The bridge is narrow, affording space for only one vehicle at a time. It is built of stone, and rests on two solid butments and two rounded piers. There are woods on both sides of the stream. On the left bank they stand a little back from it; on the right, they cover the side of the bluff below the bridge. The trees all along here were well scarred with shot. Half a mile below the bridge the creek makes a bold turn to the right, and doubles back upon itself, forming a loop, then sweeps away to the south, between a wooded hill on the west and a magnificent growth of willows massing their delicate green and drooping foliage along the low opposite shore.
Returning to the village, I visited the spot chosen as a national cemetery for the slain. The ground had been purchased, but work upon it had not yet commenced. As Pennsylvania gave the soil for the Gettysburg Cemetery, so Maryland gives the soil for this; while each State will defray its portion of future expenses. In the Antietam cemetery it is understood that the Rebel dead are to be included. Many object to this; but I do not. Skeletons, rooted up by hogs, and blanching in the open fields, are a sight not becoming a country that calls itself Christian. Be they the bones of Patriots or Rebels, let them be carefully gathered up and decently interred without delay.
The Antietam National Burying-Ground also adjoins an old town cemetery. It is situated on the right hand, at the summit of the road, as you go up out of Sharpsburg towards Boonsboro’. Here let them rest together, they of the good cause, and they of the evil; I shall be content. For neither was the one cause altogether good, nor was the other altogether bad: the holier being clouded by much ignorance and selfishness, and the darker one brightened here and there with glorious flashes of self-devotion. It was not, rightly speaking, these brothers that were at war. The conflict was waged between two great principles,—one looking towards liberty and human advancement, the other madly drawing the world back to barbarism and the dark ages. America was the chessboard on which the stupendous game was played, and those we name Patriots and Rebels were but as the pawns.
Great was the day of Antietam. Three thousand of the enemy were buried on the field. We had two thousand killed, upwards of nine thousand four hundred wounded, and more than a thousand missing. Between the sweet dawn and the bloody dusk of that dread day there fell TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND MEN! Can the imagination conceive of such slaughter?
And, after all, the striking fact about Antietam is this,—that it was a great opportunity lost. The premature surrender of Harper’s Ferry, which set free the force besieging it, and enabled the enemy to outnumber us on the field,—for Stonewall Jackson was as anxious to get into the fight as Fitz John Porter was to keep out of it,—and the subsequent inertia of the General commanding the United States forces; these two causes combined to save the Confederate army from annihilation. No such opportunity for crushing the Rebellion at a blow had been offered, nor was any such again offered,—not even at Gettysburg, for the enemy there had no coiling river in their rear to entangle them, and we had no fresh troops to launch upon them,—nor at any period afterwards, until Grant consummated that long-desired object; God’s good time having not yet come.
CHAPTER VI.
DOWN THE RIVER TO HARPER’S FERRY.
Sharpsburg is not a promising place to spend the night in, and I determined to leave it that evening. In search of a private conveyance, I entered a confectioner’s shop, and asked a young lady behind the counter if she knew any person who would take me to Harper’s Ferry.
“Yes; Mr. Bennerhalls,” she replied; “I reckon ye can get him.”
She gave me particular directions for finding his house, and I went up one of the broken pavements “fanged with murderous stones,” in search of him. To my surprise I was told that Mr. Bennerhalls did not live on that street; further, that no person of that name was known in Sharpsburg. I returned to the confectioner’s shop.
“You said Mr. Bennerhalls?”