Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies: General Robert E. Lee’s Reports of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign

With the exception of George Washington, perhaps the most famous and celebrated general in American history is Robert E. Lee (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870), despite the fact he led the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia against the Union in the Civil War. The son of U.S. Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, a relative of Martha Custis Washington, and a top graduate of West Point, Lee had distinguished himself so well before the Civil War that President Lincoln asked him to command the entire Union Army. Lee famously declined, serving his home state of Virginia instead after it seceded.

Lee constantly defeated the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the Eastern theater from 1862-1865, considerably frustrating Lincoln and his generals. His leadership of his army led to him being deified after the war by some of his former subordinates, especially Virginians, and he came to personify the Lost Cause’s ideal Southern soldier. 

Naturally, as leader of the army, Lee wrote dispatches and reports, and many were preserved in The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Since Lee died in 1870 before writing memoirs, his only primary accounts of the war come from his commands and postwar reports, preserved in the Official Records. This collection of dispatches and reports on the Maryland Campaign of September 1862 details the preparations for the Army of Northern Virginia’s invasion of Maryland, as well as the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, which forced Lee to retreat back to Virginia. 

This edition of the Official Records includes pictures of Lee.