Sharpburg! Sweet!!

The sunken road at Antietam was haunting, I swear I could feel something standing in that road.

The Cornfield...Burnsides Bridge...East and West Wood...

Gotta do it. Let me know when your going. You can fit all us commenters on that front porch can't you?

If not we can spread out along the ridges like the armies had to do...

btw, my wife told me she wasn't going and didn't.

Made my time on the battlefield longer. I still remember looking over the sunken road towards the ridge where the yankees were approaching from. Awesome.

Speaking of "lost causes"...

My sympathies to Kenyatta.

Also! And for the non-historically obsessed, patient with your nonsense fellow traveler, if any: historic Shepherdstown, across a sweeping bend in the river on the West Virginia side, is a comfortable college and theater town with a bunch of little jewelry, antique stores, and some mighty fine restaurants, including the well-known Yellow Brick Bank. I went with one friend who was equally a photo and history nerd, and when we insisted on getting up at dawn to catch the mist on the battlefield, the rest of our party decamped for a fine day of browsing, dining and shopping. We didn't catch up with them till martini hour.

http://www.civilwar.org/take-action/speak-out/wilderness-walmart/

The elected Board of Supervisors in Orange County, Va., wherein lies the Wilderness battlefield, are dead-set on plopping a big ol' Wal-Mart right on the edge of it. They recently fired the head county administrator (in a closed session) because he had the temerity to suggest they consider putting it elsewhere.

http://www.orangenews.com/ocn/news/local/local_govtpolitics/article/rolfe_fired/42588/

But Donald, the attitude is not appreciated, and I don't think anything I said warranted it.

Think rather, as is true, that I am just angry about those Mayberry developers pissing all over the historic site they had the dumb luck to be born in middle of.

And for the record, I was raised out in the country, within about 40 miles of the Wilderness - so I here speak ill of my own kind.

http://www.civilwarcommand.com/category_s/55.htm

I have been studying and learning about the Civil War, slavery, reconstruction for a long time.

My gf at the time (now my wife) picked up on it and starting making good for me at holidays and birthdays. A signed Lincoln letter, battlefield artifacts etc.

Well, three years ago she put a whole package together for me that included 2 days at a B&B in Gettysburg. She loved touring the batlefield (we are both obseeives when it comes to history, art, architecture) and really developed a new passion for the subject matter.

On our second night there we had dinner at an Inn that was built in 1776. After the desert of red velvet cakes I proposed to her.

Six months later we got married.

epilogue: Our combined libraries are something to behold and we are visiting Antietem this Summer and are going to Springfield sometime in the near future.

Ten books into a reading spree (books on the couch, books in the bathroom), I was convinced that child two was merely a slightly more intense version of my side of her genetics. We can invest great, intense, maybe too-much, attention in things we care about: my spouse calls it "falling into a keyboard." We find it harder than most folks around us to pay enough attention to things we find dull, including lots of what happens in school. I actually took to calling it "attention-excess disorder," because my daughter WAS focusing intensely--but not on the teachers' agenda.

Antietam is the 'best' Civil War battlefield I have toured. It is isolated enough that development has not encroached upon it, and--along with Gettysburg--it is a battle where Union and Confederate lines remained relatively static throughout, thus it is easier to get a real understanding of how the battle was fought from surveying the terrain. (I tried to get a feel for a far more fluid battle, The Wilderness, when I toured the site. Forget it!) Also, unlike Gettysburg there is not a monument to this or that regiment every ten &^$$#%# yards. It is exceptionally well preserved. The Burnside Bridge is in near-perfect condition, and one can still see the impressions of the Confederate rifle pits hastily dug to oppose the Union crossing. (One can also see that the water is knee-deep, and wonder wtf the Union soldiers didn't just forget the bridge and charge over Antietam Creek, but I digress.)

As a reader suggested earlier in this thread, Tony Horwitz' superb, funny and most illuminating Confederates in the Attic is essential reading! Also, I would recommend Battle Cry of Freedom, and the Negro's Civil War,* both by James M. MacPherson. The maps in the former are excellent. Take 'Battle Cry with you to any battlefield you tour; you'll want to refer regularly to them.

Robert Murphy

* I am not patronizingly suggesting you read this book just because you are black; I believe ANY serious student of the war should read it. It is first-rate, trust me.

I fear I may have revealed far too much about myself just then...

Standing in the sunken road, you can see north over that little rise about a hundred feet away, then a quarter mile slightly downhill towards the woods along the creek. The Union soldiers under French and Richardson formed up on the low ground, marched in line, shoulder to shoulder, across that field and over the rise. The Rebs, in double ranks, were dug into the road. The Union soldiers couldn't see them until they walked over that rise, as the Rebs opened up at point blank range and shot them down in rows. Four times they came on, about twenty minutes apart, each battle line walking up over that little rise over the bodies of the dead and wounded, so thick you had to step on them or fall out of ranks, to face that same blast of point blank fire.

Amidst the skirmishing and smoke Colonel Francis Barlow and two New York Regiments got over to the left and discovered that just where the Confederate line turned away south there was another little rise that allowed his men to fire straight west down the length of the Sunken road, so a minie ball couldn't help hitting flesh once or thrice before it was spent. The Confederates were routed.

Most of the 2600 hundred Rebs who fell lay in the 800 yard ditch of the Sunken Road, about three men per yard of road. 3000 dead and maimed Union men lay mostly in the field along the crest of the rise in front of the Confederate line.

You can walk Bloody Lane on foot and then look the battlefield over from the tower at its eastern end.

Cannons: An Introduction To Civil War Artillery

you just bought my love. That is the shit.