Four States

Harper’s Ferry and Antietam– CLICK 4 SHOW

Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and PA.

I was not able to place an entry for yesterdays activities at Fredricksburg and Chancellorville, both of which were shocking, revealing, tragic, pick your description, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we did not get into the hotel until after 12 midnight. Eric competently subbed in and now on to our travels today.

We have been taking tours at the various locations where we have visited and you can imagine our interactions with the guides. None of us are particularly shy about asking questions. They range from asking probing questions on the proper placement of troop formations to vital questions as to a good place for lunch. A few of the off the wall factoids we have heard from our guides are the roots of various sayings. For example, while at Lee’s chapel the guide mentioned that the portrait of Washington was painted with out hands showing and above the knee. She asked us if we knew why. The silence was deafening so she said that hands and legs were difficult to paint and so such paintings were extremely expensive. Thus the saying that “it will cost you an arm and a leg”. At Agecroft house the guide was particularly adept at sayings. Did you know that knights of old who were not of fine character owned the cheap amour known as chain mail. It had to be painted black to avoid rust. They made a habit of extorting money from villagers and thus the saying “blackmail” Or that the lord of the manner sat in the only chair at the dinner table. A table in those days was a board which has translated to us as “Chairman of the Board”. And you all thought that this was a civil war tour!

Today we traveled to two battle sites, Harpers Ferry and Antitam. Harper’s Ferry is a town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers and as such was a crossroads. Roads, rivers and rail all converged on the location. It was also the site of the Union’s sole location for the manufacturing of muskets and had about 100,000 rifles in the city. Lee, seeing such a prize and wanting to take the battle to the north invaded Maryland at this point. Harper’s Ferry and Antitam are only 10 to 12 miles apart and while Lee sped past it to points north he left his friend Stonewall Jackson to take the town (by the way, Stonewall had a brother in the army who was not as competent a General as he. His nicknamed Mud Wall, No Lie!). The topography of the river valley made Harper’s Ferry almost impossible to defend and it fell in a short time with thousand of Union prisoner taken. Such were the times that Jackson made the Union soldiers promise that they would not fight against his army until properly exchanged for confederate soldiers and let them go. Believe it or not the soldiers left and went home until the proper paperwork came through. The union position at Harpers Ferry was so poor that Jackson himself said that he would rather attack Harpers Ferry 40 times than defend it once.

We drove to Antitam which is a nearly perfectly preserved battle site left as it was in the Civil War days. Some of our other sites have had modern towns on part of the battlefield or the trees have returned to obscure what in those days was an open view. It also is a relatively small battle site that you can see from an observation tower. When Lee left Jackson at Harper’s Ferry, he found himself very vulnerable to attack which the union general McClellan took advantage of. Antitam is a place just outside of Sparksburg on Antitam Creek. The battle took place between Lee’s 27000 men and McClellan’s 87,000. Out numbered 3 to one, Lee fought McClellan to a draw but at the incredible cost of 27000 casualties in just 12 hours of fighting. Entire companies were killed to the man. Charge after charge was made (by the confederates this time) into cannons shooting what was known a canister… nails, bolts, chain, at point blank range. It was said that the men were cut down as wheat or corn by a scythe In one battle at the bridge in our pictures, 500 Georgians held off 20000 men of Burnside’s group as they crossed the stream. The battle was the worst one-day loss for the entire war.

Tomorrow we are off the Holy Grail of all civil war battles, Gettysburg.