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Posted on 09/17/2003 12:00:12 AM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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| Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support. The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer. If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions. We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.
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There's not much there. It's just a field, really. But people come every day, sometimes from far away, to stand and look.  It's beautiful to watch, hypnotic and mesmerizing, but that's not why the people stand there for so long. They're staring at the grass but they're seeing something else, something that hasn't been there for 133 years. They seldom speak. When they do, it's usually in a hush, nothing loud enough to drown out the drone of the crickets. This field of hay is called "the Cornfield" because that's what it was at dawn on September 17, 1862. By noon, though, the corn was gone, cut to the ground by bullets and cannon shells, and the field was covered with thousands of dead or broken men. It was the bloodiest part of the bloodiest day in this country's history -- the Battle of Antietam. Nearly 23,000 Americans were killed, wounded or missing in action outside Sharpsburg, Md., that day -- nearly four times the American casualties on D-Day. When the sun set and the battle ended, the two opposing armies were still in about the same positions they'd been the previous night. Yet something was won that day, something so profound that George F. Will once called the Battle of Antietam "the second most important day in American history." July 4, 1776, gave us the Declaration of Independence. September 17, 1862, gave us the Emancipation Proclamation.  That terrible day at Antietam, the First Texas Regiment battles for the Cornfield. Of 226 engaged, 40 returned unharmed. Today, few Americans know much about Antietam, and even fewer visit the battlefield. More than a million and a half tourists cram into Gettysburg every year and nearly a million visit Manassas, but fewer than 240,000 venture to Antietam. Those who do find that Sharpsburg hasn't changed much since the battle. It has a few inns, a gallery of Civil War art and a tiny museum, but not a single motel or souvenir stand or fast-food joint. Except for a small stone visitors center, a cemetery and some monuments, the battlefield, too, looks about the same as it did before the shooting started. Most of the fields where soldiers fought and died are still farms where families coax crops from the ground. Antietam is only 70 miles from Washington, but it's off the tourist track, away from the interstates, tucked into the beautiful hills of western Maryland. It's not a place you stumble upon by accident. People tend to come to Antietam in search of something -- a fallen ancestor, a glimpse of history, a place to contemplate their country. They find a field, a sunken dirt road, an old stone bridge, a tiny white church -- all of them haunted by an air of tragedy so palpable that it compels almost everyone to whisper, as if they were visiting a cathedral.  Federal Troops retreat from the Cornfield They stand silently, gazing out at the swaying grass of the Cornfield. Ask them what they're thinking and nearly all of them repeat some variation of the same three questions: How could they have done it? Could we do it today? Could I? "The Union forces in Virginia have suffered three catastrophic defeats in 1862," says Jerry Holsworth. "They have been humiliated by General Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, mauled by Lee in the Seven Days Battle, and again at Manassas. They huddle around Washington, D.C., in a state of very low morale . . ."  Holsworth is a park ranger at the Antietam National Battlefield. He's standing behind the visitors center on a sweltering afternoon, delivering the standard half-hour orientation speech in his own flamboyant style. Spread out in a semicircle around him are two dozen tourists in shorts and sneakers and T-shirts. Holsworth has asked where they're from, and they've replied Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio. Holsworth is from Texas. At 44, he's working his second summer on the Antietam battlefield. And now he's standing in his Park Service uniform -- gray shirt, green pants, Smokey Bear hat -- telling the story of the battle, enlivening it with dramatic flourishes and plenty of body English. He tells how Robert E. Lee's Confederates have driven the Union army out of Virginia and back to Washington, how Abraham Lincoln is desperate for a victory so he can issue the Emancipation Proclamation, how Lee has seized the initiative by crossing the Potomac and invading Maryland, hoping that a victory on Northern soil will bring aid from England and France. "Lee's army is suffering, folks," Holsworth says in his Texas drawl. "Half the men are barefoot. They're in rags. They've been fightin' continuously for three or four months without a break. Many of them are livin' on green corn and creek water."  General Robert E. Lee Still, the Rebels easily seized the city of Frederick, and Lee decided to take a dangerous gamble. Knowing that Union Gen. George McClellan was a slow, cautious man, Lee figured that he could divide his already-outnumbered army, send part of it to capture the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, and then reunite it -- all before McClellan attacked. Lee issued Special Order 191, which detailed his plan. But one of his officers wrapped a copy of the order around three cigars and accidentally dropped it in a field near Frederick, where a Union soldier found it. It was passed up the ranks to McClellan, who instantly realized that he could destroy Lee's divided army piece by piece. He pondered this for 18 hours, then sent his army after Lee.  General George McClellan Holsworth sweeps his hand out in a long horizontal arc, pointing out the ridge that his audience is standing on. "Lee will bring what's left of his army here to Sharpsburg Ridge with the idea of giving up the campaign and skedaddling back to Virginia," he says. He pauses dramatically. "But that night Lee would see the letter that would change his mind. Dear General Lee: Harpers Ferry will surrender in the morning. Signed T.J. Jackson, Major General, Confederate States Army.' " The next day, as promised, Jackson captured Harpers Ferry. He left Gen. A.P. Hill and a few thousand men to handle the surrender, then marched his troops back here, to the high ground between the Potomac River and Antietam Creek. Reinforced, Lee decided to stand and fight. The Rebels, about 40,000 strong, dug in along Sharpsburg Ridge. The Federals, 80,000 of them, prepared to attack. Everyone on both sides realized that tomorrow would bring a cataclysmic battle. The sun set amid the sound of sniper fire. Rain began to fall.  "The day before the battle, the soldiers came around and said, You all better get out, there's gonna be a hell of a battle here,' " says Earl Roulette. "That was on my great-granddaddy Roulette's farm. He stayed during the battle. A lot of people took their families and went out along the river to a big cave." Roulette had three great-granddaddies with farms on the battlefield -- a Roulette, a Snavely and a Rohrbach. He lives on a fourth farm, on the other side of town, near the spot where Lee made his headquarters. He farmed it for more than half a century before he retired -- "wheat and corn and barley and hay and cattle, pretty much the same as they did then." In 1976, he sold a big chunk of it to a company that built a development where the streets are named after Confederate generals -- Lee, Longstreet, Jackson, Hill.  Confederate dead on the Hagerstown road at the Battle of Antietam "Everybody thinks the Civil War was forever ago," he says. "I'm only 75 and a half, and my grandfather was 12 during the battle. He hid down at Snavely's Ford. I remember my grandpappy talking about it. What I'm saying is: It's just one generation." He's an old man with a bald head fringed by a few wisps of white hair, but he's still spry enough to hop up from his dining room table to fetch a few mementos. He comes back with an old document encased in plastic. It's a handwritten list of everything his great-grandfather William Roulette lost during the battle -- 8 hogs, 12 sheep, 3 calves, 3 barrels of flour, 155 bushels of potatoes, 220 bushels of apples . . . It goes on for page after page.  General A.P. Hill "See, this was September," he says. "These farmers were all ready for winter. In those days, you didn't run over to A&P or Food Lion to get your stuff. If you didn't have it in the fall, you did without till spring." William Roulette filed his list with the federal government, hoping to be compensated for his losses, but his great-grandson doubts that he ever got a nickel. "He had to prove it was taken by the Northern army," he says, "and how the hell could you prove it when both armies were fighting there?" He points to another item on the list -- "burial ground for 700 soldiers." He smiles wryly. "Can you imagine 700 soldiers buried in your back yard?"  Confederate dead in the Sunken Lane at the Battle of Antietam He puts down the list, rummages through a metal tray piled with battle relics he's found on his farm over the years -- bullets, belt buckles, cannonballs. He picks out a dime. It looks almost new, but the date reads 1861. "It lay out there for over a hundred years," he says. "I just found it a couple of years ago." He digs out a pair of bullets with tooth marks in them. "You've heard the expression biting the bullet'?" he asks. "Well, here's a couple that was bit on." He figures they were bitten by soldiers fighting the pain of getting a wounded arm or leg amputated -- a common operation after the battle. "You don't go around biting bullets unless you got a pretty good reason." He sorts through the pile and picks out a thin gold ring. He didn't find it on his farm; it was passed down from his grandpa Snavely. "A soldier died in their house," he says. "I believe it was an officer and not just a plain soldier. Whichever side it was, soldiers from the other side were coming and they had to get rid of him, 'cause if you had an enemy soldier in your house, you were the enemy. Feelings ran a little high along about then. So anyhow, they took him and they dumped him in the creek. And before they threw him in, my grandpa Snavely took this ring off his finger."  General John Bell Hood He holds the ring gently between his thumb and forefinger. Its circle is broken. There's a piece missing, a section cut or worn away. He raises it up to where it can catch the sunlight that streams through the window, but it's too old and tarnished to glimmer. "This meant something to somebody," he says.
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Casualties at Antietam
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Casualties include three categories: 1) dead; 2) wounded; and 3) missing or captured. |
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These are the approximate numbers for September 17th, 1862. No one knows the actual number of men who would later die of their wounds or the number of missing who had been killed. If you take a conservative estimate of 20% of the wounded dying of their wounds and 30% of the missing killed, the approximate number of soldiers that died as a result of this battle are 7,640. |
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Casualties at Antietam by Phase of Battle
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| The casualty numbers below include all three categories. The numbers below are approximations of the casualties that occurred in each phase of the battle. The chaos of battle makes it exceedingly difficult to develop precise numbers for casualties in each phase of the battle. Overall, 1 in 4 soldiers involved in battle that day were killed, wounded, or missing. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| *The total numbers for the battle do not reflect the sum of all three phases due to approximations for numbers in each phase. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Had George McClellan been the military genius Melville hails him as in this poem, the War might well have ended on the banks of Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862. Instead, McClellan frittered away numerous opportunities to rout the Army of Northern Virginia despite finding an errant copy of Robert E. Lee's Special Order No. 191 outlining Confederate strategy for the upcoming campaign.
After McClellan floundered badly on the Peninsula in July, the Army of the Potomac was removed from his command a piece at a time, and he was forced to watch from the sidelines as General John Pope bungled the Battle of Second Manassas. The AoP was subsequently reconsolidated under "Little Mac" even though Abraham Lincoln had grave misgivings about his demonstrated unwillingness to bring the army to battle.
Federal troops outnumbered the Confederates by a considerable margin at the Battle of Antietam, but McClellan was exceedingly cautious about commiting his men, in many cases refusing to send them where their presence was sorely needed "in case" something should happen elsewhere on the field. Far from "fighting in the front," as the poet says, McClellan watched the battle unfold from the safety of his hilltop headquarters at the Pry house, some distance from the field.
Although McClellan's army inflicted heavy casualties on the Army of Northern Virginia on the 17th, Lee did not withdraw immediately, believing until the last minute that a counterattack was possible. On September 18, the ANV slipped across the Potomac under cover of darkness and back to the safety of Virginia. McClellan lost yet another golden opportunity to destroy Lee's army by believing his own army too badly crippled to give pursuit.
If Lee had failed to gain the hoped-for foothold in the North, McClellan had failed to destroy the ANV or to win a decisive victory. Still, the quasi-triumph gave the Union the boost that President Lincoln needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22.
McClellan's failure to follow up on whatever advantage the North might have gained at Antietam was the final nail in his coffin -- and Lincoln was only too happy to pound it in, relieving McClellan of all command responsibilities after the AoP did nothing in seven weeks of prime campaigning season following the battle. The general retired to private life and ran against his former commander in chief for president on the Democratic ticket in 1864 -- and lost.
Kathie Watson
At least the Gettysburg Tower is gone now.
I've read that as well. What's amazing, is the fact that much of the technology which made the "industrial revolution" possible existed at the time of Christ. If it were assembled into a steam engine at that time, the inventor's work didn't survive.
I don't know anything really. I have a photocopy of his discharge, listing the names of the battle he fought in. I've not researched it any further yet. Msdrby loves geneaology. She'll get me on it, if nothing else.
Now, the Confederate line was broken in its center. With one quick push, McClellan could have cut Lee's army in two, then destroyed it. He had fresh troops ready to go. But he never gave the order to attack.
"It would not be prudent," he explained.
McClellan. Grrrrrr!
Why is Antietam overlooked by comparison to Gettysburg? The victory, if you can call it that, was not as clearcut. The Gettysburg story is full of drama, heroics and luck, although there is plenty of all three at Antietam. I think the main reason is that Antietam leaves us with a sense of sadness, the same sadness we feel when we think that Americans were once so divided that fought and killed each other is horrific numbers. Antietam is a story of two armies clawing, hacking and killing each other in what still stands as the bloodiest day in American military history. The tactics were frontal attack, brute force. Little credit goes to either General. Lee was saved by great good luck and McClellan's incompetance. McClellan's dithering prevented a great victory. I think all this is why when people visit Gettysburg they feel exhilerated while at Antietam people feel sadness and become silent.
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