In June, I visited the battlefield. Perry D. Jamieson's Death in September: The Antietam Campaign, is a useful guide to the battlefield visitor. The battle featured three major engagements. In the first, Genl Hooker's corps attacked from the north through this cornfield. There was little coordination, with U.S. units committed seriatim, enough to push the rebels back but insufficient to overwhelm them.
Mr Jamieson criticizes Genl McClellan for failing to give proper orders to his corps commanders. Genl Hooker had inconclusive results in this cornfield, going on to ignominy at Chancellorsville. On the other hand, he acquitted himself well at Chattanooga, where he reported to Grant and to Sherman. Draw the obvious conclusion.
Later in the morning, units that might have decided the issue in the cornfield went the wrong way and began a second engagement, in which rebel units entrenched themselves in this sunken road. (Before paving, rural roads turned into gulches as a consequence of frequent use. In rainy season, they may have become good places for a drowning.) The engagement did not last as long as Verdun, but there was, again, much blood spilled for little effect until sufficient forces came up to fire into the ends of the road.
The third major engagement took place at this bridge, now known as Burnside Bridge, for the corps commander with the distinctive whiskers who nearly broke the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. This view shows the approach taken by Burnside's corps, with rebel entrenchments still visible in the hills on the opposite bank.
The view from the entrenchments shows the fields of fire the defenders had on that bridge. Genl Burnside did force passage of the bridge, in part by sending troops downstream to a ford. Those troops flanked the defenders. (That attack might have been a precursor of Fredericksburg, in which Genl Meade crossed the Rappahannock downstream but was unable to turn the flank behind town.) At Antietam, the slowness of any of the attacks to develop meant the rebels were able to keep sufficient coherence to stay together and fight another two and a half years. Perhaps somewhere there is a counterfactual in which the Army of the Potomac strikes at once, along the entire front, and drives the rebel army to the Potomac, where, unlike Grant at Shiloh, there are neither supporting gunboats nor reinforcements on the other side. Without Vicksburg secured, the rebellion might not have ended immediately, but the end might have come sooner.
Antietam was one of the first battlefields to be photographed extensively, and the images were, as the newsies say, disturbing. William A. Frassanito's Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day, evaluates much of that photographic record. The author identifies some of the individual soldiers and is in some cases able to find other photographs of the participants, sometimes from before the war; in the case of a fortunate few, after the war as well. The subjects tend to be soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and junior officers, the cast whose civilian work in shop or farm is very different from the West Point and political experiences of the commanders.
Thus have our Book Reviews grown to one score and seven.
There is a national cemetery near the battlefield. This monument was put up by surviving veterans of the Turner Rifles of the 20th New York Regiment. (I like to think that they paraded to Beethoven's Yorkscher Marsch.)
In the Wisconsin section of the cemetery lies a rank of unknown soldiers.
The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery is a monument of the twentieth century. Any Civil War battlefield cemetery will have numerous unknowns buried there.
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