SOUTH MOUNTAIN.
The next day I took the cars for Hagerstown; passed Sunday in that slow
and ancient burg; and early on Monday morning set out by stage for
Boonsboro’.
Our course lay down the valley of the Antietam. We crossed the stream at
Funk’s Town, a little over two miles from Hagerstown. “Stop at two miles
and you won’t be here,” said the driver. The morning was fine; the air
fresh and inspiring; and the fact that the country through which we
passed had been fought over repeatedly during the war, added interest to
the ride. A fertile valley: on each side were fields of tall and
stalwart corn. Lusty milkweeds stood by the fences; the driver called
them “wild cotton.” And here the Jamestown-weed, with its pointed
leaves, and flower resembling the bell of a morning-glory, became
abundant. “That’s _jimson_,” said the driver; and he proceeded to extol
its medicinal qualities. “Makes a good sa’v’. Rub that over a hoss, and
I bet ye no fly lights on him!”
At Boonsboro’ some time was consumed in finding a conveyance and a guide
to take me over the battle-fields. At length I encountered Lewy Smith,
light and jaunty Lewy Smith, with his light and jaunty covered
carryall,—whom I would recommend to travellers. I engaged him for the
afternoon of that day and for the day following; and immediately after
dinner he was at the tavern-door, snapping his whip.
The traveller’s most pleasant experience of Boonsboro’ is leaving it.
The town contains about nine hundred inhabitants; and the wonder is how
so many human souls can rest content to live in such a mouldy, lonesome
place. But once outside of it, you find Nature as busy in making the
world beautiful, as man inside has been in making it as ugly as
possible. A country village carries with it the idea of something
pleasant, shady, green; therefore do not think of Boonsboro’ as a
country village. Leave it behind you as soon as convenient, and turn
your face to the mountain.
That is the famed South Mountain, where the prologue to the Antietam
fight was enacted. “I never heard it called _South Mountain_ till after
the battle,” said Lewy Smith. “It was always the _Blue Ridge_ with us.”
He had never heard of Turner’s Gap, or Frog Gap, either. “We always
called it just the gap in the mountain.” The road to the gap runs
southeast from Boonsboro’, then turns easterly up the hills. It
stretched long and pleasant before us. “The night before the battle,”
said Lewy Smith, “this road was lined with Rebels, I tell ye! Both sides
were covered with them about as thick as they could lie. It was a great
sight to see so many soldiers; and it didn’t seem to us there were men
enough in the Union army to fight them. We thought the Rebels had got
possession of Maryland, sure. They just went into our stores and took
what they pleased, and paid in Confederate money; they had come to stay,
they said, and their money would be better than ours in a little while.
Some who got plenty of it did well; for when the Rebels slaughtered a
drove of cattle, they would sell the hides and take their own currency
for pay.”
The mountain rose before us, leopard-colored, spotted with sun and
cloud. A few mean log houses were scattered along the road, near the
summit of which we came to the Mountain House, a place of summer resort.
Here again man had done his best to defeat the aim of Nature; the house
and everything about it looked dreary and forbidding, while all around
lay the beautiful mountain in its wild forest-shades.
Lewy left his horse at the stable, and we entered the woods, pursuing a
mountain-road which runs south along the crest. A tramp of twenty
minutes brought us to the scene of General Reno’s brilliant achievement
and heroic death. A rude stone set up in the field, near a spreading
chestnut, marks the spot where he fell. A few rods north of this,
running east and west, is the mountain-road, with a stone wall on each
side of it, where the Rebels fought furiously, until driven out from
their defences by our boys coming up through the woods. The few wayside
trees are riddled with bullets. A little higher up the crest is a log
house, and a well in which fifty-seven dead Rebels are buried. “The
owner of the house was offered a dollar a head for burying them. The
easiest way he could do was to pitch them into the well. But he don’t
like to own up to having done it now.”
It was a sunny, breezy field. “Up yer’s a heap of air sturrin’,” said a
mountaineer, whom we met coming up the road. We sat down and talked with
him by the stone wall; and he told us of his tribulations and mishaps on
the day of the battle, attempting to fly south over the mountain with
his family; overloading his wagon, and breaking down just as the shells
began to explode around him; doing everything “wrong-eend fust, he was
so skeered.”
We pushed along through the woods to the eastern brow of the crest, in
order to obtain a general view of the field. Emerging from among the
trees, a superb scene opened before us,—Catoctin Valley, like a poem in
blue and gold, with its patches of hazy woods, sunlit misty fields, and
the Catoctin Mountains rolling up ethereal beyond.
The bridge across Catoctin Creek, half a mile west of Middletown, where
the fighting began on that memorable Sunday, September 14th, 1862, could
be seen half hidden and far away below. There our troops came up with
the rear-guard of the invading army. Driven back from the Creek, the
Rebels massed their forces and formed their line of battle, two miles in
extent, on this mountain-side, in positions of formidable strength.
Standing on the brow of the commanding crest, you would say that ten
thousand men, rightly posted, might here check the advance of ten times
their number, hold the gap on the left there, and prevent the steep
mountain-sides from being scaled.
In a barren pasture above the slope climbed by Reno’s men in face of the
Rebel fire, we came upon a little row of graves under some locust-trees.
I took note of a few names lettered on the humble head-boards. “John
Dunn;” “T. G. Dixon, Co. C, 23d Regt. O. V. I.;” several more were of
the 23d Ohio,—the impetuous regiment that had that day its famous
hand-to-hand conflict with the 23d South Carolina, in which each man
fought as though the honor of the nation depended upon his individual
arm. Here lay the victorious fallen. A few had been removed from their
rude graves. The head-boards of others had been knocked down by cows. We
set them up again, and left the field to the pensive sound of the
cow-bells and the teasing song of the locust.
Walking back to the road through the gap, and surveying the crests
flanking and commanding it, which were held by the Rebels, but carried
with irresistible impetuosity by the men of Burnside’s and Hooker’s
corps, one is still more astonished by the successful issue of that
terrible day’s work. All along these heights rebel and loyal dead lie
buried in graves scarcely distinguishable from each other. Long after
the battle, explorers of the woods were accustomed to find, in hollows
and behind logs, the remains of some poor fellow, generally a Rebel,
who, wounded in the fight, or on the retreat, had dragged himself to
such shelter as he could find, and died there, alone, uncared for, in
the gloomy and silent wilderness.
Crampton’s Gap, six miles farther south, stormed and carried that same
Sabbath day by the men of Franklin’s corps, I did not visit. The sun was
setting as we turned our faces westward; and all the way down the
mountain we had the Antietam valley before us, darkening and darkening
under a sky full of the softest twilight tints and tranquillity.