The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered by Charles W. Mitchell Jean H. Baker & Adam Goodheart

Author:Charles W. Mitchell, Jean H. Baker & Adam Goodheart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2021-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

“WHAT I WITNESSED WOULD

ONLY MAKE YOU SICK”

Union Soldiers Confront the Dead at Antietam

BRIAN MATTHEW JORDAN

Just two days after the Battle of Antietam, the photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson captured one of the most arresting images of the Civil War: a large federal burial party taking a much-needed respite from its macabre toil on David R. Miller’s farm. Their muskets stacked, some men lean on shovels and spades; one slings a pick over his shoulder. The foreground is littered with splintered fence rails and human debris. Lifeless bodies—very likely the dead of the 124th Pennsylvania Volunteers, “raked” by a fierce rebel musketry from the West Woods—are arrayed in a neat row, awaiting their soon-to-be excavated graves. If inspected with care, this stereo negative—one of ninety-five images collected on the battlefield that autumn—yields some tantalizing clues as to the emotional toll levied by the inevitable postbattle errand. Somber and sallow-faced, the burial detail surveys the hellscape around them—appearing to oscillate between awe, horror, and disbelief. While some soldiers engage in conversation, one member of the crew points ahead—perhaps indicating the location of the next shallow trench into which bodies will be heaped. Seated on the ground, another man turns away from the carnage; still others knit their brows in seeming disgust.1

It has become axiomatic that the photographs of the Antietam dead—displayed that October in a public exhibit mounted in Mathew Brady’s New York City gallery—were the first such images captured on an American battlefield.2 But less appreciated and more significant is another novelty of the slaughter at Sharpsburg. Prior to its victories at South Mountain and Antietam, the Army of the Potomac had never wrested a battlefield from the enemy; as such, the possession “under arms” of these corpse-strewn fields provided many Union soldiers’ first intimate encounter with the grim realities of death on a massive scale.3 Taking cues from sensory history and histories of material culture, this essay examines how Union soldiers (and a few northern civilians) confronted the dead at Antietam.4 As the sensory historian Adam Mack has pointed out, our narratives too often elide the ways in which the past was “immediately” felt and experienced by ordinary historical actors, though these raw feelings and emotions informed historical memories and stimulated future action.5 Keenly aware that they were participating in history—though at pains to assimilate their place in the war as a whole—Union soldiers rummaged for meaning, living in the shadow of the dead. In the end, the assault that Antietam made on their senses—an assault that persisted six more weeks, as a listless Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan moored his Army of the Potomac in place—challenged and refined their ideas about the war and its conduct.

Union soldiers confronted a staggering spectacle on the Antietam battlefield after the shooting stopped. So surreal was the landscape that one brigade commander held, “If phantoms from the spirit world could ever come forth to bewilder mortals, sure never was there time or place or sight so seasonable.” Men distrusted their

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