A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

by Stephen Budiansky

Hammond was less successful in his efforts to drag the army pharmacopoeia into the modern era. His order to eliminate dangerous and useless mercury compounds, like the ever popular but much abused drug calomel, aroused the indignation of many surgeons. In the ensuing “Calomel Rebellion” his enemies saw an opportunity. Large, loud, and forceful, Hammond had accumulated no shortage of such enemies, including Secretary of War Stanton, who never forgave him for being appointed by Lincoln against his wishes. (“I’m not used to being beaten,” Stanton told a confidant at the time, “and I don’t like it.”) Effectively ousted as surgeon general in September 1863, he was subsequently court-martialed on trumped-up charges of corruption, and dismissed from the service in 1864. His mentor gone, Letterman succumbed to the more prosaic toll of exhaustion, and left the service at the end of 1864 as well.

After the war Bierce wrote a series of astonishingly dark and ironic short stories trying to convey some of the unheroic truths about battle to a reluctant audience; “denied existence by the chief publishing houses,” they were privately printed with the financial assistance of a businessman acquaintance only in 1891. All are shocking for their cynicism and unsparing details of what bullets do to a man’s body; none is as deeply disturbing as “Chickamauga,” which grotesquely juxtaposes the incomprehension of a small boy setting off into the woods with his wooden sword to play soldier and the horrors of the actual wounded from the battlefield he discovers there: their blood-streaked faces which he laughingly takes for those of circus clowns, the men crawling on all fours he thinks are inviting him to play horsie on their backs. It is, of course, a horrid allegory of the foolish naïveté of all boys who go off to war.

“All governments based on the few, by the few, and for the few, are hostile to the government of Christ, and must be abolished before His glory fully comes,” Haven declared.

But first he would have to be shot through the neck at Antietam.

The futile but beautiful heroism of battle was more important to him as a lesson in the irony of life than as a matter of triumph.

A hundred years after the battle a boy searching for relics near the sunken road after a heavy rain found a .69 caliber Confederate Minié ball that had been deformed on impact and fused to a .58 caliber Union bullet, the opposing projectiles having collided in midair amid the dense opposing hails of lead.

His recognition as a great general far ahead of his time would have to await the clearer judgment of military professionals once the cobwebs of the Lost Cause were cleared away, and reminiscing Confederate veterans had sputtered their last.

He never showed corpses decapitated or disemboweled or missing limbs, much less any that had been partially devoured by marauding pigs or dogs, an occurrence often remarked on by soldiers. Scarcely any of his photographs dwell on the wounded and their mutilations and agonies. And, as some remarkable detective work by the photographic historian William Frassanito discovered, in later battles (Gettysburg in particular) Gardner had clearly dragged corpses around the battlefield to pose them to his artistic satisfaction, always to conform to some idealized representation of death. One has to look closely at his images of dead soldiers at Antietam to notice one of the grimmer but unremarked-on realities that his photographs did sometimes capture: the inside-out-pockets of the Confederate dead, showing that their corpses had been systematically looted.

Nearly all of the thousands of gawking civilians who descended on the Antietam battlefield in the days after the fight stopped to pick up souvenirs.

As Ambrose Bierce found, it was probably even less palatable to reveal that war is sordid and meaningless than to reveal that it is bloody and horrifying.

Out of wry humor, or perhaps simple gratitude at being spared a similar fate, a Pennsylvania private every year sent flowers to be placed on the grave of the unknown soldier at Antietam Cemetery mistakenly marked with his name.

The strange and utter deadness of vacant but immaculate farmhouses and barns there today is the absence not only of life but of death; all witness they once bore to the destruction of battle obscured by time, paint, and the anachronistic primness of twenty-first-century lawn care.

Alleviating suffering was fine and womanly; seeking to prevent it through political change was intruding into forbidden realms.

“The remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.”