The Confederate General Rides North by Amanda C. Gable

Author:Amanda C. Gable
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

We travel on a two-lane road to go from Harpers Ferry to Sharpsburg, Maryland, where the battle of Antietam took place. The map shows that we are closely paralleling the Potomac River, but we never see it. Our drive takes us through a valley of gently rolling hills and pastureland with fences here and there, past a few head of cattle or horses. In the bright afternoon light, the grass and trees are still the fresh yellow-green color that I think of as spring. I see fields of young corn, the plants knee-high with delicately flopping leaves. We didn’t pass any promising-looking antique shops on the way to Harpers Ferry this morning and there are none on this road. But it’s okay because we don’t have that much room left in the trailer and we’re likely to pass plenty of stores on the rest of the long drive to Maine.

As I stare out the car window, I imagine Jackson’s troops hurriedly marching on this same route after they captured Harpers Ferry and Lee sent word that they should head north to Sharpsburg to reinforce the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. I want to absorb everything as we drive by so I will remember how it looks. When Jackson passed through here in mid-September, the corn would have been much higher, as tall as a man. But for once, his men wouldn’t have needed to gather the ears during their afternoon and evening march; they would have been loaded down with food taken from the Union storehouses at Harpers Ferry.

We get to the visitor center right before the filmstrip begins and Mother reluctantly agrees to stay for it. With Mother fidgeting next to me, I try to soak up all the details about Antietam. Lee had wanted to invade Pennsylvania and worked out an intricate way to divide his army in order to do so, but when Union soldiers found his battle orders, everything changed. He positioned his army on the ridge of Sharpsburg, a town east of the Potomac with the swift waters of Antietam creek running alongside it. Lee’s first invasion of the North turned out to be the bloodiest single day of the war. More than 23,000 men were killed or wounded in the one-day battle.

On the screen is a photo of a tiny white building—Dunker Church. In the foreground are a dead horse, a broken two-wheeled artillery caisson, and many dead soldiers lying in a row. The next photograph shows the Sunken Road, a broad dirt path that lies some two feet lower than the fields on either side. After a three-and-a-half-hour fight there, the narration tells us, the soldiers renamed the road Bloody Lane. I grip the arm of my seat when the next picture comes on the screen. I’ve seen it before at Aunt Laura’s. Two men in hats, slightly out of focus, look down from above the Sunken Road into the mass of tangled torsos, legs, arms, and upturned faces of soldiers who died there.

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