DATE: Sunday, September 14, 1997            TAG: 9709120067

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: SHARPSBURG, MD.                   LENGTH:  420 lines

THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM: AMERICA'S BLOODIEST DAY WHAT HAPPENED ON A CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELD IN MARYLAND ON SEPT. 17, 1962, AFFECTED THE WHOLE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

THERE ARE GHOSTS here, I am sure of that. I do not see them, of course. I do not pretend to see them. But they are here in this cornfield. If ever there were ghosts, they would be here.

They must inhabit this place in their eternal agony, perhaps trying to tell me something in that ethereal way that ghosts do, trying to tell anyone who will pause to listen to their terrible stories, stories that most of us will never be able to fully comprehend.

I want to understand what happened at this place - here in this cornfield, over there in that worn farm lane, and down there beyond the ridge at the stone bridge that crosses the shallow, swift stream - to grasp, if that is possible, what it was really like on Sept. 17, 1862.

It was a long time ago. Only the ghosts remember.

Two armies - 87,000 Federals and 38,000 Confederates - clashed here 135 years ago Thursday on this rolling western Maryland farmland just east of a shabby little market town called Sharpsburg near a creek called the Antietam.

They met here not because this place has any particularly strategic significance, but rather because Union Gen. George B. McClellan had in his hand a misplaced copy of Robert E. Lee's Order No. 191, the infamous ``Lost Order,'' that detailed his plan to move the fighting out of Virginia at harvest time and northward across the Potomac River.

``Now I know what to do,'' McClellan said.

What happened here that day, and in its aftermath, is something

that all Americans should try to understand from several perspectives. It affected the whole course of the history of this country ever since.

The big picture. Arguably, it was THE great turning point of the Civil War, which continues to absorb millions of Americans. Perhaps, in terms of political strategy, it was the war's decisive battle.

Although about as close to a tactical stalemate as there ever was, it broke the first great Southern counter-offensive. It gave Abraham Lincoln the opening he needed - not exactly a victory, but not another humiliating defeat - to announce his Emancipation Proclamation, which, in turn, altered the character of the entire war. It became a war over slavery. No longer was it about states' rights but about human rights. There would be no foreign intervention on behalf of the Confederacy and no compromise; only submission and total surrender.

The war comes home. It is generally regarded as the birthplace of modern photojournalism. Two days after the battle, amid the horrid sights and putrid smells, Alexander Gardner and his assistant James F. Gibson began to record for the first time images of the carnage of war. A month later these photographs went on display in Matthew Brady's New York studio.

It was a 19th century precursor of network television dumping images of Vietnam into our living rooms. It was stunning, shocking. Said The New York Times (giving Brady the credit due Gardner and Gibson): ``Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.''

Unsurpassed carnage. In a war of many terrible battles, this must have been the worst of them all. Unquestionably it was the bloodiest single day in American history.

By the most conservative estimates more than 23,000 Americans, Federals and Confederates, fell on this field that day, nearly 4,000 of them killed outright. The figures do not take into account the soldiers who died later of their wounds. Many did. Some authorities place the combined casualty figure as high as 26,000.

Can you grasp those numbers? Consider: In the seven-year Revolutionary War 10,623 Americans were killed or wounded. In the four-year War of 1812, 6,765. In the three-year Mexican War 5,885. A total of 23,273 American battle casualties in these previous wars.

There would be more casualties at Gettysburg, but that battle was fought over a three-day period. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the total American casualties did not exceed 6,700. The 26-day battle for Iwo Jima cost the United States more than 21,000 casualties.

What could such a horrific day have been like?

This day has begun much like that September Thursday in 1862. An early morning mist has given way to a scorching sun. I am in this cornfield - forever after known as the Cornfield - where the battle began at first light. Corn grows here today just as it did in David Miller's 30-acre plot when the guns began to roar.

The battle here along the Antietam is perhaps the easiest for history-minded visitors to follow. There was no great ebb and flow over this 12-square-mile piece of farmland that looks hauntingly similar to the way it looked in 1862; there were no complex tactical movements.

It was fought in three distinct stages - piecemeal, if you will, in a series of uncoordinated Union attacks - first here in the Cornfield and the surrounding wood that was the Confederate left flank from dawn until about 10 a.m.; then at the farm lane marked on military maps as the Sunken Road in the Confederate center from about 10 until 1; and finally around what was to become known, somewhat sarcastically, as Burnside's Bridge on the Confederate right flank for much of the afternoon.

But the soldiers, the men who do the fighting and the killing and the dying, don't see the big picture. That is what generals do, or what they are supposed to do.

The soldiers see and hear and smell only what is immediately around them. Their view of war is often, coincidentally, scarcely broader than the width of these corn rows.

The cornstalks reach above my head. I can see the sky above but not what might lie ahead. The sharp-edged green leaves, like broadswords, sway and rustle in the breeze. Tan clods of dirt are mixed with plow-shattered chips of limestone or quartzite at my feet. But no pools of blood, no mangled body parts. Sweat saturates my shirt, drips down my cheek and off my eyebrows and into my eyes.

Bugs buzz around my head. Birds chirp in a clump of locust trees over there. A small plane drones overhead. Otherwise there is silence.

I had hoped the ghosts would communicate the terror of the moment. They do not. I believe I understand why.

I have never experienced a battle nor seen the aftermath. I will never be able to understand. I have read about battles and talked about battles; I have walked over battlefields, and I have watched countless hours of filmed battles. But I have never been in a battle, so I cannot grasp how men act in battle, have no way of knowing how I would have acted if I had been here.

I can understand battle strategy and tactics, but I cannot communicate with the men who do the grisly work - men who must suspend the capacity to reason and rely on that most basic of all instincts: Kill or be killed in a wild, savage, primitive act of madness.

I try to picture the way it would have been.

Clouds of acrid black-powder smoke hanging low like dirty sheets, leaving a black, greasy film on sweaty skin . . . billowing dust chokes the throat . . . can't swallow . . . water, water . . . breath comes in gasps, heart pounds, legs ache, burn . . . sour smell of sweat . . . bitter chemical taste from tearing paper cartridges . . . cannon and rifles roar, hundreds of individual explosions merging into uninterrupted thunder . . . shattered equipment underfoot . . . stumbling . . . men are shouting, cursing, praying . . . dull thwack of ball against bone, hard lead against soft flesh . . . the wounded scream, the dead lie silent. Fear, anger, pain, despair, all rolled into one.

But those are mere words on paper.

I find myself crouching in the corn row. What am I doing? This is absurd. If there were incoming fire, I would not be thinking about this. But there is not, of course, and I find myself pondering a math problem.

If there were 20 percent casualties among those engaged here that day, doesn't that mean that one bullet in five struck human flesh? In reality it doesn't work that way. But if it did . . . if each man engaged was firing as fast as he could - three times a minute at the outset, then two as fatigue set in - how long would it take for the bullet with your name on it to arrive?

What was it like?

Maj. Rufus R. Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin was here. He survived to tell about it.

``As we appeared at the edge of the corn, a long line of men in butternut and gray rose up from the ground. Simultaneously, the hostile battle lines opened a tremendous fire upon each other. Men, I cannot say, fell; they were knocked out of the ranks by the dozens. But we jumped over the fence and pushed on, loading, firing and shouting as we advanced.''

The Rebels countercharged. The battle lines were soon no more than 30 yards apart. Point-blank range.

``Men and officers . . . are fused into a common mass in the frantic struggle to shoot fast,'' Dawes recalled. ``Everybody tears cartridges, loads, passes guns or shoots. Men are falling in their places or running back into the corn. . . . The men are loading and firing with demonical fury and shouting and laughing hysterically. . . .''

Later Dawes' regiment would advance again, and again it would be met by a counterattack.

``A long and steady line of Rebel gray . . . comes sweeping down through the woods around the (Dunker) church.'' With a Rebel yell they open fire.

``It is like a scythe running through our lines. . . . It is a race for life that each man runs for the cornfield. . . .Back to the corn, and back through the corn, the headlong flight continues.''

So the Confederates stopped parts of three Federal corps totaling 31,000 men. Nine times, by my reading of the accounts, this cornfield changed hands.

Dawes later saw action at Spotsylvania's ``Bloody Angle,'' in front of the stone wall at Fredericksburg and at the ``slaughter pen'' of Cold Harbor.

``My feeling,'' he said, ``was that the Antietam turnpike (the Hagerstown turnpike beside the cornfield) surpassed all in manifest evidence of slaughter.''

In a square of ground, centered on the cornfield, measuring about 1,000 yards on a side, nearly 12,000 men from both sides lay dead or wounded. The slaughter had taken four hours at most before it came to a sullen, exhausted halt.

Somehow the bullet with Dawes' name on it had not found its mark. For many others it was a different story.

John B. Gordon was the 30-year-old colonel of the 6th Georgia. His men had begun to think he was bulletproof.

Always in the thick of things, his uniform had been pierced several times at Seven Pines, where he had seen his younger brother killed. During the Seven Days campaign his uniform and some of his equipment were again pierced, and he was temporarily blinded by sand thrown up by an exploding shell. But neither lead nor steel had touched him.

On this day he and his men were positioned in the farm lane about a half-mile south of the battle that raged around the Cornfield and its adjacent woods. Over the years heavily loaded farm wagons had worn down the lane until much of its length was several feet below the fields on each side. It was a long, naturally formed trench called the Sunken Road.

Today, like the Cornfield, it looks much as it did before the battle began, with snake-rail fences on either side and grass growing where there were once dusty wagon ruts. Peering through the rails, I try to imagine what Gordon would have seen. The open field to the north is as empty as the Sunken Road. Except for the ghosts.

Gordon had told Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, ``These men are going to stay here, General, till the sun goes down or victory is won.''

It was a pledge he wouldn't be able to keep.

On this day the law of averages would reach out for Gordon in the place that would come to be called Bloody Lane. Up to now he had been lucky. But he was not bulletproof. Five times he was hit.

Think of what that must have been like. The soft lead projectiles that filled the air were most often .58 caliber, more than a half-inch in diameter. Very heavy stuff.

Gordon would survive to tell about it.

``The men in blue . . . formed on my front, an assaulting column four lines deep. . . . The brave Union commander, superbly mounted, placed himself in front, while his band in rear cheered them with martial music. . . . As we stood looking upon that brilliant pageant, I thought . . . `What a pity to spoil with bullets such a scene of martial beauty!' But . . . Mars is not an aesthetic god.''

Indeed. Soon it turned very ugly. The battle here, like the Cornfield before it, was close-range and intense.

Early on Gordon got a bullet through the right calf and soon afterward another higher up in the same leg. An hour later he was hit in the left arm ``tearing the tendons and mangling the flesh.'' Then another bullet ripped through his left shoulder. Four wounds and he was still standing, but ``the loss of blood had left but little of my normal strength.''

Then he was hit a fifth time. The bullet ``struck me squarely in the face and passed out, barely missing the jugular vein. I fell forward and lay unconscious with my face in my cap; and it would seem that I might have been smothered by the blood running into my cap . . . but for the act of some Yankee who had, at a previous hour . . . shot a hole through the cap, which let the blood run out.''

Strange thing about Civil War wounds and the medical care of the time. Brig. Gen. George B. Anderson, who commanded troops on Gordon's right flank, was shot once in the foot. He would die of complications in a few weeks.

With Gordon carried off, the Alabamans misinterpreted an order to reposition and pulled out altogether. The Federals occupied the vacated position and began to lay down an enfilading fire that decimated the Rebels.

And having taken the Bloody Lane - they did not occupy it because it was filled with corpses, more than 200 in a 500-foot stretch - the Federals stopped, as spent as their comrades in the Cornfield.

While all this was going on, at the Cornfield and at Bloody Lane, George McClellan, the Union commander, had expected Ambrose Burnside to attack the Rebels' right flank. He had sent specific orders before midmorning.

To attack, Burnside would have to get his troops across the Antietam. It was, and is, an insignificant creek, about 50 feet wide in most places. And shallow enough to ford, although apparently no one on the Union side thought to check the depth.

Burnside became obsessed with the stone bridge at his front. Apparently he wanted his troops to cross without getting their feet wet.

On the Confederate side, hardly more than 400 Georgia riflemen sat in wait on the wooded bluff above the bridge.

Henry Kyd Douglas, on Stonewall Jackson's staff, was a native of Sharpsburg, and he knew the terrain. After the war he would write:

``Why the bridge? It was no Thermopylae. Go look at it and tell me if you don't think Burnside and his corps might have executed a hop, skip and jump and landed on the other side. One thing is for certain, they might have waded it that day without getting their waist belts wet in any place.''

Douglas is right, of course. The creek is shallow. The bridge remains almost exactly as it looked the day of the battle. There's even one living relic of that day here.

In a post-battle sketch of the bridge by combat artist Edwin Forbes, there is a small sycamore on the northeast (Union) side of the bridge. Today the same tree is a giant patriarch shading the bridge and the stream.

Finally Burnside did get some his troops across, about 3,000 of the 12,000 he had available - piecemeal, of course, just as the other Federal commanders had engaged their forces earlier in the day. And slowly. The bridge is only wide enough for eight men to walk abreast.

Lee asked Jackson, the left flank commander by then no longer heavily engaged, to send artillery support against Burnside's attack. He sent a battery of the Rockbridge Artillery.

``It soon came up and went sweeping by at a trot,'' Douglas would remember. ``In the ranks of that noble band was Robert E. Lee Jr., as a private, and as he passed, black with the grime of a long day's fight, he stopped for a moment to salute his illustrious father and then, hat in hand, rushed after his gun.''

That's wasn't what blunted the third disjointed Union attack of the day, however. It was A.P. Hill's Light Division, arriving on the field after a 17-mile forced march from Harper's Ferry - many of them in Federal blue uniforms they had ``appropriated'' from the U.S. arsenal there - that stopped the final Union advance.

What could have been going through the minds of those who still lived as the sun, which seemed to have stood still most of the day, finally sank into the heavy smoke behind the town of Sharpsburg?

``The truth is,'' said David L. Thompson, an enlisted man from New York who was captured near Burnside's Bridge, ``when bullets are whacking against tree trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like eggshells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.''

The aftermath was dreadful, hideous, ghastly. Again, just words. It was beyond comprehension.

After dark, Kyd Douglas made his way toward the rear of the Dunker (German Baptist) Church behind Confederate lines.

``The dead and dying lay as thick over it as harvest sheaves,'' he wrote. ``The pitiable cries for water and appeals for help were much more horrible to listen to than the deadliest sounds of battle. . . .

``My horse trembled under me in terror, looking down at the ground, sniffing the scent of blood, stepping falteringly as a horse will over or by the side of human flesh; afraid to stand still, hesitating to go on, his animal instinct shuddered at this cruel human mystery. Once his foot slid into a little shallow filled with blood and spurted a stream on his legs and my boots. I had had a surfeit of blood that day and I couldn't stand this.''

Lee wanted to fight again the next day. It was his way. At sunset his lines were intact, though badly decimated. Since his opponent had outnumbered him 2-to-1 and had known his intentions, it might be argued that he had scored a tactical victory. But what he needed was a strategic victory - a Federal retreat and a continued advance northward - and that was now beyond his capacity. He was dissuaded.

A Confederate offensive probably would have been a disaster. Except . . . except that his opponent was McClellan. Little Mac could organize an army as well as anyone but he couldn't fight with it. At the end of the battle he still had a numerically superior force, including at least 15,000 he hadn't even put into action.

Perhaps he had known what to do. But he didn't know how.

During the night of the 18th and the early morning of the 19th Lee formed his battered Rebel army and marched south. McClellan let them go, and, with that final bit of inaction, his military career as well.

And within hours after it was confirmed on the 19th that the Confederates had withdrawn, cameramen Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson began to record the images of the dreadful, hideous, ghastly aftermath.

Only by then it was even worse. Unspeakably awful. Bodies, human and horse, exposed to both scorching sun and a night's rain, had begun to decompose horribly.

Those were the images that made up the exhibit called ``The Dead at Antietam'' a month later at Matthew Brady's Broadway gallery in New York.

The crowds that viewed them in hushed groups seemed as if under some spell. There had never been anything quite like this - morbidly captivating, terribly fascinating.

In a pensive commentary on the exhibit, an anonymous New York Times reporter wrote:

``(T)he dead of the battlefield come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confusing mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. . . .

``These pictures have a terrible distinctness. . . . We would scarce choose to be in the gallery when one of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless line of bodies that lie ready for the gaping trenches.''

The glory and romance of battle were gone forever. The war had come home.

For those in bondage, freedom would not follow immediately, or even soon. That is not what Lincoln's announcement on Sept. 22, that he would issue an Emancipation Proclamation, was all about. It was a threat of punitive action, a warning to the states in rebellion that unless they returned to the Union by Jan. 1, 1863, he would declare their slaves free.

That is all the president's war powers allowed him to do. And he could not even enforce that until his armies occupied the rebellious territory.

Moreover, the proclamation, when it was formally issued at the beginning of the new year, did not apply to the loyal slave states. Slavery was an institution that could be abolished only by individual state action or an amendment to the Constitution.

It would remain for the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified on Dec. 18, 1865, to free the slaves ``within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.''

What the first public mention of the Emancipation Proclamation, just five days after Antietam, did do was make the war a moral issue. It was the sounding forth of the trumpet that would never call retreat.

As Lincoln said, revolutions never go backward but proceed relentlessly to their end.

Antietam was the bloody first step, the bloodiest of them all. ILLUSTRATION: Library of Congress photo

Battle photographs at Antietam by Alexander Gardner and James F.

Gibson marked the beginning of photojournalism

Color photo

STEPHEN HARRIMAN

The battlefield in 1997

Corbis Image photo

The first Union objective was to take the Confederate left flan,

anchored by the Dunker Church.

Color photo

STEPHEN HARRIMAN

Area near the Dunker Church in 1997

Map

Graphic

TRAVELER'S ADVISORY: ANTIETAM

Getting there: Antietam National Battlefield lies north and east

of Sharpsburg, Md. It is a little more than a hour's drive from

Washington, D.C. From the Capital Beltway (I-495) take I-270

northwest to Frederick. From there take I-70 west to exit 49 and

follow Alternate U.S. 40 west to Boonsboro. From there take Md.

Route 34 toward Sharpsburg.

As an alternative, if you have more time, at Frederick take U.S.

340 west to Harpers Ferry, W.Va., and visit the National Historical

Park there. Ask at the visitor center for a ``Route to Antietam''

flyer, which will show you the way north through the town of

Shepherds-town, then across the Potomac to Sharpsburg.

Open: The battlefield is open every day; the visitor center is

open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day during

daylight hours. Admission is $2 per person or $4 per family. NPS

info: (301) 432-5124.

Getting around: There is a driving tour of the battlefield,

clearly explained in a brochure available at the visitor center.

There are Park Service informational signs at each stop that provide

maps, photographs and quotes. They tell the basic story. In addition

there are:

More than 300 tablets with more detailed information scattered

throughout the battlefield. They were created by the War Department

in the 1890s. The tablets are best used to find individual regiments

and follow the detailed actions of the battle. It is often difficult

to use the tablets without a good working knowledge of the battle.

Monuments, primarily erected by veterans of the battle and states

to commemorate their sacrifices, are typically located where the

particular troops fought. There are 103 monuments at Antietam, the

majority of which are Union. After the war the former Confederacy

was so devastated that it was difficult for veterans to raise money

to build monuments.

There were more than 500 cannons at the battle. Those on the

field today mark the location of batteries during the battle. The

barrels are from the Civil War; the wheels and carriages have been

rebuilt.

Mortuary cannons are cannons with their muzzles down, mounted in

blocks of stone. These bear the names and mark the locations where

generals were killed or mortally wounded during the battle. There

are three for each side.

Warning: Relic hunting is prohibited. Do not climb on cannons,

monuments or fences.

Time element: It's almost impossible to make a visit to Antietam

from South Hampton Roads in a day. To make it rewarding, think in

terms of a weekend outing.

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