CHAPTER V.

THE FIELD OF ANTIETAM.

At seven o’clock the next morning, light and jaunty Lewy Smith was snapping his whip again at the tavern-door; and I was soon riding out of the village by his side.

Our course lay along the line of the Rebel retreat and of the advance of the right wing of our army. A pleasant road, under the edge of woods still wet with recent rain, brought us to Keedysville, a little cluster of brick and log houses, all of which, Lewy told me, were turned into hospitals after the great battle. At the farther end of the town is a brick church. “That was a hospital too. Many an arm, a leg, a hand, was left there by our boys. There’s a pit behind the church, five feet long, five feet deep, and two feet wide, just full of legs and arms.”

We rode on until we obtained a view of the pleasant hill-sides where Porter lay with his reserves, while the other army-corps did the fighting, on the day of Antietam; then turned to the right down a little stream, and past a dam, the waters of which glided still and shadowy under fringed banks; and soon came in sight of the fields where the great fight began. There they lay, over the farther bank of the Antietam, some green, some ploughed, the latter turning up yellow as ripe grain in the morning light.

“We used to could drive all over this country where we pleased. The fences were laid down, and it was all trampled and cut up with the wagons, and soldiers, and artillery.” But the fences had been replaced, and now Lewy was obliged to keep the open road.

At a turn we came to a farm-house, near which were a number of dilapidated barns and other outbuildings, and some old straw stacks. “It was a sight to behold, passing yer after the battle!” said Lewy Smith, shaking his head sadly at the reminiscence. “All in and around these yer buildings, all around the hay-stacks, and under the fences, it was just nothing but groaning, wounded men!”

Crossing the yellow-flowing Antietam, we turned up the right bank, with its wooded shores on our right, and on our left a large cornfield containing not less than forty or fifty acres. “There was right smart o’ corn all through yer time of the battle. Good for the armies, but not for the farmers. Come to a cornfield like this, they just turned their horses and cattle right into it, and let ’em eat.” You fortunate farmers of the North and West, so proud and so careful of your well-tilled fields never yet broken into in this ruinous fashion, have you fully realized what war is?

Leaving the course of the creek, and crossing the fields where the fighting on our extreme right began, we reached a still and shady grove, beside which, fenced in from a field, was a little oblong burying-ground of something like half an acre. In the centre was a plain wooden monument constructed of boards painted white; the pedestal bearing this inscription:—

“_Let no man desecrate this burial-place of our dead_;”

And the side of the shaft, towards the fence, these words:

“_I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live._”

This was the hospital cemetery. The graves were close together in little rows running across the narrow field. They were all overgrown with grass and weeds. Each was marked by a small rounded head-board, painted white, and bearing the name of the soldier sleeping below. Here is one out of the number:—

As I wrote down this name, the hens in the farm-yard near by were cackling jubilantly. The clouds broke also; a shaft of sunlight fell upon the glistening foliage of the grove, and slanted down through its beautiful vistas. I looked up from the sad rows of patriot graves, and saw the earth around me, all around and above the silent mouldering bodies of the slain, smiling sweetly through her misty veil. For Nature will not mourn. Nature, serene, majestic, full of faith, makes haste to cover the wounds in the Earth’s fair bosom, and to smile upon them. The graves in our hearts also, which we deemed forever desolate, she clothes with the tender verdure of reviving hope before we are aware, and gilds them with the sunshine of a new love and joy. Blessed be our provident mother for this sweet law, but for which the homes in the land, bereft by these countless deaths in hospitals and on bloody fields, would lie draped in endless mourning.

Near the monument, in the midst of the level burying-place, grew a loftily nodding poke-weed, the monarch of his tribe. It was more like a tree than a weed. With its roots down among the graves, and its hundred hands stretched on high, it stood like another monument, holding up to heaven, for a sign, its berries of dark blood.

Pursuing a road along the ridge in a southwesterly direction, Lewy at length reined up his horse in another peaceful little grove. Without a word he pointed to the rotting knapsacks and haversacks on the ground, and to the scarred trees. I knew the spot; it was the boundary of the bloody “cornfield.” We had approached from the side on which our boys advanced to that frightful conflict, driving the Rebels before them, and being driven back in turn, in horrible seesaw, until superior Northern pluck and endurance finally prevailed.

In a field beside the grove we saw a man ploughing, with three horses abreast, and a young lad for escort. We noticed loose head-boards, overturned by the plough, on the edge of the grove, and lying half imbedded in the furrows. This man was ploughing over graves!

Adjoining the field was the historic cornfield. I walked to the edge of it, and waited there for the man to turn his long slow furrow down that way. I sat upon the fence, near which was a trench filled with unnumbered Rebel dead.

“A power of ’em in this yer field!” said the ploughman, coming up and looking over as I questioned him. “A heap of Union soldiers too, layin’ all about yer. I always skip a Union grave when I know it, but sometimes I don’t see ’em, and I plough ’em up. Eight or ten thousand lays on this farm, Rebels and Union together.”

Finding him honest and communicative, I wished him to go over the ground with me.

“I would willingly, stranger, but I must keep the team go’n’.”

I suggested that the boy was big enough to do that.

“Wal, he kin. Plough round onct,”—to the boy,—“or let ’em blow, tain’t go’n’ to hurt ’em none.”

So he concluded to accompany me. We got over into the “cornfield,” late a hog-pasture, and presently stopped at a heap of whitening bones.

“What’s this?” I said.

“This yer was a grave. The hogs have rooted it up. I tol’ the ol’ man he oughtn’t to turn the hogs in yer, but he said he’d no other place to put ’em, and he had to do it.”

I picked up a skull lying loose on the ground like a cobblestone. It was that of a young man; the teeth were all splendid and sound. How hideously they grinned at me! and the eye-sockets were filled with dirt. He was a tall man too, if that long thigh-bone was his.

Torn rags strewed the ground. The old ploughman picked up a fragment.

“This yer was a Union soldier. You may know by the blue cloth. But then that ain’t always a sign, for the Rebels got into our uniform when they had a chance, and got killed in it too.”

I turned the skull in my hand, half regretting that I could not carry it away with me. My first shuddering aversion to the grim relic was soon past. I felt a strange curiosity to know who had been its hapless owner, carrying it safely through twenty or more years of life to lose it here. Perhaps he was even then looking over my shoulder and smiling at it; no longer a perishable mortal, but a spirit imperishable, having no more use for such clumsy physical mechanism. The fancy came so suddenly, and was for an instant so vivid, that I looked up, half expecting that my eyes would meet the mild benignant eyes of the soldier. And these words came into my mind: “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”

Let him who has never thought seriously of life look at it through the vacant eye-sockets of a human skull. Then let him consider that he himself carries just such a thing around with him, useful here a little while, then to be cast aside.

“Every face, however full, Padded round with flesh and fat, Is but modelled on a skull.”

Take the lesson to heart, O Vanity! It is but a little time, at the longest, that the immortal soul thou art will animate this bone; but the hour comes quickly when to have been a good soldier of the truth on any field, whether resounding with arms, or silent with the calm strong struggle of love and patience, and to have given thy life to the cause, will be sweeter to thee than the fatness of the earth and length of days. No, heroic soldier! you I do not pity, though your mortal part lies here neglected and at the mercy of swine.

The cornfield, and another field from which it was separated by a fence at the time of the battle, are now thrown together, forming a lot of about fifty acres. The upper part was dotted with little dry brown cocks of seed-clover. No hogs were on it at the time; they had been turned out, to save the clover-seed, I presume, for that was of some consequence.

We found plenty more bones and skulls of Union soldiers rooted up and exposed, as we ascended the ridge. Beside some lay their head-boards. I noted the names of a few: “Sergt. Mahaffey, Co. C, 9th Regt. P. R. C.,” for one.

“The Rebs had all the fence down ’cept a strip by the pike,” said the ploughman. “That was jist like a sifter. Some of the rails have been cut up and carried away for the bullet-holes.”

He showed me marks still remaining on the fence. Some of our soldiers had cut their names upon it; and on one post some pious Roman Catholic had carved the sacred initials:—

“I. H. S.”

“I reckon that was a soldier’s name too,” said my honest ploughman. And so indeed it was,—_Jesus Hominum Salvator_.

Beyond the pike, between it and the woods, was a narrow belt of newly ploughed ground.

“You see them green spots over yon’ covered with weeds? Them are graves that I skipped.” In the edge of the woods beyond lay two unexploded shells which relic-hunters had not yet picked up.

Whilst I was exploring the fields with my good-natured ploughman, Lewy Smith brought his horse around by the roads. He was waiting for me on the pike. “The last time I drove by yer,” he said, “there was a nigger ploughing in that field, and every time he came to a grave he would just reach over his plough, jerk up the head-board, and stick it down behind him again as he ploughed along; and all the time he never stopped whistling his tune.”

We drove on to the Dunker church, sometimes called “the Schoolhouse,”—a square, plain, whitewashed, one-story brick building, without steeple, situated in the edge of the woods. No one, from its appearance, would take it to be a church; and I find that soldiers who fought here still speak of it as “the Schoolhouse.”

“The Dunkers are a sect of plain people,” said one of the old Dutch settlers. “They don’t believe in any wanities. They don’t believe in war and fighting.”

But their church had got pretty seriously into the fight on that occasion. “It was well smashed to pieces; all made like a riddle; you could just look in and out where you pleased,” said Lewy Smith. It had been patched up with brick and whitewash, however, and the plain people, who “did not believe in wanities,” once more held their quiet meetings there. I thought much of them as we rode on. A serious, unshaven thrifty class of citizens, they know well how to get a living, and they bear an excellent reputation for honest industry throughout the country. Their chief fault seems to be that they persist in killing one of man’s divinest faculties,—as if the sweet and refining sense of beauty would have been given us but for a beneficent purpose. At the same time they do believe sincerely in solid worldly goods,—as if they too were not, after all, quite as much one of the “wanities”! Think of it, my solemn long-bearded friend; you buy land, lay out your dollar in perishable dust, or you expend it in the cultivation of those gifts and graces which, if heaven is what I take it to be, you will find use for when you get there. Now which do you suppose will prove the better investment? All of religion does not consist in psalm-singing and sedate behavior. But I do wrong to criticise so worthy and unoffending a sect of Christians, who are no doubt nearer the kingdom than the most we call such; and I merely set out to say this: while we are in the world, all its interests, all its great struggles, concern us. We cannot sit indifferent. Non-intervention is unknown to the awakened soul. Help the good cause we must, and resist the evil; if we cannot fight, we can pray; and to think of keeping out of the conflict that is raging around us is the vainest thing of all, as yonder well-riddled plain people’s church amply testifies.

As it was beginning to rain, Lewy Smith carried me on to Sharpsburg, and there left me. A more lonesome place even than Boonsboro’; the battle alone renders it in the least interesting; a tossed and broken sort of place, that looks as if the solid ground-swell of the earth had moved on and jostled it since the foundations were laid. As you go up and down the hilly streets, the pavements, composed of fragments of limestone slabs, thrust up such abrupt fangs and angles at you, that it is necessary to tread with exceeding caution. As Sharpsburg was in the thick of the fight, the battle-scars it still carries add to its dilapidated appearance. On the side of the town fronting the Federal line of battle, every house bears its marks; and indeed I do not know that any altogether escaped. Many were well peppered with bullets, shot and shell. The thousand inhabitants of the place had mostly fled to the river, where they would have been in a sad plight if McClellan had followed up the Rebels on their defeat, and done his duty by them. Imagine a bent bow, with the string drawn. The bow is the river, and the string is the Confederate line after the battle. At the angle of the string is Sharpsburg; and between the string and the bow were the fugitives. Fortunately for them, as for the enemy, McClellan did _not_ do his duty.

After dinner I started to walk to the bridge, known henceforth and for all time as “Burnside’s Bridge,” just as the road his corps cut for itself through the forests over the mountain, on his way hither from the Sunday fight, is known to everybody as “Burnside’s Road.”

A shower coming up by the way, I sought shelter under the porch of a stone house, situated on a rising bank near the edge of the town. I had scarcely mounted the steps when a woman appeared, and with cordial hospitality urged me to enter the sitting-room. Although the porch was the pleasanter place,—overlooking the hills and mountains on the east, and affording a comfortable wooden bench, where I had thought to sit and enjoy the rain,—I accepted her invitation, having found by experience that every dweller on a battle-field has something interesting to tell.

She and her neighbors fled from their homes on Tuesday before the battle, and did not return until Friday. She, like nearly every person I talked with who had acted a similar part, was sorry she did not remain in the cellar of the house.

“When we came back, all I could do was jist to set right down and cry.” The house had been plundered, their provisions, and the household comforts they had been slowly getting together for years, had been swept away by the all-devouring armies. “Them that stayed at home did not lose anything; but if the soldiers found a house deserted, that they robbed.”

I inquired which plundered the most, our men or the Rebels.

“That I can’t say, stranger. The Rebels took; but the Yankees took right smart. We left the house full, and when we got home we hadn’t a thing to eat. Some wounded men had been fetched in, and they had got all the bedding that was left, and all our clothing had been torn up for bandages. It was a right hard time, stranger!”—spoken earnestly and with tears. “I haven’t got well over it yet. It killed my old father; he overworked getting the fences up again, and it wore on him so he died within a year. We are jist getting things a little to rights again now, but the place a’n’t what it was, and never will be again, in my day.”

She showed me, in an adjoining room, a looking-glass hanging within an inch or two of a large patched space in the wall.

“That glass was hanging on that nail, jist as it hangs now, when a shell come in yer and smashed a bedstead to pieces for me on that side of the room, and the glass wasn’t so much as moved.”

Suspecting that I might be keeping her from her work, I urged her to return to it, and found she had indeed quitted some important household task, because “it didn’t seem right to leave a stranger sitting alone.” I arose at once, on making that discovery, telling her I would rest under the porch until the rain was over. She appeared for a moment quite distressed, fearing lest the subtle law of politeness should somehow suffer from her neglect. This woman’s sense of hospitality was very strong, her whole manner carrying with it an earnest desire to make me comfortable and keep me entertained while in her house. Although troubled about her kitchen affairs, she seemed far more anxious about her duty to me,—as if the accident of my being stopped by the rain at her gate had placed her under sacred obligations. At last she thought of a happy solution of the difficulty.

“I’ll get some pears and treat ye!” I begged her not to take that trouble for me; but she insisted, repeating with pleased eagerness, “Yes, I’ll get some pears and treat ye!”

She brought a dish of fruit, and afterwards sent two little girls, her nieces, to keep me company while I ate. They were pretty, intelligent, well-dressed misses of ten and twelve; the eldest of whom opened the conversation by saying,—

“Right smart o’ fruit cher.” A phrase which I suspect every stranger might not have understood, notwithstanding her prettily persuasive smile. South of the Maryland and Pennsylvania line, and indeed in the southern counties of Pennsylvania, one ceases to hear of a _plenty_ or a _good deal_; it is always a “_heap_,” or “_right smart_.” The word _here_, along the borders, is pronounced in various ways: _here_, rarely; _yer_, commonly; _hyer_, which is simply _yer_ with an aspirate before it; _jer_, when the preceding word ends with the sound of _d_, and _cher_ after a final _t_. “Rough road jer,” is the southern for “Rough road here”; “out cher,” means, similarly, “out here”; the final _d_ and _t_ blending with the _y_ of _yer_, and forming _j_ and _ch_, just as we hear “would jew” for “would you,” and “can’t chew” for “can’t you,” everywhere.

The little girls played their hospitable part very charmingly, and I was sorry to leave them; but the rain ceasing, I felt obliged to walk on. They took me to their aunt, whom I wished to thank for her kindness. Finding that I had not filled my pockets with the pears, as she had invited me to do, she brought some grapes and gave me. I bore the purple bunches in my hand, and ate them as I walked away from the house. They were sweet as the remembered grace of hospitality.

The bridge was a mile farther on. The road strikes the creek, and runs several rods along the right bank before crossing it. If the tourist is surprised at the strength of the positions on South Mountain, from which the Rebels were dislodged, he will be no less amazed at the contemplation of Burnside’s achievement here. Above the road as it approaches the bridge, and above the creek below the bridge, rises a high steep bank, like a bluff. To approach from the opposite side, exposed to a concentrated infantry and artillery fire flashing all along this crest,—to carry the bridge, and drive back the enemy from their vantage-ground,—one would say was a feat for the heroes of the age of fable. But the truth is, though men are slow to receive it, there never was any age, called “of fable,” or another, better than this,—none that ever produced a more heroic race of men. We have worshipped the past long enough; it is time now to look a little into the merits of the present. Troy, and Greece, and Rome were admirable in their day, and the men of Israel did some doughty deeds; but the men of New England, of the great Middle States, and of the vast North-West, what have they done? The Homeric heroes and demigods are in no way superior, except in brag, to the hilarious lads of Illinois, or the more serious boys of Massachusetts. Of materials such as these the poet would have made a more resounding Iliad.

That Burnside’s command could ever have crossed this bridge, from the high banks on the other side to the steep banks on this, in the face of superior numbers pouring their deadly volleys upon them, that is what astonishes you; and what grieves you is this: that reinforcements were not sent to enable him to hold what he gained. If Porter, who had the reserves, had been a man of right courage and patriotism, or anything but a pet of the commanding general, he would have gone into the fight when needed,—for reserves were not invented merely to be kept nice and choice,—and the results of that day would have been very different.

I spent some hours about the bridge, the Antietam Creek singing all the while its liquid accompaniment to my thoughts. It sang the same song that day, but its peaceful music was drowned by the roar and clash of the conflict. I sat down on a rock and watched a flock of buzzards perched on the limbs of a dead tree, looking melancholy,—resembling, to my mind, greedy camp-followers and army speculators, who remembered with pensive regret the spoils of the good old war-days.

The bridge is narrow, affording space for only one vehicle at a time. It is built of stone, and rests on two solid butments and two rounded piers. There are woods on both sides of the stream. On the left bank they stand a little back from it; on the right, they cover the side of the bluff below the bridge. The trees all along here were well scarred with shot. Half a mile below the bridge the creek makes a bold turn to the right, and doubles back upon itself, forming a loop, then sweeps away to the south, between a wooded hill on the west and a magnificent growth of willows massing their delicate green and drooping foliage along the low opposite shore.

Returning to the village, I visited the spot chosen as a national cemetery for the slain. The ground had been purchased, but work upon it had not yet commenced. As Pennsylvania gave the soil for the Gettysburg Cemetery, so Maryland gives the soil for this; while each State will defray its portion of future expenses. In the Antietam cemetery it is understood that the Rebel dead are to be included. Many object to this; but I do not. Skeletons, rooted up by hogs, and blanching in the open fields, are a sight not becoming a country that calls itself Christian. Be they the bones of Patriots or Rebels, let them be carefully gathered up and decently interred without delay.

The Antietam National Burying-Ground also adjoins an old town cemetery. It is situated on the right hand, at the summit of the road, as you go up out of Sharpsburg towards Boonsboro’. Here let them rest together, they of the good cause, and they of the evil; I shall be content. For neither was the one cause altogether good, nor was the other altogether bad: the holier being clouded by much ignorance and selfishness, and the darker one brightened here and there with glorious flashes of self-devotion. It was not, rightly speaking, these brothers that were at war. The conflict was waged between two great principles,—one looking towards liberty and human advancement, the other madly drawing the world back to barbarism and the dark ages. America was the chessboard on which the stupendous game was played, and those we name Patriots and Rebels were but as the pawns.

Great was the day of Antietam. Three thousand of the enemy were buried on the field. We had two thousand killed, upwards of nine thousand four hundred wounded, and more than a thousand missing. Between the sweet dawn and the bloody dusk of that dread day there fell TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND MEN! Can the imagination conceive of such slaughter?

And, after all, the striking fact about Antietam is this,—that it was a great opportunity lost. The premature surrender of Harper’s Ferry, which set free the force besieging it, and enabled the enemy to outnumber us on the field,—for Stonewall Jackson was as anxious to get into the fight as Fitz John Porter was to keep out of it,—and the subsequent inertia of the General commanding the United States forces; these two causes combined to save the Confederate army from annihilation. No such opportunity for crushing the Rebellion at a blow had been offered, nor was any such again offered,—not even at Gettysburg, for the enemy there had no coiling river in their rear to entangle them, and we had no fresh troops to launch upon them,—nor at any period afterwards, until Grant consummated that long-desired object; God’s good time having not yet come.