THE FIELD OF ANTIETAM.
At seven o’clock the next morning, light and jaunty Lewy Smith was
snapping his whip again at the tavern-door; and I was soon riding out of
the village by his side.
Our course lay along the line of the Rebel retreat and of the advance of
the right wing of our army. A pleasant road, under the edge of woods
still wet with recent rain, brought us to Keedysville, a little cluster
of brick and log houses, all of which, Lewy told me, were turned into
hospitals after the great battle. At the farther end of the town is a
brick church. “That was a hospital too. Many an arm, a leg, a hand, was
left there by our boys. There’s a pit behind the church, five feet long,
five feet deep, and two feet wide, just full of legs and arms.”
We rode on until we obtained a view of the pleasant hill-sides where
Porter lay with his reserves, while the other army-corps did the
fighting, on the day of Antietam; then turned to the right down a little
stream, and past a dam, the waters of which glided still and shadowy
under fringed banks; and soon came in sight of the fields where the
great fight began. There they lay, over the farther bank of the
Antietam, some green, some ploughed, the latter turning up yellow as
ripe grain in the morning light.
“We used to could drive all over this country where we pleased. The
fences were laid down, and it was all trampled and cut up with the
wagons, and soldiers, and artillery.” But the fences had been replaced,
and now Lewy was obliged to keep the open road.
At a turn we came to a farm-house, near which were a number of
dilapidated barns and other outbuildings, and some old straw stacks. “It
was a sight to behold, passing yer after the battle!” said Lewy Smith,
shaking his head sadly at the reminiscence. “All in and around these yer
buildings, all around the hay-stacks, and under the fences, it was just
nothing but groaning, wounded men!”
Crossing the yellow-flowing Antietam, we turned up the right bank, with
its wooded shores on our right, and on our left a large cornfield
containing not less than forty or fifty acres. “There was right smart o’
corn all through yer time of the battle. Good for the armies, but not
for the farmers. Come to a cornfield like this, they just turned their
horses and cattle right into it, and let ’em eat.” You fortunate farmers
of the North and West, so proud and so careful of your well-tilled
fields never yet broken into in this ruinous fashion, have you fully
realized what war is?
Leaving the course of the creek, and crossing the fields where the
fighting on our extreme right began, we reached a still and shady grove,
beside which, fenced in from a field, was a little oblong burying-ground
of something like half an acre. In the centre was a plain wooden
monument constructed of boards painted white; the pedestal bearing this
inscription:—
“_Let no man desecrate this burial-place of our dead_;”
And the side of the shaft, towards the fence, these words:
“_I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he
were dead, yet shall he live._”
This was the hospital cemetery. The graves were close together in little
rows running across the narrow field. They were all overgrown with grass
and weeds. Each was marked by a small rounded head-board, painted white,
and bearing the name of the soldier sleeping below. Here is one out of
the number:—
[Illustration:
E. G. POOLE,
Co. G. 12th Mass.
Died Oct 14th,
1862.]
As I wrote down this name, the hens in the farm-yard near by were
cackling jubilantly. The clouds broke also; a shaft of sunlight fell
upon the glistening foliage of the grove, and slanted down through its
beautiful vistas. I looked up from the sad rows of patriot graves, and
saw the earth around me, all around and above the silent mouldering
bodies of the slain, smiling sweetly through her misty veil. For Nature
will not mourn. Nature, serene, majestic, full of faith, makes haste to
cover the wounds in the Earth’s fair bosom, and to smile upon them. The
graves in our hearts also, which we deemed forever desolate, she clothes
with the tender verdure of reviving hope before we are aware, and gilds
them with the sunshine of a new love and joy. Blessed be our provident
mother for this sweet law, but for which the homes in the land, bereft
by these countless deaths in hospitals and on bloody fields, would lie
draped in endless mourning.
Near the monument, in the midst of the level burying-place, grew a
loftily nodding poke-weed, the monarch of his tribe. It was more like a
tree than a weed. With its roots down among the graves, and its hundred
hands stretched on high, it stood like another monument, holding up to
heaven, for a sign, its berries of dark blood.
Pursuing a road along the ridge in a southwesterly direction, Lewy at
length reined up his horse in another peaceful little grove. Without a
word he pointed to the rotting knapsacks and haversacks on the ground,
and to the scarred trees. I knew the spot; it was the boundary of the
bloody “cornfield.” We had approached from the side on which our boys
advanced to that frightful conflict, driving the Rebels before them, and
being driven back in turn, in horrible seesaw, until superior Northern
pluck and endurance finally prevailed.
In a field beside the grove we saw a man ploughing, with three horses
abreast, and a young lad for escort. We noticed loose head-boards,
overturned by the plough, on the edge of the grove, and lying half
imbedded in the furrows. This man was ploughing over graves!
Adjoining the field was the historic cornfield. I walked to the edge of
it, and waited there for the man to turn his long slow furrow down that
way. I sat upon the fence, near which was a trench filled with
unnumbered Rebel dead.
“A power of ’em in this yer field!” said the ploughman, coming up and
looking over as I questioned him. “A heap of Union soldiers too, layin’
all about yer. I always skip a Union grave when I know it, but sometimes
I don’t see ’em, and I plough ’em up. Eight or ten thousand lays on this
farm, Rebels and Union together.”
Finding him honest and communicative, I wished him to go over the ground
with me.
“I would willingly, stranger, but I must keep the team go’n’.”
I suggested that the boy was big enough to do that.
“Wal, he kin. Plough round onct,”—to the boy,—“or let ’em blow, tain’t
go’n’ to hurt ’em none.”
So he concluded to accompany me. We got over into the “cornfield,” late
a hog-pasture, and presently stopped at a heap of whitening bones.
“What’s this?” I said.
“This yer was a grave. The hogs have rooted it up. I tol’ the ol’ man he
oughtn’t to turn the hogs in yer, but he said he’d no other place to put
’em, and he had to do it.”
I picked up a skull lying loose on the ground like a cobblestone. It was
that of a young man; the teeth were all splendid and sound. How
hideously they grinned at me! and the eye-sockets were filled with dirt.
He was a tall man too, if that long thigh-bone was his.
Torn rags strewed the ground. The old ploughman picked up a fragment.
“This yer was a Union soldier. You may know by the blue cloth. But then
that ain’t always a sign, for the Rebels got into our uniform when they
had a chance, and got killed in it too.”
I turned the skull in my hand, half regretting that I could not carry it
away with me. My first shuddering aversion to the grim relic was soon
past. I felt a strange curiosity to know who had been its hapless owner,
carrying it safely through twenty or more years of life to lose it here.
Perhaps he was even then looking over my shoulder and smiling at it; no
longer a perishable mortal, but a spirit imperishable, having no more
use for such clumsy physical mechanism. The fancy came so suddenly, and
was for an instant so vivid, that I looked up, half expecting that my
eyes would meet the mild benignant eyes of the soldier. And these words
came into my mind: “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual
body.”
Let him who has never thought seriously of life look at it through the
vacant eye-sockets of a human skull. Then let him consider that he
himself carries just such a thing around with him, useful here a little
while, then to be cast aside.
“Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modelled on a skull.”
Take the lesson to heart, O Vanity! It is but a little time, at the
longest, that the immortal soul thou art will animate this bone; but the
hour comes quickly when to have been a good soldier of the truth on any
field, whether resounding with arms, or silent with the calm strong
struggle of love and patience, and to have given thy life to the cause,
will be sweeter to thee than the fatness of the earth and length of
days. No, heroic soldier! you I do not pity, though your mortal part
lies here neglected and at the mercy of swine.
The cornfield, and another field from which it was separated by a fence
at the time of the battle, are now thrown together, forming a lot of
about fifty acres. The upper part was dotted with little dry brown cocks
of seed-clover. No hogs were on it at the time; they had been turned
out, to save the clover-seed, I presume, for that was of some
consequence.
We found plenty more bones and skulls of Union soldiers rooted up and
exposed, as we ascended the ridge. Beside some lay their head-boards. I
noted the names of a few: “Sergt. Mahaffey, Co. C, 9th Regt. P. R. C.,”
for one.
“The Rebs had all the fence down ’cept a strip by the pike,” said the
ploughman. “That was jist like a sifter. Some of the rails have been cut
up and carried away for the bullet-holes.”
He showed me marks still remaining on the fence. Some of our soldiers
had cut their names upon it; and on one post some pious Roman Catholic
had carved the sacred initials:—
“I. H. S.”
“I reckon that was a soldier’s name too,” said my honest ploughman. And
so indeed it was,—_Jesus Hominum Salvator_.
Beyond the pike, between it and the woods, was a narrow belt of newly
ploughed ground.
“You see them green spots over yon’ covered with weeds? Them are graves
that I skipped.” In the edge of the woods beyond lay two unexploded
shells which relic-hunters had not yet picked up.
Whilst I was exploring the fields with my good-natured ploughman, Lewy
Smith brought his horse around by the roads. He was waiting for me on
the pike. “The last time I drove by yer,” he said, “there was a nigger
ploughing in that field, and every time he came to a grave he would just
reach over his plough, jerk up the head-board, and stick it down behind
him again as he ploughed along; and all the time he never stopped
whistling his tune.”
We drove on to the Dunker church, sometimes called “the Schoolhouse,”—a
square, plain, whitewashed, one-story brick building, without steeple,
situated in the edge of the woods. No one, from its appearance, would
take it to be a church; and I find that soldiers who fought here still
speak of it as “the Schoolhouse.”
“The Dunkers are a sect of plain people,” said one of the old Dutch
settlers. “They don’t believe in any wanities. They don’t believe in war
and fighting.”
But their church had got pretty seriously into the fight on that
occasion. “It was well smashed to pieces; all made like a riddle; you
could just look in and out where you pleased,” said Lewy Smith. It had
been patched up with brick and whitewash, however, and the plain people,
who “did not believe in wanities,” once more held their quiet meetings
there. I thought much of them as we rode on. A serious, unshaven thrifty
class of citizens, they know well how to get a living, and they bear an
excellent reputation for honest industry throughout the country. Their
chief fault seems to be that they persist in killing one of man’s
divinest faculties,—as if the sweet and refining sense of beauty would
have been given us but for a beneficent purpose. At the same time they
do believe sincerely in solid worldly goods,—as if they too were not,
after all, quite as much one of the “wanities”! Think of it, my solemn
long-bearded friend; you buy land, lay out your dollar in perishable
dust, or you expend it in the cultivation of those gifts and graces
which, if heaven is what I take it to be, you will find use for when you
get there. Now which do you suppose will prove the better investment?
All of religion does not consist in psalm-singing and sedate behavior.
But I do wrong to criticise so worthy and unoffending a sect of
Christians, who are no doubt nearer the kingdom than the most we call
such; and I merely set out to say this: while we are in the world, all
its interests, all its great struggles, concern us. We cannot sit
indifferent. Non-intervention is unknown to the awakened soul. Help the
good cause we must, and resist the evil; if we cannot fight, we can
pray; and to think of keeping out of the conflict that is raging around
us is the vainest thing of all, as yonder well-riddled plain people’s
church amply testifies.
As it was beginning to rain, Lewy Smith carried me on to Sharpsburg, and
there left me. A more lonesome place even than Boonsboro’; the battle
alone renders it in the least interesting; a tossed and broken sort of
place, that looks as if the solid ground-swell of the earth had moved on
and jostled it since the foundations were laid. As you go up and down
the hilly streets, the pavements, composed of fragments of limestone
slabs, thrust up such abrupt fangs and angles at you, that it is
necessary to tread with exceeding caution. As Sharpsburg was in the
thick of the fight, the battle-scars it still carries add to its
dilapidated appearance. On the side of the town fronting the Federal
line of battle, every house bears its marks; and indeed I do not know
that any altogether escaped. Many were well peppered with bullets, shot
and shell. The thousand inhabitants of the place had mostly fled to the
river, where they would have been in a sad plight if McClellan had
followed up the Rebels on their defeat, and done his duty by them.
Imagine a bent bow, with the string drawn. The bow is the river, and the
string is the Confederate line after the battle. At the angle of the
string is Sharpsburg; and between the string and the bow were the
fugitives. Fortunately for them, as for the enemy, McClellan did _not_
do his duty.
After dinner I started to walk to the bridge, known henceforth and for
all time as “Burnside’s Bridge,” just as the road his corps cut for
itself through the forests over the mountain, on his way hither from the
Sunday fight, is known to everybody as “Burnside’s Road.”
A shower coming up by the way, I sought shelter under the porch of a
stone house, situated on a rising bank near the edge of the town. I had
scarcely mounted the steps when a woman appeared, and with cordial
hospitality urged me to enter the sitting-room. Although the porch was
the pleasanter place,—overlooking the hills and mountains on the east,
and affording a comfortable wooden bench, where I had thought to sit and
enjoy the rain,—I accepted her invitation, having found by experience
that every dweller on a battle-field has something interesting to tell.
She and her neighbors fled from their homes on Tuesday before the
battle, and did not return until Friday. She, like nearly every person I
talked with who had acted a similar part, was sorry she did not remain
in the cellar of the house.
“When we came back, all I could do was jist to set right down and cry.”
The house had been plundered, their provisions, and the household
comforts they had been slowly getting together for years, had been swept
away by the all-devouring armies. “Them that stayed at home did not lose
anything; but if the soldiers found a house deserted, that they robbed.”
I inquired which plundered the most, our men or the Rebels.
“That I can’t say, stranger. The Rebels took; but the Yankees took right
smart. We left the house full, and when we got home we hadn’t a thing to
eat. Some wounded men had been fetched in, and they had got all the
bedding that was left, and all our clothing had been torn up for
bandages. It was a right hard time, stranger!”—spoken earnestly and with
tears. “I haven’t got well over it yet. It killed my old father; he
overworked getting the fences up again, and it wore on him so he died
within a year. We are jist getting things a little to rights again now,
but the place a’n’t what it was, and never will be again, in my day.”
She showed me, in an adjoining room, a looking-glass hanging within an
inch or two of a large patched space in the wall.
“That glass was hanging on that nail, jist as it hangs now, when a shell
come in yer and smashed a bedstead to pieces for me on that side of the
room, and the glass wasn’t so much as moved.”
Suspecting that I might be keeping her from her work, I urged her to
return to it, and found she had indeed quitted some important household
task, because “it didn’t seem right to leave a stranger sitting alone.”
I arose at once, on making that discovery, telling her I would rest
under the porch until the rain was over. She appeared for a moment quite
distressed, fearing lest the subtle law of politeness should somehow
suffer from her neglect. This woman’s sense of hospitality was very
strong, her whole manner carrying with it an earnest desire to make me
comfortable and keep me entertained while in her house. Although
troubled about her kitchen affairs, she seemed far more anxious about
her duty to me,—as if the accident of my being stopped by the rain at
her gate had placed her under sacred obligations. At last she thought of
a happy solution of the difficulty.
“I’ll get some pears and treat ye!” I begged her not to take that
trouble for me; but she insisted, repeating with pleased eagerness,
“Yes, I’ll get some pears and treat ye!”
She brought a dish of fruit, and afterwards sent two little girls, her
nieces, to keep me company while I ate. They were pretty, intelligent,
well-dressed misses of ten and twelve; the eldest of whom opened the
conversation by saying,—
“Right smart o’ fruit cher.” A phrase which I suspect every stranger
might not have understood, notwithstanding her prettily persuasive
smile. South of the Maryland and Pennsylvania line, and indeed in the
southern counties of Pennsylvania, one ceases to hear of a _plenty_ or a
_good deal_; it is always a “_heap_,” or “_right smart_.” The word
_here_, along the borders, is pronounced in various ways: _here_,
rarely; _yer_, commonly; _hyer_, which is simply _yer_ with an aspirate
before it; _jer_, when the preceding word ends with the sound of _d_,
and _cher_ after a final _t_. “Rough road jer,” is the southern for
“Rough road here”; “out cher,” means, similarly, “out here”; the final
_d_ and _t_ blending with the _y_ of _yer_, and forming _j_ and _ch_,
just as we hear “would jew” for “would you,” and “can’t chew” for “can’t
you,” everywhere.
The little girls played their hospitable part very charmingly, and I was
sorry to leave them; but the rain ceasing, I felt obliged to walk on.
They took me to their aunt, whom I wished to thank for her kindness.
Finding that I had not filled my pockets with the pears, as she had
invited me to do, she brought some grapes and gave me. I bore the purple
bunches in my hand, and ate them as I walked away from the house. They
were sweet as the remembered grace of hospitality.
The bridge was a mile farther on. The road strikes the creek, and runs
several rods along the right bank before crossing it. If the tourist is
surprised at the strength of the positions on South Mountain, from which
the Rebels were dislodged, he will be no less amazed at the
contemplation of Burnside’s achievement here. Above the road as it
approaches the bridge, and above the creek below the bridge, rises a
high steep bank, like a bluff. To approach from the opposite side,
exposed to a concentrated infantry and artillery fire flashing all along
this crest,—to carry the bridge, and drive back the enemy from their
vantage-ground,—one would say was a feat for the heroes of the age of
fable. But the truth is, though men are slow to receive it, there never
was any age, called “of fable,” or another, better than this,—none that
ever produced a more heroic race of men. We have worshipped the past
long enough; it is time now to look a little into the merits of the
present. Troy, and Greece, and Rome were admirable in their day, and the
men of Israel did some doughty deeds; but the men of New England, of the
great Middle States, and of the vast North-West, what have they done?
The Homeric heroes and demigods are in no way superior, except in brag,
to the hilarious lads of Illinois, or the more serious boys of
Massachusetts. Of materials such as these the poet would have made a
more resounding Iliad.
That Burnside’s command could ever have crossed this bridge, from the
high banks on the other side to the steep banks on this, in the face of
superior numbers pouring their deadly volleys upon them, that is what
astonishes you; and what grieves you is this: that reinforcements were
not sent to enable him to hold what he gained. If Porter, who had the
reserves, had been a man of right courage and patriotism, or anything
but a pet of the commanding general, he would have gone into the fight
when needed,—for reserves were not invented merely to be kept nice and
choice,—and the results of that day would have been very different.
I spent some hours about the bridge, the Antietam Creek singing all the
while its liquid accompaniment to my thoughts. It sang the same song
that day, but its peaceful music was drowned by the roar and clash of
the conflict. I sat down on a rock and watched a flock of buzzards
perched on the limbs of a dead tree, looking melancholy,—resembling, to
my mind, greedy camp-followers and army speculators, who remembered with
pensive regret the spoils of the good old war-days.
The bridge is narrow, affording space for only one vehicle at a time. It
is built of stone, and rests on two solid butments and two rounded
piers. There are woods on both sides of the stream. On the left bank
they stand a little back from it; on the right, they cover the side of
the bluff below the bridge. The trees all along here were well scarred
with shot. Half a mile below the bridge the creek makes a bold turn to
the right, and doubles back upon itself, forming a loop, then sweeps
away to the south, between a wooded hill on the west and a magnificent
growth of willows massing their delicate green and drooping foliage
along the low opposite shore.
Returning to the village, I visited the spot chosen as a national
cemetery for the slain. The ground had been purchased, but work upon it
had not yet commenced. As Pennsylvania gave the soil for the Gettysburg
Cemetery, so Maryland gives the soil for this; while each State will
defray its portion of future expenses. In the Antietam cemetery it is
understood that the Rebel dead are to be included. Many object to this;
but I do not. Skeletons, rooted up by hogs, and blanching in the open
fields, are a sight not becoming a country that calls itself Christian.
Be they the bones of Patriots or Rebels, let them be carefully gathered
up and decently interred without delay.
The Antietam National Burying-Ground also adjoins an old town cemetery.
It is situated on the right hand, at the summit of the road, as you go
up out of Sharpsburg towards Boonsboro’. Here let them rest together,
they of the good cause, and they of the evil; I shall be content. For
neither was the one cause altogether good, nor was the other altogether
bad: the holier being clouded by much ignorance and selfishness, and the
darker one brightened here and there with glorious flashes of
self-devotion. It was not, rightly speaking, these brothers that were at
war. The conflict was waged between two great principles,—one looking
towards liberty and human advancement, the other madly drawing the world
back to barbarism and the dark ages. America was the chessboard on which
the stupendous game was played, and those we name Patriots and Rebels
were but as the pawns.
Great was the day of Antietam. Three thousand of the enemy were buried
on the field. We had two thousand killed, upwards of nine thousand four
hundred wounded, and more than a thousand missing. Between the sweet
dawn and the bloody dusk of that dread day there fell TWENTY-FIVE
THOUSAND MEN! Can the imagination conceive of such slaughter?
And, after all, the striking fact about Antietam is this,—that it was a
great opportunity lost. The premature surrender of Harper’s Ferry, which
set free the force besieging it, and enabled the enemy to outnumber us
on the field,—for Stonewall Jackson was as anxious to get into the fight
as Fitz John Porter was to keep out of it,—and the subsequent inertia of
the General commanding the United States forces; these two causes
combined to save the Confederate army from annihilation. No such
opportunity for crushing the Rebellion at a blow had been offered, nor
was any such again offered,—not even at Gettysburg, for the enemy there
had no coiling river in their rear to entangle them, and we had no fresh
troops to launch upon them,—nor at any period afterwards, until Grant
consummated that long-desired object; God’s good time having not yet
come.