We drove on to the Dunker church, sometimes called “the Schoolhouse,”—a square, plain, whitewashed, one-story brick building, without steeple, situated in the edge of the woods. No one, from its appearance, would take it to be a church; and I find that soldiers who fought here still speak of it as “the Schoolhouse.”
“The Dunkers are a sect of plain people,” said one of the old Dutch settlers. “They don’t believe in any wanities. They don’t believe in war and fighting.”
But their church had got pretty seriously into the fight on that occasion. “It was well smashed to pieces; all made like a riddle; you could just look in and out where you pleased,” said Lewy Smith. It had been patched up with brick and whitewash, however, and the plain people, who “did not believe in wanities,” once more held their quiet meetings there. I thought much of them as we rode on. A serious, unshaven thrifty class of citizens, they know well how to get a living, and they bear an excellent reputation for honest industry throughout the country. Their chief fault seems to be that they persist in killing one of man’s divinest faculties,—as if the sweet and refining sense of beauty would have been given us but for a beneficent purpose. At the same time they do believe sincerely in solid worldly goods,—as if they too were not, after all, quite as much one of the “wanities”! Think of it, my solemn long-bearded friend; you buy land, lay out your dollar in perishable dust, or you expend it in the cultivation of those gifts and graces which, if heaven is what I take it to be, you will find use for when you get there. Now which do you suppose will prove the better investment? All of religion does not consist in psalm-singing and sedate behavior. But I do wrong to criticise so worthy and unoffending a sect of Christians, who are no doubt nearer the kingdom than the most we call such; and I merely set out to say this: while we are in the world, all its interests, all its great struggles, concern us. We cannot sit indifferent. Non-intervention is unknown to the awakened soul. Help the good cause we must, and resist the evil; if we cannot fight, we can pray; and to think of keeping out of the conflict that is raging around us is the vainest thing of all, as yonder well-riddled plain people’s church amply testifies.
As it was beginning to rain, Lewy Smith carried me on to Sharpsburg, and there left me. A more lonesome place even than Boonsboro’; the battle alone renders it in the least interesting; a tossed and broken sort of place, that looks as if the solid ground-swell of the earth had moved on and jostled it since the foundations were laid. As you go up and down the hilly streets, the pavements, composed of fragments of limestone slabs, thrust up such abrupt fangs and angles at you, that it is necessary to tread with exceeding caution. As Sharpsburg was in the thick of the fight, the battle-scars it still carries add to its dilapidated appearance. On the side of the town fronting the Federal line of battle, every house bears its marks; and indeed I do not know that any altogether escaped. Many were well peppered with bullets, shot and shell. The thousand inhabitants of the place had mostly fled to the river, where they would have been in a sad plight if McClellan had followed up the Rebels on their defeat, and done his duty by them. Imagine a bent bow, with the string drawn. The bow is the river, and the string is the Confederate line after the battle. At the angle of the string is Sharpsburg; and between the string and the bow were the fugitives. Fortunately for them, as for the enemy, McClellan did not do his duty.
After dinner I started to walk to the bridge, known henceforth and for all time as “Burnside’s Bridge,” just as the road his corps cut for itself through the forests over the mountain, on his way hither from the Sunday fight, is known to everybody as “Burnside’s Road.”
A shower coming up by the way, I sought shelter under the porch of a stone house, situated on a rising bank near the edge of the town. I had scarcely mounted the steps when a woman appeared, and with cordial hospitality urged me to enter the sitting-room. Although the porch was the pleasanter place,—overlooking the hills and mountains on the east, and affording a comfortable wooden bench, where I had thought to sit and enjoy the rain,—I accepted her invitation, having found by experience that every dweller on a battle-field has something interesting to tell.
She and her neighbors fled from their homes on Tuesday before the battle, and did not return until Friday. She, like nearly every person I talked with who had acted a similar part, was sorry she did not remain in the cellar of the house.
“When we came back, all I could do was jist to set right down and cry.” The house had been plundered, their provisions, and the household comforts they had been slowly getting together for years, had been swept away by the all-devouring armies. “Them that stayed at home did not lose anything; but if the soldiers found a house deserted, that they robbed.”
I inquired which plundered the most, our men or the Rebels.
“That I can’t say, stranger. The Rebels took; but the Yankees took right smart. We left the house full, and when we got home we hadn’t a thing to eat. Some wounded men had been fetched in, and they had got all the bedding that was left, and all our clothing had been torn up for bandages. It was a right hard time, stranger!”—spoken earnestly and with tears. “I haven’t got well over it yet. It killed my old father; he overworked getting the fences up again, and it wore on him so he died within a year. We are jist getting things a little to rights again now, but the place a’n’t what it was, and never will be again, in my day.”