I am old enough so that in my youth I knew men who knew veterans of the Civil War, all of whom fought under Jackson and Lee. This is during the years just past World War II expressed by a generation who had either fought in that war or lived through that war and who had done so as Americans no matter where they might reside in South.
It was an article of faith among these people, expressed to me more than once by my father and others, that the hand of God can be seen in the untimely death of Stonewall Jackson because it meant the ultimate loss by the Confederacy because he was not available to Lee at Gettysburg.
These Southerners saw God's hand in the affair to preserve the union to fight the second world war and to wage the Cold War.
The battle of Sharpsburg is better known as the battle of Antietam, of course. It's interesting that a Northern newspaper is calling the battle by the nearby town--usually when there are rival names for a battle, the Confederate name is for the nearby town and the federal name is for a nearby river.
I never saw any Civil War veterans in person but remember as a child reading a newspaper report that the last Confederate soldier had died. Many years ago I heard a talk by a 97-year-old man whose father had ridden with Nathan Bedford Forrest...his father was rather advanced in years when he was born.