The Dead of Antietam
“Every blade of grass, every leaf, every stone here at Antietam has meaning. You can touch and you can feel it,” Antietam National Battlefield superintendent John Howard once told a group of Civil War enthusiasts who were visiting the Sharpsburg, Maryland site.
Antietam speaks to me like no other battlefield, whether I come as a student of history, a photographer, or a spiritual pilgrim. It is my favorite place on Earth and I am still searching for the reason this is so.
If you sit upon one of the snake rail fences that meander about the battlefield around the Sunken Road, with little trouble you can transport yourself back to that terrible September 17 in 1862, when two American armies killed each other from dawn to dusk. If you snap your fingers once every second for twelve hours, that would be how many Americans were killed or wounded that late summer day. Those deaths make this place haunting.
The Antietam battlefield is a small wedge of land that perfectly fits like a piece of jigsaw puzzle into the western Maryland landscape. My favorite place on the battlefield is the Dunker Church, a worship home to the pacifist sect of German Baptist Brethren who lived in this area at the time of the battle. Its simple design, whitewashed brick with no steeple, is unpretentious and humble.
Antietam is a Native American word that means “the swift current,” but it has come to mean so much more. Antietam was a true stalemate, but this battle changed the American landscape by setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation-Lincoln’s tool to crush the Southern economy. The words “Forever Free” had never been uttered in America to African-Americans before Antietam. Though all men were created equal, never had they lived equally. We still don’t. And so Antietam matters.
Mathew Brady and his legion of photographers came to Antietam just after the battle to shoot the battlefield. Never before had someone tried to make art out of death. When Brady opened his New York gallery with his exhibit, “The Dead of Antietam,” thousands lined up to see the powerful photos. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” a New York Times reporter wrote. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and our streets, he had done something very like it. But there is one side of the picture that…has escaped photographic skill. It is the background of windows and orphans…homes made desolate and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been quenched forever. All this desolation imagination must paint-broken hearts cannot be photographed.”
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Giclee Print">Battle of Antietam
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Giclee Print">Jahn, E.
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Antietam speaks to me like no other battlefield, whether I come as a student of history, a photographer, or a spiritual pilgrim. It is my favorite place on Earth and I am still searching for the reason this is so.
If you sit upon one of the snake rail fences that meander about the battlefield around the Sunken Road, with little trouble you can transport yourself back to that terrible September 17 in 1862, when two American armies killed each other from dawn to dusk. If you snap your fingers once every second for twelve hours, that would be how many Americans were killed or wounded that late summer day. Those deaths make this place haunting.
The Antietam battlefield is a small wedge of land that perfectly fits like a piece of jigsaw puzzle into the western Maryland landscape. My favorite place on the battlefield is the Dunker Church, a worship home to the pacifist sect of German Baptist Brethren who lived in this area at the time of the battle. Its simple design, whitewashed brick with no steeple, is unpretentious and humble.
Antietam is a Native American word that means “the swift current,” but it has come to mean so much more. Antietam was a true stalemate, but this battle changed the American landscape by setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation-Lincoln’s tool to crush the Southern economy. The words “Forever Free” had never been uttered in America to African-Americans before Antietam. Though all men were created equal, never had they lived equally. We still don’t. And so Antietam matters.
Mathew Brady and his legion of photographers came to Antietam just after the battle to shoot the battlefield. Never before had someone tried to make art out of death. When Brady opened his New York gallery with his exhibit, “The Dead of Antietam,” thousands lined up to see the powerful photos. “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war,” a New York Times reporter wrote. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and our streets, he had done something very like it. But there is one side of the picture that…has escaped photographic skill. It is the background of windows and orphans…homes made desolate and the light of life in thousands of hearts has been quenched forever. All this desolation imagination must paint-broken hearts cannot be photographed.”
Giclee Print">
Giclee Print">Battle of Antietam
Giclee Print
Giclee Print">
Giclee Print">Jahn, E.
Buy at AllPosters.com
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