October 21

Antietam

We came down to the lobby for breakfast at about the same time as everyone else in the hotel…it was really crowded!  We were ready to leave about nine.  A couple of guys from Tennessee pulled up to us and asked questions about the bikes as we prepped.  They both rode Harleys, and were interested in our trip.  They were pulling a HUGE trailer, loaded with furniture that they were selling.  They were really funny and told some wild tails before they cranked up and left.

Today was another misty, cool, dreary day.  The goal for today was Sharpsburg, Maryland, and the Antietam National Battlefield.  Since we had missed a lot of the mountain roads that we had wanted to ride on the way in to Gettysburg, we decided to hit them today.  We rode west on 30 to Cashtown, then started looking for back roads.  We wound around the misty countryside, finding a one-lane covered bridge built in 1890 on Jack Mountain Road, then headed up Zoo Road, a twisty little path covered with damp leaves and shrouded in fog.  Soon we were on roads that did not appear on the map or the GPS, but I figured that as long as we kept heading south-west, we would be OK.  The road rose and fell over ridges and mountaintops, climbing into heavy fog on the tops.  We found ourselves back on the map at Hwy 491, and kept heading south to Sharpsburg, where a battle was named after a little creek in the area, Antietam.

This battle occurred on September 17, 1862, a year before Gettysburg.  It was the stopping point of Lee’s first invasion of the North, which he undertook for many of the same reasons as the second.  This battle (known as Sharpsburg in the South) is not as well known as Gettysburg, perhaps because it was tactically a draw.  Yet it resulted in several important milestones.  First: this was the bloodiest day in American history.  23,000 men were casualties in this one day.  Second: it was here that Clara Barton rose to fame, as she nursed wounded men on the battlefield, and went on to found the American Red Cross.  Third:  Lee’s retreat from this field gave Abraham Lincoln a political opportunity that he had been waiting for.  Which brings me to an important subject in any discussion of the Civil War…slavery.

The Civil War did not start over the issue of slavery.  Many people misunderstand that.  I think the schools have something to do with that…we all know that the War ended slavery, so it is easy to teach it as having been about slavery all along.  However, as with many issues in history, it is much more complex than that. 

When Lincoln was elected, he received no electoral votes from the South.  Zip, nada, none.  Why?  From the earliest days of the Union, there had been debate over whether the nation should have a strong central government and weak state governments, or the other way around.  Early Americans were so opposed to a strong central government that we did not have a President for our first 13 years as a nation.  Many of the founding fathers, fresh from their experience with England, were opposed to the nation having a standing army!  They just didn’t want a central government to have a lot of power or control over their lives.  As time progressed, this debate intensified.  Lincoln believed in a strong central government.  So did many of the northern people.  The South wanted strong state governments and a weak central one.  Lincoln supported a strong tariff (tax) that favored northern manufacturing interests, but kept the southern states (which were mainly agricultural) from buying less expensive finished goods from Europe.  The South saw Lincoln as a power-hungry dictator.  So, as soon as Lincoln was elected, southern states began to leave the Union.  They left to preserve their rights and maintain the principals of limited government that the Founding Fathers had intended, and that, in their minds, had been watered down by the power-hungry in Washington.

Jefferson Davis, upon his inauguration as President of the Confederacy, said, “We just want to be left alone”.  Lincoln, however, insisted that the Constitution required that he be President of ALL the states, not just part of them.  There was also the issue of all the Federal property in the southern states…forts, arsenals, mints, and so on.  So Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to form an army and bring the South back into the fold, by force if necessary.  Thus the Civil War began.  It's purpose...to restore the Union. 

Lincoln was not pro-slavery, but neither was he an abolitionist.  He stated in his inaugural speech that he had no intention to end slavery in the states where it already existed, nor did he think that he had the Constitutional authority to do so.  However, as the war drug on and the South won conflict after conflict, the people of the North grew tired of sacrificing their sons for "the Union".  They were willing to give Davis his wish to be “left alone”.  Lincoln understood that he needed to cast the war in a different light.  His solution was to issue a directive emancipating the southern slaves.  This would accomplish several things.  It would give the northern people a more tangible cause to fight for.  It would weaken European support for the Confederacy (Europe had already abolished slavery).  It would also, perhaps, incite a slave rebellion that would weaken the South.  But Lincoln knew that issuing the Emancipation Proclamation at a time when the War was going against him would look like an act of desperation.  He needed a victory, no matter how slim, so that he could issue the Proclamation against a backdrop of positive news.  That opportunity came at Antietam.

I should note that the National Park Service did an excellent job, in museums, displays, ranger talks, etc, of teaching the politics of the War and the role that slavery played in it.  I somewhat expected to see the simplistic, “The Civil War was all about the morally-superior North freeing the slaves from the craven Southerners” explanation.  I was pleasantly surprised that this was not the case. 

Enough of that.

Our first stop was the Visitors Center, which showed a movie that detailed the battle action.  Then we went upstairs to an observation platform that overlooks the field, and listened to a very detailed and interesting history of the battle given by a park Ranger.  From there we took the driving tour of the field, seeing the major sites like the Dunker Church, where Stonewall Jackson formed the Southern lines; the Bloody Cornfield, where the opposing forces fought back and forth all day in head-high corn  (Union general Hooker wrote “every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before"); to the Bloody Lane, a sunken road used as a trench by the Confederates until the Union forces flanked them, firing artillery down the lane until it was stacked with bodies 4 and 5 deep for over a quarter of a mile.  Finally, we saw Burnside's Bridge, where Union General Ambrose Burnside wasted a day and lots of Union lives trying to take a bridge over Antietam creek.  He never thought to check the depth of the water.  His men could have waded across.

Confederate bodies at The Bloody Lane.

A year later, when Confederate troops marched to Gettysburg, they passed this place.  The field was still littered with bones.

For those interested in the battle, there is a lot of good information at http://www.civilwarhome.com/antietam.htm.

We left the battlefield shortly before dark to find a place to stay.  A ranger had advised us to cross the Potomac and head into Shepherdstown, West Virginia, to a Clarion hotel with a nice restaurant.  We did, and found it to be a very nice place…it seems that Bill Clinton had held some sort of Middle East peace talks there.  The restaurant was expensive but good, we did laundry and watched some TV, and went to bed around 11.

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