|
Gentlemen,
I travelled to Antietam with my brother, Mark Fogarty, an editor and a journalist. While he is not a member of the club, he enjoyed meeting the crazy gamers and was a good aide-de-camp for the excursion. As I expected, he wrote about the event, coupled with his thoughts at the battlefield. Taken from his myspace blog, which follows:
In the Beauty of the Cornfields
It's just dusk by the observation tower on the Antietam battlefield on a summer Saturday evening. A group of close observers of the American Civil War is about to drink a toast to those who fell in a staggering effusion of blood on one awful September day in 1862. I look down the open field where the tough boyos of the 69th New York, the Irish Brigade, came charging up the slope into withering fire from Confederates taking advantage of the cover of the Sunken Road. Three deer are walking along the line of fire, utterly at ease.
I have often marveled at the beauty of the places where our national tragedy played out, the bitter poignancy of all these brave men dying, to take the lyrics of a pertinent song, in the beauty of the lilies. (Or if not in the lilies, in the cornfields or peach orchards or summer meadows of our extravagantly beautiful rural America.)
The battlefield at Antietam (just outside Sharpsburg, MD) is staggeringly beautiful on this Saturday. The sun pours down on its grass fields and cornfields and creeks and dark forests and rolling pastures, cupped by hills that fade into summer haze. The corn is ripening today in Maryland, full in stalk and leaf, ready for harvesting, the palpable sweetness of this America of ours. That day, Sept. 17, 1862, saw a different harvest, more than 20,000 of our finest and bravest men, in a bloody mess that stands as the most appalling day of bloodletting in American history. And yet it led directly to the biggest moral victory of the war, the emancipation of slaves and the molasses-slow start towards racial equality in this country that continues today and will take generations more.
The beauty of Antietam and Gettysburg, just a couple of dozen miles away over the Pennsylvania border, seems to me not just an atmospheric underlining of what happened at these historic places but a natural reproach to our human habit of designating our own kind as outsiders and going after them with such murderous ferocity, cutting down the human harvest that co-exists with the grass and the trees and the water.
I have come to Antietam with my brother John, who belongs to a group called the American Civil War Game Club, a group of Civil War enthusiasts that replays the battles online and takes a passionate interest in both the games and the history that produced them. They are an interesting group of people from both the north and south of this country, including both Union and Confederate partisans. The Rebs definitely outnumber the Yanks in this company of irregulars, and there is a good bit of goodnatured bashing that goes on between the sides, and some that's less than goodnatured. (Losing the war seems to have left some Southern guys bruised, even at this late date.) Still, we make up an amiable bunch of guys (and one lively woman) who manage to spend a weekend together in amity.
There's strength in numbers, so our tour of the battleground comes with some perks. A tip of the hat to the group's leader, Larry Quick, who arranged the whole itinerary, including a special concert just for us, and to Bill Spitz, our very knowledgeable personal tour guide
So what was going on at Antietam? The Confederates, under Robert E. Lee, had invaded the North in a show of force to influence foreign governments to recognize the Confederacy and perhaps even end the war by beating the Northern armies and forcing the Union side to sue for peace. The Yankees, under George McClellan, the slowpoke general who organized the Army of the Potomac magnificently but never seemed to move aggressively on the attack, now were trying to throw the Rebs back across the Potomac into Virginia. The usually canny Gen. Lee, brilliant in Virginia but apt to make puzzling moves north of the Potomac, had divided his forces and sent Gen. Stonewall Jackson and his men to capture Harper's Ferry, so he was severely outnumbered as the engagement began. Worse, his plans had been discovered by the Federals so Gen. McClellan was less fearful than usual about attacking.
Our tour of Antietam with Bill Spitz begins around noon at the Confederate artillery position near the Dunker Church, overlooking the initial Union assault through the cornfield. Bill tells a story of carnage and confusion, with positions changing hands multiple times and a couple of timely ambushes by the Rebels, who outgeneral the Union side handily during the course of the day but are bled white by the force of numbers on the other side and their unusual willingness to grapple. A just-in-time reappearance by the fearsome Stonewall Jackson pushes the Union forces back later in the day on the Yanks' right wing.
After inspecting the Dunker Church (tiny!) we visit the 6th New Hampshire regiment, modern-day re-enactors who are taking the shade of the trees against the noonday sun nearby. Larry Quick (everyone calls him Notso) has arranged a private performance of the regimental band for us, and the fellows gamely gather up their instruments in the heat of the day and play period songs. They have two guitars, a ukulele, a banjo, a washboard (used for percussion) and an elementary one-string bass attached to a washtub! This is a highlight of the day for me.
On the other side of the battlefield, Bill shows us where 2nd and 20th Georgia soldiers confound several Union attempts to cross the narrow Burnside Bridge across Antietam Creek. By Bill's rangefinder, the Georgia sharpshooters are just eighty yards from the Union troops trying to cross, and havoc ensues. Eventually sheer force of numbers prevails, but Union meekness in following up curtails a rout of the Rebs and in fact Union forces later retreat on their left wing as well.
Fighting around the Sunken Road epitomizes the brutal slugfest that Antietam was, as it is famously described later as so piled with dead bodies it is possible to walk up and down it without foot touching ground.
The usual descriptions of Union victory are hard to reconcile with the battlefield reality, which indicates a gruesome and bloody draw. However, this turns into victory (and a foreshadowing of the tactic Ulysses S. Grant will use to crush the insurrection, by repeated engagements that bleed the Confederates dry of soldiers). Lee knows he cannot continue to incur such losses as he has taken at Antietam, and withdraws from the field and across the Potomac.
Abraham Lincoln, though, now has the victory he needs to make the Emancipation Proclamation more than just an empty gesture. So Antietam leads to the freeing of the slaves, and the painful process of lifting the stain on our nation's soul that has resulted from more than two centuries of human enslavement. This terrible effusion of blood is followed by a great effusion of freedom.
Notso has started a tradition (begun last year at Gettysburg) of returning to the battlefield at dusk to toast the fallen soldiers of both sides. So we return to the observation tower as it is growing dark. My brother points out the deer grazing peacefully in the killing field
I am glad to join the men of the club (and the woman) as we swig from flasks and pay tribute to each of the more than 20,000 men killed or wounded on that deadly day. Each of them fought for their own conception of freedom, and all of us who join in the toast and all of us in America today enjoy the freedom they were passionate enough about to devote the utmost of their spirits to, up to and including their lives. The union that was regained produced the people who fought and destroyed fascism and communism and saved the world, and America still has the capacity to lead the world, no matter how awful the current generalship is.
There comes a booming from the far horizon, a slow cannonade from Nature on her summer campaign, a salute to the soldiers of the summer fields who no longer can be told apart from the wheat and the corn and the trees. No matter which side of the creek they lined up on, I'm certain these men would be happy to see us. We are northerners and southerners, as they were. We are Americans, as they were. We are the people they fought for and died for, and we have inherited their cornfields and their churches and their creeks and their woods, America the beautiful.
Copyright 2007 Mark F. Fogarty
regards,
Col John Fogarty
2nd Brigade, 'Carlin's Cavaliers'
1st Division, XX Corps
Army of the Cumberland
Lt. John Fogarty
2nd Brigade "Carlin's Cavaliers"
First Division
XX Corps
Army of the Cumberland
|
ACWGC 
ACWGC Memorial
CSA HQ
VMI
Join CSA
Union HQ
Join Union 
Login
FAQ
Search
Members
