Whew! Back at the
Artillery Ridge Campground in Gettysburg, after a long day that
spanned three sites, three states, and four battles. Waking up at
the crack of dawn again, we made coffee and set off south across the
Mason-Dixon line, feeling very authentic. On today's docket:
Manassas, Virginia for the sites of First and Second Bull Run, then
to Sharpsburg, Maryland for the Battle of Antietam, and then to
Harper's Ferry, West Virginia to see the armory site that was raided
by John Brown in 1859, setting of a chain of events that would lead
the nation to war.
I was overly
excited about all this, since the only Civil War Battlefield I'd been
to was Gettysburg, and I was going to see some new sights today. We
powered past Maryland and crossed the Potomac (for the first of FIVE
TIMES today) to get to the Manassas, the site of the first real
battle of the war.
A side note before
I continue: I'll be using the Northern names for the battles through
the blog. Most of the time it doesn't matter, since Gettysburg is
Gettysburg and Fort Sumter is Fort Sumter, but there's a wrinkle in
naming other battles, two of which we saw today. The North tends to
name battles near strategic bodies of water after the water, hence
the First and Second Battles of Bull Run, for, well, Bull Run, and
the Battle of Antietam for Antietam Creek. The South tends to name
battles after the closest major town, so they call First and Second
Bull Run First and Second Manassas, and they call Antietam the Battle
of Sharpsburg. I'll be using the Northern names for two reasons:
first, I'm from the North and they're most familiar to me, and
second, we won the freaking war and so we can call the battles
whatever we damn well please. Winners write the history, so deal
with it.
Anyway, First and
Second Bull Run July 21, 1861. The First Battle is actually only on
a small part of the overall field, which I suppose makes sense since
it was only a few months after the last states seceded, and neither
army had any idea what the hell they were doing. No one was
battle-tested yet, and I've heard it described that the battle would
be decided by which army panicked and broke and ran first. As it
was, the Confederate Army was close to breaking when General Bee saw
General Thomas Jackson recklessly forward on horseback, barely even
flinching in the face of Union fire. Bee yelled to his troops “There
stands Jackson, like a Stone Wall”, and an American military legend
was born. The Federal troops broke first, and retreated to the
safety of Washington.
In
late August 1862, The Armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia
would find themselves facing off around the creek at Bull Run again,
as Lee and Jackson tried to swing north to Maryland. Amanda's
ancestor was actually at Second Bull Run, and we were able to trace
his movements through what turned out to be a much larger
battlefield. The armies were more seasoned, and the 12th
Pennsylvania ended up supporting New York regiments that were cut to
pieces when James Longstreet turned out to be exactly where he
shouldn't have been. All I could think about tracing the second
battle was how pissed I'd be if I were a soldier having to fight over
the same freaking ground we'd left just over ONE YEAR AGO, but I
digress. Richard Gustin was actually just a captain at this point,
but in one instance near a grove of trees, his Colonel got shot, the
officer who replaced the Colonel got shot, and the command of the
12th
passed to Richard. He would have command off and on after the battle
while his Colonel recovered from his wounds.
All in all the
battlefields around Bull Run were done really well, though after
getting used to Gettysburg, there seemed to me to be a dearth of
monuments on the field. I mean, there were a couple, mostly put
there by the Commonwealth of Virginia dealing with the whole
“Stonewall Jackson gets his nickname and is badass” thing, but
you can't go two feet without a monument at Gettysburg. It's
actually a major reason they couldn't film the movie there, since it
was shot before the days of ubiquitous CGI and it would have been
prohibitively expensive to edit them out. But anyway, the Bull Runs,
very well done, good maps and a nice auto tour.
But after the
Second Battle of Bull Run, Lee turned north to Maryland, trying to
lower Northern moral and convince Maryland to possibly secede. It
took him the better part of a month to get to Sharpsburg, though it
took us about an hour and half. Antietam was in many ways similar to Gettysburg, with a lot of monuments to various people and regiments,
or to entire states honoring their soldiers. We actually got there
just in time for a re-enactment artillery demonstration, which was by
all accounts AWESOME. But though the battlefield has been very well
preserved as well. With a lot of cornfields and split rail fences
like Gettysburg, the thing that struck me about Antietam was how
SMALL it was.
That's not to say
that not a lot of the battlefield isn't preserved, it is. It's just
that the whole battle took place over an area you can easily see from
one elevated bluff, which in a stroke of good planning, is exactly
where the Parks Service put the Visitors Center. They had an observation deck where a ranger could point out the whole thing blow
by blow, which was great for a person like me who wasn't really all
that familiar with Antietam, apart from the fact that it sucked.
And
ooooh, did it suck. Gettysburg is the bloodiest battle of the war,
with more than 5,000 men dying over the course of its three days.
Antietam, on the other hand, had 2,300 men lose their lives, and the
whole battle was over in an HOUR AND A HALF. Richard Gustin popped
up again, having followed Lee with General McClellan from 2nd
Bull Run, and the 12th
Pennsylvania reserves fought over a cornfield at the northern end of
the battlefield that changed hands like 6 times. He was lucky to be
where he was, though, since down the slopes of the farm soldiers were
fighting over what became known as “The Bloody Lane”, a sunken
farm road that the Confederates used as cover to fire from. Union
soldiers eventually flanked them, though, and were able to fire
straight down the lane. One solider apparently said “It was like
shearing sheep in a pen. I couldn't miss.” You've probably seen
pictures of both the Bloody Lane and the Dunker Church, a small
farmhouse used as a meetinghouse by German immigrants. People
working for Matthew Brady came and photographed them after the
battle, and they were the first pictures of dead soldiers on the
field that most people saw.
Unfortunately
by the time we'd gotten to see some of the battlefield, it was
getting to be a little late in the afternoon. We've tried to space
things out enough so that we're not going to be frantically rushing
from place to place, but today we had a lot to see, so we did a
highlights drive around Antietam and had to get going to Harper's
Ferry. Which is a shame, really, since if the rest of the field was
as interesting and well preserved as what we saw, we didn't really do
it justice. Also we were able to find a monument to William
McKinley, who was a sergeant at the battle, that was placed there
after his assassination as president in 1901. It was careful to
point out that McKinley was able to successfully serve hot coffee and
food to his superiors whilst under enemy fire...important stuff to
remember, I guess. Coffee is serious business.
Anyway,
heading up to West Virginia, we came to the confluence on the
Shenendoah and the Potomac (again!), and the village of Harper's
Ferry. We found it right on the border of kitchy-tacky and quaint,
kind of like Old Sturbridge Village meets Six Gun City, only if a
crazy man had attacked it in search for weapons to start an armed
slave revolt. The area around Harper's Ferry is actually really
pretty, and the rivers below were littered with fishers and tubers.
We were able to see a museum about the John Brown Raid in 1859, how
the Marines who captured Brown were commanded by Robert E. Lee, and
see the firehouse where they holed up after things went south. The
actual armory isn't there anymore unfortunately; the Virginia state
militia tried to seize it after Virginia seceded and the Federal
troops stationed there burned it to the ground to spite the
Confederates. All in all a good take, but not quite what we were
expecting.
But
anyway, the daylight is failing and we've got another big day ahead
of us tomorrow; heading to Newport News, VA to see the USS Monitor,
and then all the way down to Jacksonville, NC to stay with friends
near Camp LeJeune. More later!
-M
