Lessons from a battlefield

Our writer visits Antietam looking for fall color but instead finds a renewed sense of patriotism.

I've never liked to think about the Civil War. It's not that I find the past boring, but this chapter of our history is so dark and disturbing that it pains me to even contemplate what those days must have been like.

It's ironic then that my work brings me to Antietam National Battlefield outside Sharpsburg, Maryland. Our photographer convinced me that this would be a beautiful spot to find fall color. He was right, but I wasn't prepared for the emotions the place would stir.

There's really not much to see here. A small stone visitors center, a cemetery, and some monuments help tell the story. Well-placed wayside exhibits fill in all of the important details. Still, the battlefield itself is largely a pastoral landscape.

On September 17, 1862, however, farmer D.R. Miller's cornfield became the bloodiest spot of the bloodiest oneday battle in American history. By noon, the corn had been demolished by bullets and cannon shells, and the ground was covered with thousands of dead and broken men. There were more than 23,000 casualties at Antietam, equally divided between the North and South.

Union general Joseph Hooker would later write of Miller's cornfield: "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. It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battlefield."

The battle ended Robert E. Lee's first attempt to move the war north and spurred President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Scholars believe that the events of this day turned the tide of the war.

Despite my initial objections, I'm glad we passed this way. Believe it or not, I found hope on that battlefield. Today, I have a deeper appreciation for the sacrifices those young men made and a deeper faith in the resiliency of the American people. If we as a nation could survive this horror, we can overcome anything.

This, after all, is the reason we visit old battlefields-to learn the lessons the past has to offer.

CASSANDRA M. VANHOOSER

Antietam National Battlefield: P.O. Box 158, Sharpsburg, MD 21782; (301) 432-5124 or www.nps.gov/anti.

Hours: The National Park Service Visitors Center is open 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Entrance fee: $3 per person or $5 per family. How to get there: Sharpsburg is less than two hours from Baltimore or Washington, D.C.; from 1-70, take Exit 29, and follow State 65 to the battlefield entrance.

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Oct 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved