Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam

9. Opportunities Found and Lost

9( Opportunities Found and Lost autumn had just begun its colorful ritual along the Antietam. But after the battle the forests and fields were scorched and bleak. Orderly Sgt. James A. Wright of the First Minnesota remembered buildings riddled by shot and shell, harvested crops singed by exploding projectiles, fences broken or scattered, and the fields “trampled by hurrying battalions until they looked as if swept by a tornado.” Leafless trees stood as stark as at midwinter, if not split apart by the holocaust. “The green sward had been stained with a brighter crimson than nature gives to the dying leaves,” he noted years later. The human toll equaled that of nature. Statistics hardly told the whole story. Shepherdstown resident Mary Bedinger Mitchell, daughter of a former minister to Denmark, recalled the noise, confusion, dust, throngs of stragglers, horsemen galloping about, wagons blocking one another, and teamsters wrangling—a continual din of shouting, swearing, and rumbling. Most of all she remembered the overflow of wounded: “Wherever four walls and a roof were found together,” with “every inch of space” filled with suffering, “and yet the cry was for room.” “An ever present sense of anguish, dread, pity, and, I fear, hatred” constituted her recollections of Antietam. On Samuel Poffenberger’s farm north of Sharpsburg, nurse Clara Barton helped load the vanguard of thousands of Union wounded for an overland trek to Frederick hospitals and beyond. There could be no rest, said 260 | opportunities found and lost her assistant, Cornelius Welles: “All around us were dying men, calling for water, for friends, for God to deliver them from their miseries.”1 Once the burial parties had done their job and the armies moved on, other angels of the battlefield would hew to reconstruction. Sightseers traveled great distances to view the scenes atop South Mountain or, like Otho Nesbitt from Clear Spring, Maryland, gaped at the sight of Confederate dead at Antietam. “I suppose a mile long or more,” nearly “all lying on their backs as if they hadn’t even made a struggle,” he observed before leaving for home, “having satisfied myself in regard to falling humanity.” Slowly, frightened local citizenry emerged from hiding places in cellars and the Killiansburg Cave along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal about two miles from town. Little Theresa Kretzer remembered how everything at the end of the day of the battle seemed painted in red: haze from the sunset , the brick of the church, “red, red, red.” “Too afraid to cry,” she recalled. “It was a red stew,” and the smell of death hung over the region for weeks, even months. Sergeant Wright recalled how arriving soldiery had found “an old-fashioned country neighborhood— almost ideal for the times,” with the people living in peace and enjoying undisturbed life on farms where most had been born. “But, we left it with homes, fields, and forests, marred, shattered, devastated, and ruined.” Little wonder that “the inhabitants were as glad that we were going as we were to go.” The only gain for Sharpsburg, he observed, “was its 4,000 or more new-made graves, and people are not generally desirous of gain in that direction.”2 The basic facts about the battle were known in Washington within hours, in Richmond somewhat later. Copies of the Philadelphia Examiner reputedly spread news of South Mountain and Sharpsburg to the Confederate capital “like a thunderclap out of a rainbow.” President Abraham Lincoln told an associate that while Antietam had been fought on a Wednesday, Lee had not pulled back before Friday, so that he could not find out until Saturday, September 20, “whether we had really won a victory or not.” Government censorship shrouded the details in the South, although Felix G. de Fontaine of the Charleston Daily Courier and Peter Wellington Alexander, another reporter, recounted the heroic gallantry and general excitement of combat along with a fair share of dubious facts on numbers, casualties , and details of combat. George E. Smalley of the New York Tribune and Charles Coffin of the Boston Journal supplied similar stories for opportunities found and lost | 261 northern readers. Smalley’s account of Antietam, written in the dim light of a swaying oil lamp on the night train to New York, observes historian J. Cutler Andrews, “was finer than any other writing of the kind during the whole four years of the conflict.” Southern commentators...