A YEAR AFTER.(anniversary of 9/11 attacks)

Publication: The New Yorker

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

On September 17, 1862, in the Maryland village of Sharpsburg, in the fields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River, forces of the Union Army defeated Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee. By nightfall, some five thousand men were dead. Of nearly twenty thousand wounded, one in ten would soon succumb. On that day, the bloodiest in the nation's history, more Americans were killed than in all the other wars fought by the United States between the Continental victory at Yorktown, in 1781, and the landing of the American Expeditionary Force in France, in 1917. By the morning of September 18th, Antietam was a vision of hell. As James M. McPherson writes in "Crossroads of Freedom," his haunting new account, "The detritus of battle lay thickly on the field: smashed weapons and gun carriages, dead horses, scraps of bloody clothing, discarded knapsacks and blanket rolls, and the smell of rotting corpses, vomit, and excrement." In some of the letters of surviving soldiers, there is a sense that the horror would forever escape the capabilities of their language and remain lodged only in their nightmares. One soldier from Pennsylvania wrote home saying, "No tongue can tell, no mind can conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed."

At Antietam, for the first time, photographers were able to bring the war's images of torment into focus for all who would care to look. Alexander Gardner and James Gibson, working for the great Mathew Brady and his studio in New York, arrived quickly on the scene at Antietam and began photographing the corpses and the battlefield. When an exhibition of those photographs opened the following October, a particularly sensitive reporter from the Times praised Brady's pictures for trying to "bring home to us...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.