In addition to the visual hallucinations and the sense of euphoria (or terrible anxiety, depending on one’s luck), psychedelics have a tendency to freight the world’s anodyne details with terrible significance. On a mushroom trip, a person may become temporarily convinced that a friend’s silly joke provides some deep insight into the secret springs of the world, or may stare at an otherwise-uninteresting scratch on the wall for minutes, memorizing its every contour as it shifts and twists in on itself; the patterns on a bathroom wall contain occult mysteries.
In the same way, a tiny bridge or unremarkable hill can be transformed by the psychedelia of war into a thing worth ordering men to their deaths for.
The Antietam Creek runs for about 42 miles from roughly Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, to Sharpsburg, Maryland, where it empties into the Potomac. Today, the Antietam is generally in good health, though the National Park Service is concerned about agricultural runoff contributing to eutrophication and sedimentation along the creek. It is managed as a trout fishery and is apparently used for kayaking and tubing in the summer. On September, 17, 1862, however, the creek bore witness to what is usually counted the single bloodiest day in American history: the battle called either Antietam or Sharpsburg, depending on whether one was reading Union or Confederate newspapers at the time.
After the Second Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas), at which Robert E. Lee spanked John Pope, Lee decides to move on Washington and begin a campaign through western Maryland. He is opposed by Union general George B. McClellan, primarily famous at this point for doing a stellar job training up a crackerjack Army of the Potomac and then spectacularly shitting the bed with it in eastern Virginia during the ill-fated Peninsula campaign. As generals, they are unequally matched; Lee was the architect of McClellan’s defeat in the Peninsula earlier that year, and McClellan lacked either the chutzpah of Lee or the steadiness of Ulysses S. Grant, and combined these absences with an enormous, Napoleonic ego; he therefore spent much of his generalship alternately dithering and preening, failing to capitalize on his enemies’ weaknesses and chronically overestimating the size of the Confederate army.
But as Lee moves into Maryland, McClellan’s army stumbles upon a copy of Lee’s orders for the campaign, such that even this incompetent jackanape realizes he has a potential advantage if he can just move quickly enough from Washington. McClellan marches west; Lee begins gathering his split forces to repulse him, and settles on the area near the tiny town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, for the battle. McClellan obliges him.
No one really wins this battle. In military parlance, Antietam is a tactical draw but a strategic victory for the Union. In about 12 hours of brutal combat, McClellan’s forces gain a tiny bit of ground, but Confederate reinforcements under A.P. Hill arrive in time to prevent the destruction of Lee’s army. Lee dislikes his position and so elects to withdraw the next day; McClellan fails to pursue him with enough vigor such that Lee gets away, which causes President Lincoln to fire McClellan for the final time. In one sense, McClellan wins: he halts Lee’s advance into the North, though he would come back the next year, culminating in the battle of Gettysburg. In another sense, no one wins, since nothing was materially gained; the battle simply reverts the state of the war to exactly where it was before Lee moved into Maryland.
Lincoln claims it as a victory, however, and capitalizes on that momentum to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, promising to free the enslaved people of the rebellious states (though not the four loyal ones that are still somehow slave states) by January 1, 1863, if those states do not return to the Union. Before, one could perhaps fool oneself into thinking this was purely a war about keeping the Union together; now it is explicitly about slavery. This has the immediate political effect of preventing England and France from providing official support to the Confederacy, as they had both been contemplating; both nations banned slavery some time prior and now refuse to support a power that is explicitly fighting a war to maintain that abhorrent practice.
That’s the history, or at least the 10,000-foot view of it. If you want a good description of troop movements and the like, you could do worse than this 15-minute video from the American Battlefield Trust. But when I visited Antietam last weekend, I was thinking less about the broader historical significance of the battle in terms of the War writ large, and more about the 23,000 immediate consequences of the battle. The day after the battle, no Proclamations had been issued and the battle’s meaning was yet unfixed, save for the dead and the dying, and there were a lot of those.
The National Park Service estimates 22,720 casualties, men killed, wounded, captured, or missing. 3650 men died right there on the battlefield, and 17,300 more were wounded; many of those (the Park Service estimates about 1/7, or another 2500 or so) died of their wounds in the days to follow. Every nearby house and church was turned into a field hospital, and the scale of the gravedigging was such that many bodies (particularly Confederate dead) lay unburied for several days and were still visible to be photographed when Alexander Gardner arrived on the scene on September 19th. For those men, the significance of the battle was already plain: this is where I lost my leg; this is where I was captured; this is where I died.
No bodies were in evidence by the time I got there on Sunday. Over the preceding 161 years, the battlefield has been preserved and cleaned up, and were it not for the 400+ signs, monuments, and cannons that litter its 3200 acres, there would be no sign of the battle. This is of course a silly thing to say; one can’t go more than a hundred feet without finding a stone monument to this or that regiment, but the landscape itself is not notably scarred by the battle. I saw no craters, no fences riven to pieces by bullets, no walls pitted by shells like one can see at Ft. Pulaski, near Savannah, the only other Civil War battlefield I have managed to visit so far. (I grew up in Colorado and have lived a majority of my adult life in Minnesota; these places are obviously light on Civil War battlefields).
And Antietam National Battlefield is, above all else, beautiful: rolling hills; the gently flowing creek; massive old trees, their leaves turning with the season. One walks the trails, seeing the cows gently grazing on the few farms that are still on the land (whose ownership is unclear to me). Downtown Sharpsburg abuts the south end of the battlefield and is a perfect postcard of a bucolic Appalachian town. Strolling around the battlefield today is about as pleasant an afternoon as one can spend outside, assuming the weather cooperates. The Sunken Road, a recessed dirt road that was so thick with Confederate dead that one man claimed he could walk across the entire road without ever setting foot on the ground, is now a pleasant path shaded in part by walnut trees. At one end, I saw a man and his very young son loudly discussing Pokémon; the Bloody Lane itself was strolled by young women in yoga pants walking big, fluffy dogs.
In this context, I was struck by the smallness of all of it, of how one little hill or bridge or cornfield that was unimportant the day before became invested with dire significance for those 12 hours and then became unimportant immediately thereafter. Antietam is, as I mentioned, usually considered the bloodiest day in American history, as more Americans became casualties on that day than on any other. (Granted, this is largely because one counts both sides in the Civil War rather than only one side, as one does with D-Day or other sanguinary superlatives.) But these men did not die “at Antietam,” writ large; the battle was not named yet, and “Antietam” is not really a place. Much of the battle has relatively little to do with the creek itself. They died in far more specific ways and places: trying to cross Burnside’s Bridge, or trying to hold the Sunken Road, or trying to take the West Woods, which is not an entire forest but instead a little patch of trees north of Sharpsburg; the trail that loops through the whole patch is only 1.4 miles long.
Burnside’s Bridge, as it is now called, is a 125-foot long and 12-foot wide stone bridge across the Antietam that Union troops under Ambrose Burnside sought to cross so they could attack Lee’s right flank. 500 Confederates from Georgia posted up along a ridge just west of the bridge tried to stop them. After two failed Union attacks, and with the Confederates running out of ammunition, Burnside’s 51st New York and 51st Pennsylvania regiments finally stormed the bridge and drove back the Georgian defenders, allowing Burnside’s 8500 men to cross; before they could be effectively brought to bear on most of Lee’s army, however, they were met by A.P. Hill’s reinforcements and fought to a draw. This was not one of the bloodiest parts of the battle; those were further north in the Bloody Cornfield or the Bloody Lane, but it’s the easiest part of the battle to visualize. The bridge is still there, and when walking across it, it is simple to envision doing so under heavy fire from grey-uniformed men with guns on the ridge who are trying to kill you; standing on the ridge, it is easy to imagine firing on soldiers massed on the other shore.
It is a very pretty bridge, but it is not really very big. After the war, it continued to be used as an ordinary thoroughfare; there are pictures of big 1960s automobiles driving across it. This bridge was worth killing and dying for? This bridge across this creek that one could ordinarily just wade across? Well, maybe. Had the Confederates not held the bridge so stubbornly, or had Burnside been a little more expeditious about moving his troops across the bridge, or had Hill been slower marching his reinforcements from Harper’s Ferry, the battle could have happened differently, and perhaps the Civil War could have been shorter, and many fewer men might have died of bullet wounds and dysentery. Under the psychedelic logic of war, this bridge, this road, this cornfield, is worth cannon fire and bayonet charges.
Because as any user of psychedelics could tell you, everything is connected and everything is also about everything else. Because you are dying for the bridge, yes, but in so doing you are also dying for the Cause; in fighting over Burnside’s Bridge you are sounding the Battle Cry of Freedom, whatever that means to you. You are fighting for your private reasons and also over the great question of whether or not we will allow people to own other people, and it all tangles together in an incoherent and terrible way, and then it’s over, and you’re either dead or not, and, if not, you look back on it, exhausted and frazzled and coming down from the high, and you gained the bridge, which felt so desperately important at the time, but which does not seem to have amounted to much, and many of your friends are dead or dying, and the bridge never matters again for the rest of the war, and one hundred years later people drive Buicks over it and sixty years after that they come to stare at it and think about you, and then they go home, and the young sycamore tree that was next to the bridge when you fought is still there, now a great and ancient thing.