On 18 September, the 2nd MA waited but received no orders to advance. There was no fighting on this day and the burial parties hastily went about their business. Lee held his line, defying McClellan, who was satisfied with merely having fought him to a standstill, and when Lee reluctanly withdrew his army, McClellan was delighted with his great "victory." President Lincoln was far less pleased, however, and fed up finally with the general's inability to fight a decisive battle, removed him from command of the Army of the Potomac in favor of Burnside.
The 12th Corps, now under the command of BG Alpheus Williams, was sent to Sandy Hook, where the 2nd MA encamped on the same summit it had occupied 13 months earlier. From the top of Maryland Heights, Lt. Robert Gould Shaw could see the lights of the Rebel camps, and he knew that the war was far from over. "What a week for thousands of families throughout the country," he lamented. Like many who had survived the Battle of Antietam, he had a difficult time trying to describe what he had experienced. To his family he wrote, "Every battle makes me wish more and more that the war was over. It seems almost as if nothing could justify a battle like that of the 17th, and the horrors inseparable from it."
On the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States, the 2nd Massachusetts had entered the battle with less than 240 men and lost 80, even though it had come under close fire twice and had been engaged 3 times on the morning of the 17th. The losses in the 3WS and 27IN were considerably higher due to the exposed positions those regiments held during the action around the Miller House early in the day.
Among the officers wounded during the battle were Lt. Francis Crowninshield--his second in the line of duty--and Capt. James Francis, who lost two fingers. Lt. Charles Mills, who had only been with the regiment for a month, was shot through both legs. His career with the 2MD was over. Serving as a staff officer later in the war, he would be killed at Hatcher's Run on 31 March, 1865.
There would be no more campaigning before the winter. It was the regiment's first real break following 6 months of hard work.
If the Battle of Antietem had fallen far short of President Lincoln's expectations, the failure of Lee's thrust into the North gave him the opportunity he had been waiting for to announce his Emancipation Proclamation.
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