Ghosts of Gettysburg Haunted Daytrips: Antietam
It is a dubious distinction, indeed. But just for the historical records, the question should be asked.
What is the bloodiest day in all of American History?
Many will say D-Day, June 6, 1944, the invasion of Normandy.
The toll was about 10,000 military casualties, but those figures represent all the Allies, not just Americans landing on that fateful day.
Some will say the Battle of Gettysburg with its astounding 51,000 casualties. But Gettysburg was spread out over three days.
Others may point to the attack on Pearl Harbor where 2,403 were killed—including 68 civilians—and 1282 were wounded.
Still others may cite September 11, 2001 when the U. S. was attacked by terrorists. There were 246 deaths in planes, 125 mostly military deaths at the Pentagon, and 2,606 in New York City totaling 2,977. But they weren’t all Americans who died, some were foreign nationals working in the U.S.
All were horrific, tragic, and sad beyond words. All left an indelible scar on the hearts of caring Americans of any generation.
But nothing in all of American History comes close to one fall day in 1862. On September 17, two American armies ripped and clawed at each other with artillery, rifled-muskets and bayonets until, after about twelve hours of fighting, nearly 23,000 men lay dead, dying or wounded near the small creek called Antietam outside of the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. According to their website, the National Park Service’s “official” figure is 22,720 casualties for September 17, 1862. They admit that, with the massive amount of catastrophic violence that occurred, no figures are rock solid.
The Battle of Antietam: Prelude
During the spring and summer of 1862, the military fortunes of the Confederacy were rising. General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, with rapid marches, had seriously roughed-up Union armies in the Shenandoah Valley. To the east, Confederate forces, after strategic retreats, had victoriously driven Federal troops from the very gates of Richmond during the Seven Days Battles on the Virginia Peninsula, between the James and York Rivers.
Under their new commander, General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia struck their Federal enemies near the 1861 battlefield of Manassas. At the Second Battle of Manassas, in August 1862, Confederates were so determined to win that some soldiers threw rocks when they ran out of ammunition. Seemingly unstoppable, the veteran Confederates followed Lee across the Potomac River and into Maryland on their first invasion of the north.
Hoping to garner support from the citizens of the border state, Lee kept a tight rein on foraging by his men. Regardless, Marylanders’ reception of the Confederate army was still cool. In order to open a supply route into the Shenandoah Valley, Lee needed to seize Harpers Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, the scene of Abolitionist John Brown’s aborted raid to free the slaves in October 1858.
One timeless maxim of war is that a commander should never divide his forces in the face of the enemy. But more than once Robert E. Lee, ever the audacious tactician, would violate that edict during his tenure as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. On his way northward, in early September 1862, splitting his army and relying on his opponent’s caution, he sent Stonewall Jackson to capture Harpers Ferry. On September 13, his audacity almost cost him his army. Union commander Major General George B. McClellan was handed three cigars wrapped in a copy of Lee’s orders, discovered at an abandoned Confederate campsite, specifying the routes for the divided sections of Lee’s army. With those plans in hand, McClellan could now pounce on each section with his full force before they could unite, thereby destroying the main army of the rebellion.
Instead of acting immediately, McClellan dithered. A southern sympathizer delivered the news of McClellan’s finding Lee’s order to Confederate Cavalry Commander J.E.B. Stuart, who passed the information to Lee. In response, Lee plugged the gaps in the South Mountains with Confederate soldiers. Savage and heroic fighting bought Lee a whole day. He was considering retreating to the Shenandoah Valley when word came from Jackson that Harpers Ferry was about to fall. (Its capture would net nearly 12,000 Union prisoners, one of the largest wholesale captures in U.S. Army history.) Lee sent orders to his units to concentrate at Sharpsburg, Maryland.
As it was, McClellan still managed to corner a part of Lee’s army with the Potomac River at its back near Sharpsburg behind Antietam Creek. McClellan’s attacks began at dawn, September 17, 1862. However, what was to be coordinated Union assaults, instead struck the rebel line in piecemeal fashion.
Union attacks swept from the north and fighting rolled southward. For the next eight hours northern soldiers fought through areas whose names would be seared into the American military psyche: the Cornfield, the West Woods, the East Woods, the Sunken Road, soon to be christened “Bloody Lane.” Lee continued to shift his troops from one endangered segment of his line to the next, barely staving off catastrophe. On the southern end of the battlefield, a handful of Georgia sharpshooters tenaciously held Union general Ambrose Burnside’s Ninth Corps from crossing Antietam Creek and encircling Lee’s army.
When Union assaults finally drove Confederates from the Sunken Road leaving it half full of southern bodies, all McClellan needed to do was send in his reserves. Confederate artillerist E. P. Alexander wrote of the imminent catastrophe: “Lee’s army was ruined, and the end of the Confederacy was in sight.” But true to Lee’s estimation of his opponent, McClellan, believing Lee’s army to be larger than it really was, exercised caution and held back.
Burnside’s men finally forced a crossing of the bridge that would ignominiously bear his name forever. Once again Lee’s army was threatened with destruction: Burnside was about to cut off Lee’s army’s only retreat route across the Potomac, but he halted to reorganize his advance. All McClellan needed to do was send in support to Burnside. Fatally, his caution once again prevailed.
But Lee had his own troubles. Looking to the south, he saw a dust cloud rising from marching troops. If they were Union troops, his army was destroyed, the Confederate cause of independence shattered. For what seemed like an eternity, an aide peering through a telescope, finally announced the column was marching under Confederate flags; A. P. Hill had arrived after a killing march from Harpers Ferry and burst upon Burnside’s flank, stopping his attack in its tracks.
Dawn of September 18, around the small Maryland hamlet was nothing like dawn on the 17th. The day revealed fields strewn with some 3,650 silent dead and 17,300 moaning wounded. The two armies sat cautiously watching one another: Lee expecting a continuation of the attacks from the previous day, the next of which could be fatal to his army; McClellan seemingly satisfied he had avoided contact with what he fantasized as Lee’s never-ending reserves.
Lee began his retreat into Virginia.
McClellan boasted of a great victory. But his main objective of destroying Lee’s army went unfulfilled.
The Union general assured Washington that Pennsylvania was now safe from Confederate invasion, but with the Army of Northern Virginia intact, and after a series of major victories for it in the future, within nine months, Lee’s legions would be crossing the Mason-Dixon line again, marching menacingly into the Keystone State.
Directions to Sharpsburg, Maryland: There are a number of ways to reach Sharpsburg from Gettysburg, all taking about an hour and fifteen minutes. My favorite route is through the mountains west of Frederick. Take Route 15 South from Gettysburg. At Frederick, exit onto Route 40 West (West Patrick Street). Follow Route 40 until it leaves town, then bear left onto Alternate Route 40.After passing through the Gap you will enjoy a scenic drive down the slope of South Mountain, across the valley and through Middletown, eventually coming to Boonsboro. In Boonsboro, turn left on Potomac Street. This will bring you to the outskirts of Sharpsburg. You’ll start to see cannons, ubiquitous on our Civil War battlefields.
This route also takes you through the battlefield of South Mountain (named so by Northern troops) or Boonsboro (the Confederate name for the battle) fought on September 14, 1862. Prominent in the accounts of this delaying battle for one of the gaps in the mountains prior to Antietam, is the so-called “Mountain House,” now a restaurant called the Old South Mountain Inn. Dating back to 1732, it is located on the old National Pike, which carried troops (possibly including a young George Washington) to the future battlefields of the French and Indian War in western Pennsylvania.
There are a number of ghost stories circulating around the old stone house. For example, a fire broke out in one part of the building. It was undetected until a door, which was habitually closed, opened by itself. An employee smelled smoke just in time to put the fire out. The opening of the door was attributed to Madeline Dahlgren, one-time owner of the Inn, but long dead at the time of the fire.
Antietam National Battlefield is located near Sharpsburg.
A number of years ago a group of reenactors, under the cover of darkness, made their way out to the Bloody Lane to spend the night sleeping on the exact spot where historic photographs showed piles of bodies. Shortly after they settled in for the night, one after another, they began to leave, some slowly, some more rapidly, all complaining of some sort of weirdness that had descended upon them, from auditory anomalies to sensing something “just not right.” One reenactor was left, laughingly mocking his comrades, calling them derogatory names, swearing he was there to stay the night.
His friends were gathered about their cars when they heard a blood-curdling scream emanate from the darkened fields of death. A figure staggered from the darkness. It was their fellow reenactor, out of breath from a terrified sprint away from the Bloody Lane. It was several minutes before they could get him to calm down and relate what happened.
He was lying, he said, flat on his back, chuckling to himself about his friends leaving him for some imagined sound or trifling feeling. Suddenly he began to hear strange, unearthly sounds, whispers of moans close to his ears, the rustling of grass between his arm and chest. All his imagination, he thought, until the rustling turned into the vision of a human arm rising from the darkened, blood-soaked earth beside his torso. Frightened by the bizarre vision he tried to rise. The mangled arm and hand twisted around to press down on his chest and pin him to the ground. At his scream, the more than imaginary arm let him go.
[image error]Antietam’s Bloody Lane
The Pry House became a hospital site during the bloody battle. Union general Israel Richardson was carried there after being wounded. His wife made the long journey from Michigan to care for him. Although surgeons thought he would recover, a fatal infection set in and, despite the tender ministrations of his wife, the general was dead within a few days.
[image error]Pry House
The house was eventually purchased and preserved by the National Park Service, but one night, in the mid-1970s, the house caught fire. By the time the fire department arrived, the fire had made its way to the second floor, which then collapsed in upon the first. The firemen were put in a quandary, however, trying to determine if they should attempt a rescue of a woman who seemed to be moving around, silhouetted by the fire on the second floor. They were about to do the heroic thing when their captain waved them off, reminding them that there was no second floor remaining.
The event could be ignored, attributed to the highly unlikely (and probably even scientifically impossible) mass-hallucination of several dozen firemen, except for the experience a while later of two park rangers on patrol passing the Pry House. The interior was still gutted by the fire. As they sat looking at the old hospital on the small hill, they were struck by the appearance of a womanly figure moving—or floating—past one of the windows. They discussed whether they should exit the patrol car to investigate for a prowler, except that it would have been impossible: the figure moved past a second-floor window, a clear impossibility—at least for a living prowler—since the second floor was still not in existence.
