Battle of Antietam Creek, The

DESCRIPTION: At Antietam, singer hears a wounded comrade tell of leaving his home, disliking his master, and running off to New Orleans, where he is conscripted. After ten battles, he has been wounded. The singer realizes that the man is his own brother
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1938 (recording, Warde Ford)
LONG DESCRIPTION: "'Twas on the field of Antietam, where many's the soldier fell, Is where occurred the story Which now to you I'll tell. The dead lay all around me...." At the battle of Antietam Creek, singer hears a wounded comrade tell of leaving his home and family for Ohio. The man tells of being an apprentice, disliking his master, then running off to New Orleans, where he is conscripted into the army. He has been in ten battles, but has finally been wounded -- by his brother, he thinks. The singer realizes that the man is his own brother, and rushes to him as he dies. The dying man forgives the singer. The singer buries him
KEYWORDS: army battle Civilwar war parting travel death dying burial work injury brother apprentice
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Apr 16, 1862 - The Confederate Congress passes the conscription act
Sept 17, 1862 - Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg). Robert E. Lee's invasion of Maryland meets a bloody check at the hands of George McClellan -- and vice versa
FOUND IN: US(MW)
Roud #15487
RECORDINGS:
Warde Ford, "The Battle of Antietam Creek" (AFS 4213 A, 1939; on LC29, in AMMEM/Cowell)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "General Lee's Wooing" (subject) and notes there
NOTES [3379 words]: After Robert E. Lee's forces won the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lee determined to invade the North, both to relieve the burden of sustaining his army (which had stripped much of northern Virginia bare of food and other supplies) and to threaten the Union government. So he invaded Maryland, with the option to later head into Pennsylvania.
One stage in the invasion was to capture the garrison of Harper's Ferry, where the Shenandoah River entered the Potomac, This would not only allow the Confederates to take some 12,000 prisoners, it would also eliminate a threat to Lee's supply lines to Virginia. Knowing that the extraordinarily cautious Union general George McClellan was in charge of the defending armies, Lee felt it safe to divide his army into five separate parts -- three, under the overall command of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, to approach Harper's Ferry in three different directions, one to gather supplies in Maryland, and one, the single division of D. H. Hill, to guard the passes so McClellan couldn't figure out what was going on. This even though Lee's army was badly reduced by casualties and straggling -- many men had no shoes and could not keep up; it is estimated that only about 40,000 men made it into Maryland. McClellan had at least half again as many, and probably more like twice as many, men as Lee.
And McClellan also had an incredible stroke of luck: he captured a copy of the order revealing Lee's plans. He proceeded to attack D. H. Hill at South Mountain. He had the chance to separate Lee's army and defeat it in detail. Lee gave immediate orders to concentrate everyone at Sharpsburg, although he delayed things a bit when Stonewall Jackson informed him that Harper's Ferry was about to fall.
McClellan therefore still had his chance. On September 16, less than half of Lee's army was at Sharpsburg. McClellan, with almost all of his army present, could easily have overwhelmed it. Instead, he spent the day looking over the battle site.
By the morning of September 17, McClellan had looked the place over -- but Lee had had time to gather eight of the nine divisions of his army. He was still heavily outnumbered, but at least he had enough troops to put together a defensive line.
McClellan's plan was hardly a plan at all -- more a series of uncoordinated lunges. The Union First Corps attacked the Confederate left. Lee managed to hold that off, so the Union Twelfth Corps attacked the same spot. Lee held that off, too. So the Union Second Corps attacked, one division at a time, toward the left and left-center. This attack too was stopped, but Lee had no troops left at all. The only unengaged forces were a few brigades on Lee's right. The Federal Ninth Corps attacked there, and eventually managed to cross the Antietam and threaten Lee's rear. Lee's last remaining unit, A. P. Hill's division, arrived just in time to attack the Ninth Corps and cause it to halt. And that was the end of the fighting on September 17.
On September 18, Lee bluffed: He had no fresh troops left, but he stayed in his lines, as if daring McClellan to attack him. McClellan refused. The next day, Lee slipped away.
The Battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg was hardly a victory for anyone. It produced the highest casualties of any single day of battle in the Civil War. By the time it was over, every regiment in Robert E. Lee's invading army was worn out, and he may have had fewer than 25,000 effective soldiers left. McClellan still had unused troops (two whole corps, the Fifth and Sixth, representing a third of his army), but he refused to commit them; his losses had also been immense, and he didn't realize how badly Lee had been hurt. And he was too much of a moral coward to risk it anyway.
After the battle, Lee headed back across the Potomac. The "wooing" of Maryland, which many Southerners thought would bring the state over to the Confederacy, or at least bring in a lot of recruits, was over, with little benefit to the southern cause. (For the idea of "wooing" Maryland, see also "General Lee's Wooing.") The one good result of Antietam was that it was enough of a victory -- barely -- to allow Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Can we determine anything about the facts behind this song? We know that the dead brother was "conscripted" in New Orleans. This obviously means that he ended up in a Louisiana regiment in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Apart from a few artillerymen, by the time of Antietam, all the Louisiana troops in Lee's army were part of just two brigades:
1. Harry Hays's "Louisiana Tigers" (division of Ewell/Lawton/Early): 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th Louisiana regiments (Palfrey, p, 197)
2. Starke's/Stafford's brigade (division of Jackson/Winder/Talliaferro/Starke; later commanded by Edward Johnson): 1st, 2nd, 9th, 10th, 15th Louisiana plus Coppen's Louisiana Battalion (Palfrey, p. 196)
(We should probably also mention the Washington Artillery, a Louisiana unit that fought at Antietam on the same general part of the field as the two infantry brigades; Sears, p. 251. It took enough casualties that it could just possibly be the unit mentioned here, but the odds are much lower.)
Neither brigade had existed in its current form for very long. Hays's "Louisiana Tigers" had been Dick Taylor's Brigade and had fought in Jackson's Valley Campaign, but some of its troops had been reorganized after the Seven Days's Battles a couple of months before Antietam and placed under Hays after Taylor was promoted. That same reorganization had created Starke's Louisiana Brigade; most of its troops had belonged to the Army of Northern Virginia before that, but they had been brigaded with other regiments; only after the Seven Days were these Louisiana unites brought together (Jones, p. 111). There was some complaint when Starke was made their brigadier; although he lived in New Orleans, he had been born in Virginia and had been serving in a Virginia regiment (Jones, p. 112).
The Lousiana Tigers fit well with the statement that the dead brother joined the army in New Orleans: "Harry Hays's famous (or infamous) Louisiana Tigers... had adopted their name and at least some of the raffish reputation of a unit recruited in the early days of the war from among the denizens of the New Orleans waterfront, and the brigade as a whole was a mixture of nationalities ranging from Irishmen to French Creoles" (Sears, p. 188).
Jackson's and Ewell's divisions were the core of Jackson's wing of the Army of Northern Virginia; they were the two with which he had conducted his "Valley Campaign." By the time of Antietam, Jackson's wing consisted of four divisions -- those two plus the divisions of D. H. Hill and A. P. Hill. When Antietam began, A. P. Hill's division was still at Harper's Ferry, which the Confederates had captured shortly before; Hill was working out the details of paroling the garrison. The other three divisions formed the left of Lee's line outside Sharpsburg, with Ewell's and Jackson's divisions forming the extreme left and D. H. Hill the center-left. The opening Federal attack, by Joe Hooker's First Corps, flattened the two divisions, then the Federal Twelfth Corps attacked them, then the Second Corps hit them again as well as attacking D. H. Hill. Some other Confederate soldiers, such as John Bell Hood's division, helped counter-attack the Federals, but the divisions of Jackson and Ewell, and hence the brigades of Hays and Starke, were hit hard.
Very hard. "One-third of Lawton's, Hay[s]'s, and Trimble's brigades were killed or wounded. Aside from [Jubal A.] Early, who had not yet been drawn into the main fight, there was only one general officer of brigade level on the field. Jackson's Division was reduced to 600 men and was being commanded by a colonel [at full strength it would have had roughly 16,000 men and had one major general and four brigadiers]; Winder's Brigade by a major; Jones's Brigade by three successive captains" (Murfin, p. 219). On p. 376, Murfin reports that Starke's Brigade suffered 70 killed and 212 wounded, and Hays's Brigade lost 41 killed and 216 wounded; this in brigades that probably started with fewer than 1000 men each. Sears, p. 190, ays, "Losses among the Louisiana Tigers were... 61 percent... and every one of its regimental commanders was killed or wounded." Nolan, p. 140, quotes division commander Jubal A. Early's report that says that casualties among the Tigers were 323 of 550 men present, and that, in addition to all the regimental commanders, the entire brigade staff was killed or injured. Early's figure is actually less than that of Jones, p. 130: 45 dead, 289 wounded, 2 missing (total of 336).
What's more, the divisions of Ewell and Jackson had had harder fighting than almost any others in the army. A truly veteran regiment from other parts of Lee's army -- say the First North Carolina -- might have fought seven or eight battles by then (First Bull Run, Fair Oaks/Seven Pines, Seven Days, Second Bull Run, and Antietam, plus perhaps one or two skirmishes such as Big Bethel or Williamsburg) -- but Jackson's and Ewell's troops had also had a part in the dozen or so battles of Jackson's Valley Campaign.
The first Union formation the Tigers faced at Antietam, according to Sears, pp. 188-189, was the third brigade (Hartsuff's) of the second division (Ricketts's) of Joe Hooker's First Corps. consisting of the 12th Massachusetts, the 13th Massachusetts, the 83th New York, and 11th Pennsylvania regiments, by this tine under the command of Colonel Richard Coulter (Hartsuff having been injured earlier).
Starke's brigade seems to have had slightly lower casualties than Hays's, but in other ways it suffered even more. It belonged to what was still officially "Jackson's Division," but since Stonewall Jackson was directing an unofficial corps, the division had been in the hands of a series of brigadiers -- first Charles Winder, then William Taliaferro. But Taliaferro had been wounded at Groveton (Boatner, pp. 825-826) and John R. Jones succeeded to command of the division. Early in the battle at Antietam, a shell burst near Jones. He did not suffer any wounds but claimed the concussion left him unfit for battle (Boatner, pp. 442-443. This was accepted at the time, but when he dodged battle again at Chancellorsville, he was removed from command and charged with cowardice). William Starke, the only other brigadier general still with the division, then took command -- and was promptly killed (Boatner, pp. 792-793). So Starke's Brigade had lost two division commanders and its brigadier. In addition, every field officer in the brigade was killed or injured, although Colonel Edmund Pendleton, whose injury was relatively mild, stayed in the field when it turned out no other senior officer could serve (Hones, p. 132). And the brigade, based on Sears, p. 194, and Nolan, p. 139, found itself fighting against the Union's famous "Iron Brigade" and the rest of Doubleday's division of the First Corps. (Ironically, it had also fought the Iron Brigade at Groveton a few weeks earlier; Jones, pp. 119, 131.)
To be sure, the Confederates gave as good as they got: Hooker's first corps lost something like 30% of its numbers. Nolan, p. 142, says the Iron Brigade suffered 345 casualties out of about 800 engaged, and Hartsuff's brigade suffered about as badly.
The experience seems to have permanently damaged Starke's brigade. Turnover of general officers in the Army of Northern Virginia was high -- as witness the fact that eight of the divisions at Antietam were recognizably still part of the army ten months later at Gettysburg, and only three had the same commander at the latter battle. In these eight divisions, 21 had brigadiers at their heads when Antietam started. By my count, only eight were still with their brigades at Gettysburg (though several other Antietam brigades were led by colonels who were promoted after Antietam, or had brigadiers who were injured and later returned to duty; by that standard, I count 16 brigades which still had the same commander. But there were 37 brigades at Gettysburg, so turnover was more than 50%). Still, Lee worked very hard to keep an officer of appropriate rank at the head of his brigades. At Gettysburg, 34 of the 37 brigades had a permanent commander with the rank of Brigadier General (although a few were injured and not with their troops). Starke's brigade was one of the three exceptions. Confederate law generally required promotion from within -- Lee couldn't just take a general from somewhere else and put him in charge of the brigade. And when Starke's successor Francis Nicholls was disabled at Chancellorsville, Lee could not identify any officer in the brigade he felt capable of promotion (Tagg, p. 281). To repeat, this was one of only three brigades in that situation.
To wildly speculate on which specific regiment is meant, the 2 Louisiana of Starke's Brigade had a very high proportion of soldiers who were American citizens but who came from other states: "Of the 1,020 members who gave a place of birth on the muster rolls, 655 were born in states outside Louisiana" (Jones, p. 235). Most of the other Louisiana regiments in Lee's army consisted primarily of either Louisiana natives or people born outside the United States.
So both Hays's brigade and Starke's brigade fit with the description in the song. Except... the singer said he was conscripted.
Now there is no question but that the Confederates were conscripting people by the time of Antietam; the Union would do so also, although not for a few more months. "On 16 Apr, '62 [the Confederate] Congress conscripted for three years all white males between 18 and 35 who were not legally exempt" (Boatner, p. 172). In fact, there were conscripts at Antietam -- Sears, p. 209, reports the 5th North Carolina of Garland's Brigade going to pieces because conscripts were afraid of the fighting. Except... "the law allowed thirty days for potential draftees to avoid the stigma of the draft by volunteering" (McPherson, p, 432; the real advantage of volunteering was that they got to choose the units they joined). So no one could be conscripted until May -- and even that assumes that the mechanisms of conscription were ready on day one, which they generally weren't. Then the men had to be mustered in and equipped, then shipped to Virginia. Antietam was fought on September 17, 1862, just five months after the draft law passed. Would it have been possible for a draftee to get from Louisiana to the Army of Northern Virginia in time to fight nine battles prior to Antietam? It seems unlikely.
Perhaps we should change "conscripted" to "enlisted." But if we don't want to emend the text, we might note that while no one was formally conscripted in 1861, pressure could be applied. In New Orleans, in fact, "foreigners were literally shanghaid into the army" (Jones, p. 7). Non-natives, particularly Irishmen and Germans, were sometimes confined or otherwise coerced until they joined the military (Jones, p. 8). Jones does not record this sort of pressure being applied to a Northerner, but perhaps someone with a northern accent who had only recently arrived in the city would be treated as a "foreigner."
Finally, perhaps "conscription" in this case referred not directly to being forced into the army but to being forced to *remain* in the army; many units had enlisted for one or two years, but the conscription law also required that "One-year volunteers must remain in the army two more years" (McPherson, p. 430). "This law had a sobering effect on the Louisianians, for many were tired of military life and eagerly looked forward to returning home. Complaints and oaths were loud and numerous in such commands as the 1st Louisiana, seven of the ten companies of which were due to disband less than two weeks after the law went into effect" (Jones, p. 59). So maybe Our Soldier enlisted in 1861, but instead of his term ending in early 1862, he was required to remain until 1864 (and, of course, he failed to live that long).
So while the mention of conscription may well be an anachronism, it is possible that the term was simply used in a slightly broader sense than we usually use today.
If we can't even say which Confederate unit this is supposed to be about, it might seem absurd to try to identify the Union unit involved. But... there are possibilities.
Suppose we assume that the song is about Starke's Brigade, which fought against the Union's Iron Brigade. At this time, the Iron Brigade consisted of four Western regiments: the 19th Indiana and the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin. Recall that, when the dead brother left home, he went to Ohio before moving to New Orleans. To move to Ohio from Wisconsin is to go a long way east. But to go from Indiana to Ohio could be just a few miles. So the 19th Indiana is a very good bet for the Federal regiment if the dead man is from Starke's Brigade.
If, on the other hand, the unit is the Louisiana Tigers, their first adversary was Hartsuff's Brigade: 12th Massachusetts, 13th Massachusetts, 83rd New York, 11th Pennsylvania. Here, again, there is one state that is closest to Ohio, and that's Pennsylvania. So, if the Confederate brother was in Hays's Brigade, then the Union brother was likely in the 11th Pennsylvania.
The third possibility that occurs to me is that the song has become garbled. What are the odds that the dead brother would have fled his home and gone to Ohio, then gone to New Orleans? Perhaps he came *from* Ohio instead. In that case, we need to look for an Ohio unit in the Army of the Potomac. There weren't a lot of these -- most Ohio regiments fought in the west, not the east. But Hector Tyndale's brigade of the Twelfth Corps, which attacked the Confederate left after the First Corps was fought out, had three Ohio regiments, 5th Ohio, 7th Ohio, and 66th Ohio, along with the recently-added 28th Pennsylvania. Also, the 8th Ohio was in Nathan Kimball's brigade of William H. French's division of the Second Corps, which was engaged after the Twelfth Corps. None of these units were directly sent to attack Hays's or Starke's brigade, and the 8th Ohio in particular went to a different part of the field, but they were close enough that perhaps a man in Tyndale's brigade might have heard one of the wounded Louisianians.
All of which is very pretty, but none of it is convincing. Having read multiple histories of Antietam (some of them not cited here because they didn't say anything not found in those I have cited), and also a history of the Louisiana troops in the Army of the Potomac, I can find no hint of a story like this. The closest I can find is a tale on p. 87 of Tucker, but it's not about Louisiana troops. When Burnside's troops were trying to cross the Antietam, the first attempt to get across the stream was made by the 11th Connecticut regiment under Colonel Henry Walter Kingsbury. The attempt failed, and Kingsbury was mortally wounded. It just so happens that Kingsbury's brother-in-law was David R. Jones, who was the commander of the Confederate division that held Burnside's Bridge against Kingsbury and his men. It is reported that "Upon hearing of the mortal wounding of Colonel Kingsbury from Union prisoners... [Jones] broke down in tears" (Tucker, p. 87). But the troops in that case were from Georgia and Connecticut.
In addition, John B. Gordon told a story of a mortally wounded father finding the body of his son, and there are other tales of relatives at the battle, but none like this. It seems pretty clear the song is fictional. Why, then, have one brother go to New Orleans, rather than a relatively nearby state like Virginia or Tennessee? That, I think, we can answer. New Orleans was, by far, the largest city in the Confederacy (based on an online census report I found, it had almost 170,000 people in 1860, making it the sixth largest city in the United States. The next-largest city in the South, Charleston, was only #22 on the list of largest cities, with a population of barely more than 40,00, or a quarter of that of New Orleans. New Orleans was cosmopolitan, it was large, it was the South's biggest port. It would be the obvious destination for someone heading from the North to the South.- RBW
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