker’s blue-clad troops resolutely tromped through the head high stalks of the Cornfield, only to be slaughtered in droves when Confederates hiding prone in the corn rose up and fired a volley from perhaps ten to fifteen yards away. For the next hour and a half, Hooker and Jackson—two of the war’s most relentless warriors—engaged in a melee defined by bold Union attacks, desperate Southern counterattacks, and a staggering amount of bloodshed.
A master at shifting troops to the endangered spots on his line mid-battle, Lee forwarded Jackson as many reinforcements as he could. But by 7 AM, all these Confederate troops were either dead, incapacitated, or too exhausted to be of much use. Meanwhile, with his objective of the Dunker Church squarely in his sights, Hooker still retained some fresh troops and seemed about to be reinforced by two other entire Union corps.
At 7 AM, Lee turned to Hood to save Jackson and the Confederate left, which was, by this point, in extreme danger of being annihilated. The task facing Hood’s men was tall, but, as one member of the 1st Texas wrote to his mother after the battle, the Army of Northern Virginia’s highest-ranking leaders “always [sent] Texans to the hottest part of the field.”
[Photo: Union Soldiers Approach the Dunker Church at Antietam]
The 1st Texas Meets Its Gruesome Fate in the Cornfield
Fear was not the emotion most prevalent in the minds of the majority of Hood’s veterans when they received the command to charge into the Cornfield. Instead, the most prominent emotion was anger. Exhausted from forced marches, they had been promised their first hot breakfast in days, which they were preparing over campfires when Hood received his orders. Forced to abandon their meals, these soldiers were determined to make the best of their hot tempers by shooting as many Union soldiers as possible and steamrolling through the at that time Union-dominated Cornfield.
Hood’s 2,300-man division was divided in two brigades, with one under Evander Law and the Texas Brigade under William Wofford. As his troops approached the Cornfield, Hood sent Law’s brigade marching northeast to crush the victorious but by now badly disorganized Union troops at the southeastern end of the Cornfield. Wofford’s brigade Hood sent due north to clobber the already extraordinarily bloodied Union “Iron Brigade” of Hooker’s corps.
[Photo: Hood Leads His Division into the Cornfield]
Appreciating why and how the 1st Texas came to such a grisly fate requires a general understanding of the tactical situation Wofford’s brigade faced. The first of Wofford’s troops to reach the Cornfield smashed into the Iron Brigade’s exposed left flank “like a scythe running through our lines,” in the words of one Union officer present, and sent its survivors streaming headlong for the rear.
Soon, however, it was Wofford’s own left flank in the Cornfield which was vulnerable. As much of his brigade turned to deal with the new Federal threat to its west, Hood ordered the commander of the 1st Texas, Phillip Work, to form Wofford’s right flank with his regiment in this crucible full of bullet-ridden cornstalks and dead young men.
[Photo: Commander of the 1st Texas at Antietam, Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Worth]
With Lula Wigfall’s hand-sewn flag flying at the head of their battle lines, the 1st Texas’ 226 proud veterans pushed due north to form Wofford’s right in accordance with Hood’s order. But upon reaching their destination and seeing that their fellow regiments had the situation on Wofford’s left under control, the supremely confident troops of the 1st Texas began to push northward. Held mostly by exhausted Federal units whose manpower had been severely depleted in the morning’s previous bloodletting, the northern and center portion of the Cornfield was extraordinarily vulnerable to a Confederate counterattack. And for this job, Hood’s veterans were probably more qualified than any other troops in either army.
Ultimately, the fighting men of the 1st Texas were victims of both their own almost instantaneous and staggering success and their officers’ inability to keep them, now smelling blood in the water, under any semblance of control. As the troops steamrolled their way through the northern portion of the Cornfield, scarcely needing to fire a shot at their spent and fleeing enemies, they moved further and further away from the rest of Wofford’s brigade. As Hood would put it in his official report after the battle, the 1st Texas “slipped the bridle,” thus, entirely unbeknownst to its members, setting itself up to be decimated or even destroyed by far larger contingents of Union reinforcements.
[Photo: The 1st Texas Advances Through the Cornfield]
Work presciently sensed trouble upon finding it “impossible to restrain [his] men.” Still, he could not help but admire the seeming ease with which his Texans were wresting the Cornfield, which had already changed hands almost ten times and was soaked with blood from thousands of casualties of both armies, from Union control. However, as the soldiers of the 1st Texas approached the wooden rail fence marking the northern edge of the Cornfield, they finally received an almost unspeakable comeuppance for their brave but overeager and unsupported advance.
Warned by the panicked and retreating survivors of the Iron Brigade they let pass through their lines of the 1st Texas’ approach, the men of Robert Anderson’s fresh 600-man Union brigade of Hooker’s corps knelt expectantly behind a fence running east-to-west across open ground just a few dozen yards north of the Cornfield’s northern edge. The moment the Texans came into view, Anderson’s troops sprang to their feet and leveled their muskets. Then, the brigade’s four regiments each fired a volley in almost instantaneous succession at Work’s completely unprepared Texans.
[Photo: Some of Anderson’s Pennsylvanians Release Their Devastating Volley on the 1st Texas Regiment]
The nearly simultaneous volleys unleashed by Anderson’s men at Work’s oblivious Texans likely represented the most destructive momentary concentration of musketry in the entire Civil War. In virtually an instant, more than half of the 226 bold and headstrong members of the 1st Texas were killed or maimed by the Pennsylvanians’ musket balls. The regiment was not so much stunned as it was obliterated. Astoundingly, the regiment’s survivors began to return the blue-clad troops’ fire, but most of these Confederates were mowed down where they stood.
In a very short time, the mere 57 members of the 1st Texas who had gone unhit by Anderson’s maelstrom began to race back south through the Cornfield even more quickly than they had jubilantly advanced in the opposite direction just minutes before. According to one member of the 1st Texas who lived to tell the tale, “Eight men were killed or wounded trying to bring [the regimental flag] off the field. Just as fast as one man would pick it up, he would be shot down” by the merciless Union infantrymen.
[Photo: A Dying 1st Texas Soldier Holds the Regimental Flag in the Cornfield]
Losing most of their brothers in arms was lamentable enough for the few survivors of the 1st Texas. But their degree of devastation increased exponentially when they escaped across the southern edge of the Cornfield only to discover that their regimental flag had somehow been left behind amidst the carnage. “The flag! The flag! Where is the flag?” one soldier demanded of Work during the retreat. All the “color bearers,” the private frantically told his regiment’s commander, “are shot down!”
Sadly for this man and the rest of the few men of the regiment who escaped the Cornfield on two feet, Work had no idea where the flag was. In reality, the 1st Texas’ triumphant Union oppressors had already captured the blood-soaked flag as a trophy. For these resolute Pennsylvanians, their accomplishment was an impressive one, indeed, seeing as how they had shot down just shy of all the veterans of one of the most feared regiments in either army to win it.
[Photo: A Monument at Antietam Honoring Pennsylvania Troops, Credit to The National Parks Service]
The Aftermath of the Fracas in the Cornfield for the 1st Texas and John Bell Hood
Roll call came after the fighting on Jackson’s sector of the Southern line had flickered out between 11 AM and noon. Only then did Work’s dazed Texans finally appreciate the magnitude of the galling sacrifice they and their dead and dying comrades had made to save Jackson’s beleaguered wing of the Army of Northern Virginia. A whopping 82.3% of the 1st Texas’ members had been either slain or maimed by Anderson’s stalwart Pennsylvanians in perhaps five minutes—and most of these casualties were inflicted in the first seconds of the fateful encounter. This casualty rate was and would remain the highest casualty rate suffered by any regiment on either side in any battle throughout the entire Civil War.
[Photo: Members of the 1st Texas Lying Dead Just Beyond the Northern Edge of the Cornfield]
The 1st Texas was obviously hit harder than any other regiment in Hood’s division, but its ghastly fate was generally indicative of the staggering price Hood’s entire division had paid to deliver Lee’s left flank. Approximately 1,300 of the 2,300 crack soldiers Hood had so confidently led into battle were killed or wounded in their division’s attack. But ultimately, the results of the courageous but at times reckless attack made by Hood’s division at Antietam proved something of a mixed bag for the Confederates.
Yes, the lauded Southern division had been completely decimated and eventually fell back to the jumping-off point of its assault. But at the height of its success, it had driven what had been Hooker’s triumphant troops back almost a mile in pell-mell fashion. In doing so, it had blunted Federal momentum in and around the Cornfield and granted Lee and Jackson precious time to reorganize the still upright Confederates on the northern end of the battlefield to continue the fight.
Around 8:45 AM, facing this refreshed Southern resistance, Hooker was shot—probably by one of Hood’s troops—in the right foot, fell from his white horse, and was carried from the field on a stretcher. Hooker’s wounding deprived the Army of the Potomac of its corps commander most capable of rallying the shaken Federal troops in the vicinity of the Cornfield and practically ensured that the conflagration on Lee’s left flank would flicker out in stalemate.
[Photo: Hooker Leads Union Troops from Atop His White Horse]
Still, the sheer destruction Union forces had wreaked on the 1st Texas and the rest of Hood’s division ensured that a sense of tragedy permeated the division’s survivors. No one felt this sense of tragedy more acutely than the sad-eyed Hood himself. “It was” at Antietam, the Southern division commander glumly remembered years later, “that I witnessed the most terrible clash of arms, by far, that occurred during the war.” Hood’s legendary but quite likely true reaction to his division’s fate on the morning of September 17 does a good job of summing up his mood. When Lee approached him and asked where Hood’s “splendid division” now found itself, Hood looked him straight in the eye. “Dead on the field” was the extent of his soft, sad reply.
[Photo: Confederate General John Bell Hood]
Like the rest of the survivors of Hood’s division, the paltry number of survivors in the 1st Texas would lick their wounds and soldier on, performing admirably throughout the remainder of the war. The trauma of what they experienced in the Cornfield, however, would never be far from their minds. Nor would these men ever retrieve their beloved regimental flag. Graciously, however, in 1905, Northerners returned the flag to Texas, where today it is on display at the state’s official Library and Archives Building in Austin.
[Photo: Monument to Texas Troops at Antietam, Credit to National Parks Service]
Further Reading:
American Battlefield Trust. (2025). “Antietam.”
American Battlefield Trust. (2025). “The Flags of Antietam.”
McPherson, James. (2002). Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, The Battle That Changed the Course of the Civil War. Oxford University Press.
National Park Service (2023). “Flags at Antietam.” Antietam National Battlefield.
National Park Service (2022). “A Short Overview of the Battle of Antietam.”
National Park Service. (2020). “Texas State Monument.” Antietam National Battlefield.
Sears, Stephen. (2003). Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. Mariner Books.