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Monday, November 21, 2016

Antietam National Battlefield, Sharpsburg, Maryland

As with almost all the Civil War battlefields preserved by the National Park Service, Antietam lies serene with its well-maintained fields and copses of trees. The place bears no resemblance to the ferocious place of death and destruction in 1862. To this day, Antietam remains the single bloodiest one-day battle in our nation’s history, worse even than D-Day or Iwo Jima in World War II. The Confederate defeat here ended Lee’s first invasion of the North and set the stage for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Like other battlefields, Antietam place bears silent witness to the thousands of men killed in the savage fighting in these hills, swales, and streams.
The battlefield at Antietam  (Photo by Hunner)
Lee invaded Maryland for several reasons: first, he wanted to rattle the North by taking the war to their homeland. Second, the rich farmland of Maryland beckoned as a cornucopia. Third, a successful invasion might open the door to foreign recognition of and support for the Confederacy.

The South’s victory at Second Manassas opened the route north. Lee’s plan called for the Army of Northern Virginia to split in two, with General Stonewall Jackson’s troops going to Harper’s Ferry and the rest heading farther north. However, the Union forces at Harper’s Ferry held out longer than expected. Complicating the invasion, Union soldiers found Lee’s secret battle orders in a muddy field, wrapping three cigars, but Union General McClellan failed to exploit Lee’s divided army. The invasion stalled near the town of Sharpsburg, and Lee considered retreating to Virginia until news reached him that Harper’s Ferry had finally fallen. With those Confederate troops now free to rejoin his army, Lee braced for battle with nearly 30,000 troops. McClellan’s army held 60,000 men with another 15,000 in reserve nearby.
General Robert E. Lee (From exhibit at Antietam's Visitors' Center)
The Battle of Antietam took place in three phases. First, at the Cornfield and the North Woods at the north end of the battlefield, the armies clashed with ferocious intensity. Then as the Northerners pressed in from the east, the Confederates regrouped in a sunken farm road afterwards known as the Bloody Lane. And finally at the southeast part of the battlefield, just when it looked like the North would crack the Confederate right, more Southern reinforcements rushed from Harper’s Ferry shored up their defenses. As Civil War historian James McPherson notes: “The fighting at Antietam was among the hardest of the war.”[1]

When I visited Antietam at the end of August, I sat behind the Visitors’ Center looking out over the battlefield as Chief Ranger Keith Synder sketched out the action. The first phase of the battle took place over five hours during the morning of September 17, 1862. Wading through a ripened corn field, five Union divisions slammed into five Confederate divisions which resulted in 12,000 men dead or wounded. The combat so shattered these divisions that they backed off, and few of those survivors rejoined the fighting that day.

By midday, the battle had shifted to the center of the lines as Confederate soldiers ducked into a sunken road to resist the Union onslaught at the Bloody Lane. After a determined resistance, this fell to the advancing troops in blue. A northern war correspondent who arrived right after the Union captured the road commented: “Confederates had gone down as the grass falls before the scythe.”[2] Those who escaped fled to nearby Sharpsburg to regroup.

General Burnside commanded the Union left on the southeast section of the battlefield. As a divisionary action, he tried to pin down Confederates so that they could not reinforce the fighting to the north. Instead, the Georgia troops on a hillside above a strategic bridge devastated the squads of Union soldiers who tried to rush across. After many delays, the Union took the bridge and also forded the Antietam Creek at nearby fords and forced the Southerners back.
Burnsides' Bridge from the rifle pits that the Georgians used to pick off the Union soldiers as they tried to cross it.
(Photo by Hunner)
Just when it seemed that the Union troops were going to roll up the Confederate right flank, General A.P. Hill’s men arrived from Harper’s Ferry and blunted the North’s advance. The next day, both sides stayed in the area without any major engagements. Each side had suffered much in the one-day battle—17,000 wounded and 6,000 dead or dying. Nearly one-third of the Confederates who marched north became causalities. Both sides reeled from such losses, which perhaps explains why McClellan failed to capture the exhausted Southern army which retreated to Virginia.

The number of dead and wounded shocked the public. The toll was horrendous—as McPherson says: “The causalities at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish American War combined.”[3] As the Civil War intensified, the body count mounted.
A Confederate cannon facing towards Burnsides' Bridge in the southern part of the battlefield
(Photo by Hunner)

One of the most lethal weapons on the Civil War’s battlefields was artillery which constituted its own branch of the army. Well placed cannons anchored an army’s position and blunted enemy attacks. 
Effective use of artillery required a well-trained set of soldiers and horses. A battery consisted of four to six guns manned by seventy to one hundred soldiers. Each unit consisted of a cannon, one or two limbers which carried between thirty and fifty rounds of ammo each, and a caisson with spare wheels and more ammunition. The limbers and caisson held between 120 to 200 rounds. The cannon, limber, and caisson in various combinations were pulled by six or more horses which made these weapons quickly responsive to a fluid battlefield.
Caisson and limber for a Civil War cannon (From Civil War Trust website) 
A cannon crew consisted of seven men. Four surrounded the gun with the Gunner in charge of aiming and giving commands. The other three at the gun washed and cleared the bore after every shot, rammed the ammunition and shell down the barrel, primed the powder bag, and lit the fuse or pulled the lanyard to fire the weapon. The final three in the crew ran ammunition from the caisson and limber (which were detached behind the cannon) to the gun and prepared the charges and fuses.

Two types of cannons blasted away during the war. Smoothbore guns fired round cannon balls. Rifled cannons had grooves cut inside the barrels which gave a spin to the fired round and proved more accurate. The range of many of the cannons at Antietam was around one mile.

These guns used four types of ammunition depending on the target. Smoothbores fired round shots while the rifled cannons used shells that looked like large bullets. Some ammo were solid projectiles while others had a fuse that exploded at its destination and scattered shell fragments. Case ammunition consisted of a shell packed with small balls that scattered once the fuse detonated while a canister shot contained golf ball size iron balls. Canister was used at close range—when soldiers were 100 to 300 yards away. Sometimes, the guns fired on opposing batteries to disable their enemy’s guns. Often however, cannons focused on charging infantry to disrupt advances.[4]

At Antietam, more than 500 cannons spewed lethal metal into the opposing side. Over 3,000 rounds per hour were fired, creating such a booming that “soldiers described the day as a ‘savage continual thunder’ and a ‘tumultuous chorus.’”[5] The effect of cannon balls, shell fragments, case, and canister on the human body was devastating.

As the Confederate army retreated, and the Union forces maneuvered to protect D.C., President Lincoln used the Union’s victory as an opportunity to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. On September 22, he issued a preliminary order which declared that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.” This executive order focused on slaves in the Confederacy, but obviously, few if any were at first freed. The Emancipation Proclamation also opened the door to Blacks serving in the military of the United States.


The Proclamation changed why the United States fought. Prior to issuing it, Lincoln said: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”[6] On January 1, 1863, the reason for fighting officially shifted to ending slavery on the continent. Slaves did free themselves by escaping from plantations and walking to Union camps or the north. It would take another two and a half years of war to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery. Next week, I will explore the impact that war deaths have on those left behind while in future weeks we will visit Chattanooga and the other battlefields in the Civil War. Having said this, I am now finishing up my sabbatical and road trip. I am not sure how much longer I can continue to post a blog every week, especially once I start teaching again in January. I am also figuring out how to turn this into a book. Please let me know any ideas you have about both my blog as well as what you would like to see in a book. 

Cannon at Antietam (Photo by Hunner)



[1] James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford university Press, 1988), 540.
[2] McPherson, Battle Cry,” 541.
[3] McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom,” 244.
[4] “Artillery at Antietam.”
[5] Keith Snyder, “Artillery at Antietam,” a brochure published by the Western Maryland Interpretive Association.
[6] George Tindall and David Shi, America: A Narrative History, (New York: W. W. Norton  & Company, 1984), 720.