What Happened to the Union & Confederate Dead of Antietam??? | History Traveler Episode 256

foreign [Music] with over 23 000 casualties the Battle of Antietam stands out as the single bloodiest day in American history and after the battle the army of Northern Virginia and the army of Potomac would move on and they would continue fighting each other constantly all the way until April of 1865 at Appomattox Courthouse but even though they had moved on the people of Sharpsburg were left to deal with the aftermath this whole whole entire area became one giant graveyard there were over 4 000 Dead who were buried all over this area the town of Sharpsburg was completely transformed homes and businesses and churches had been converted into field hospitals that that were filled with the wounded and the dying right here on the roulette farm this Farm alone had over 700 burials right here on this property well obviously this was going to be a bit of an issue for these people you couldn't plow these fields and over the next few years the the bones of the Dead in these hastily dug Graves started coming to the surface you had some Mass Graves where soldiers were buried in trenches somewhere individual Grays where maybe they had a piece of wood with the name etched into it and over the next few years it was decided that something had to be done so all of these Graves would have to be dug up and all of the Dead would be reinterred in places like the cemeteries that we're going today one of which is the Antietam National Cemetery [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] we've moved over now to the Antietam National Cemetery and the the ground that we are standing on right now was originally purchased by the state of Maryland 11 and a quarter acres for the establishment of a cemetery for the the dead of the Maryland campaign so it's not just Antietam soldiers who are here but also soldiers from South Mountain and also from the the Battle of Monocacy now the original plan was to have both Union and Confederate soldiers buried here together but the the people in this area were so upset about the idea of that keep in mind this is March of 1865 the war is still going on and these people were very embittered about what had happened here that that plan was abandoned and the Confederates who were disinterred were reburied in places like Hagerstown and around Frederick and I think there's some around Shepherdstown as well we're going to be going to a few of those later but anyway uh Chris from vlogging through history is also doing a video we've been working in conjunction with one another on this Antietam series and he also has a video where he is here at the Antietam National Cemetery uh I'm not going to go as in depth as what he is but we're going to take a look at a few of these Graves when you come to the Antietam National Battlefield one thing that you will notice is that all of the graves here are grouped by state so this right here is the Pennsylvania section and if we move over here well this is looking at the section with New York soldiers and the effort to to locate these Graves and identify the soldiers must have been one heck of a task and there were two area men who who did a lot to uh help disinter these soldiers and identify them and and get them up here to the cemetery those men they were Aaron good and Joseph Gill and this is something that took months in order to accomplish and uh the way that they would identify them uh they were identified by letters or maybe pay receipts or diaries or photographs uh in some cases let me see if I can find one here um oh yeah here we go let me back up so in some cases you couldn't identify the soldier by name so you'll see a lot of these graves right here where it says unknown but we know that this Soldier was from New York well that might be a mark on their cartridge box or or something like that or maybe on their their cat badge so anyway another thing that helped these guys was a burial map from a guy named Elliot who had marked where all of the burials were on the battlefield now it wasn't just these two men who were doing the work they had a Workforce that was made up of discharged soldiers and and locals but man this must have been one heck of a job I just mentioned the the Elliott burial map of Antietam and I plan on maybe doing a video on this sometime in the future but I'll just give it quick mention there was a man by the name of S.G Elliott who showed up here to the the battlefield and and laid out this map showing where all of the Dead Union and Confederate soldiers were after the battle he later did one uh in Gettysburg that's probably the burial map that he's most well noted for uh interestingly enough the Antietam burial map uh wasn't really I guess rediscovered until 2020 whenever my buddy Tim Smith happened upon it at the New York Public Library it's still there today but anyway that map has helped us to understand the the burials uh here at Antietam much better something that's interesting to note I mentioned that there were over 4 000 dead here at Antietam the Elliott burial map shows around just over 5 800. so there's there might be a little bit of a discrepancy in numbers there but something else that's kind of interesting kind of goes back to a prior video that I did with Gary Adelman here where we talked about photography during the Battle of Antietam well the photography at Antietam also connects to this Cemetery now on the video that Gary Edelman and I did on Civil War photography here at Antietam we went to the spot of one photo that Alexander Gardner took that shows some soldiers at the base of the tree and I think the name of the photo is a lone grave on battlefield of Antietam well if if you take a close look at that grave well you see the name of John Marshall who was in the 28th Pennsylvania uh well because of that photo and also because of the Elliott burial map which for some reason uh marks the grave of John Marshall or the field grave we know a little bit about him John Marshall as I mentioned was in the 28th Pennsylvania he was 50 years old at Antietam and uh was was an Irish Stone Mason from Allegheny City and he died right there close to where the The Visitor Center is today and he was reinterred right here at grave 3600 at the Antietam National Battlefield [Music] in the episode that we did at Burnside Bridge we showed an Alexander Gardner photo that showed some temporary Graves of some 51st New York guys along the stone wall that runs along the creek well if you cross-reference that with the rosters and also with the Elliott burial map one of the names on the Elliott burial map was Edward Miller and he appears on the rosters for the the 51st New York and his name is actually etched in one of those temporary grave markers Edward Miller was 18 years old whenever he was killed there at Burnside Bridge so another young guy who who would not see old age due to the the Civil War uh but yeah pretty interesting to be able to cross-reference you know the photos and the burial map and then to be able to see where the original grave was and then where these soldiers were reinterred I do want to be clear on something though I would love to portray myself as the smartest guy in the room here I'm drawing pretty much all of this from an article that Gary Adelman wrote on the American Battlefield Trust website so thankful for you know all of these uh intelligent hard-working people who have kind of laid the groundwork and foundation for the rest of us to learn from but yeah really really interesting to see this grave here's something that is kind of funny to me uh the dedication of this Cemetery was on the fifth anniversary of the battle so September 17th of 1867 and the man who was invited to speak at that dedication was President Andrew Johnson well here they they do have one information panel that has a few of his words but the the thing that people pay most attention to is uh Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the middle of the Antietam National Cemetery is this colossal statue this is the the private Soldier monument and the whole thing is 44 feet and seven inches tall and if you include the base is 250 tons so the the soldier itself is in two pieces uh joined at the waist as a matter of fact if we if we zoom in a little bit we might even be able to kind of see where the the seam is for this Soldier and then down below it says not for themselves but for their country September 17th 1862. uh now something that's kind of interesting about about this statue and about this uh this Memorial it was designed by a guy named Batterson who was from Connecticut and I think costs like around 32 000 or something like that it originally stood at the Gateway of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 1876 so everybody could you know see it and then it was disassembled to come right here to Sharpsburg but there was a problem um the uh the top half uh fell into the dead gum River uh in Washington DC so they had to retrieve it and then it came up the the CNO canal and was dedicated here on September 17th of 1880. foreign here's a monument that is interesting to me that I thought that I would point out this is for the 20th Regiment of the New York volunteers also known as the Turner rifles and if you look over here it says erected in memory of our fallen comrades by the survivors of the regiment well one thing that people maybe Overlook quite a bit whenever they're talking about the Civil War on the union side is that a lot of these soldiers were immigrants so in this case they were German immigrants so you can see that same inscription marked in German on this side as a matter of fact a lot of regiments you know you would go through them and uh if you walked through their Camp they weren't speaking English like they were speaking uh German or you know some other language but anyway that's reflected here in this Monument here is the grave of one Werner Von bachell who was a captain in the sixth Wisconsin which of course was a regiment in the famous iron Brigade and uh what makes bashel kind of noteworthy in addition to his service is his dog he had a Newfoundland dog that Rufus Dawes writes about and I'm just going to read a section from Rufus Dawes book uh so so Von brachelle who was the commander of company F was uh killed at uh Turner's Gap the Battle of South Mountain and uh here it says Captain Michelle was an ex-officer of the French army brought up as a soldier in the Napoleonic school he was imbued with the doctrine of fatalism his social equalities commanded the respect of all and his loss was deeply felt in the regiment Michelle had a fine Newfoundland dog which had been trained to perform military salutes and many other remarkable things in Camp on the March and in line of battle this dog was his constant companion the dog was by his side when he fell our line of men left the body when they retreated but the dog stayed with his dead master and was found on the morning of the 19th of September lying upon the body We buried him with his master so far as we knew no family or friends mourned poor Michelle but it's probable that he was joined in death by his most devoted friend on earth now Von bashel was reinterred here at the National Cemetery and it's probable that his dog is buried with him [Music] [Music] all right well uh that was just a few of the graves here of the Union Soldiers at the Antietam National Cemetery as for right now we're going to go ahead and hop in our vehicle and head down the road and try and find some of the final resting places of the Confederates who died here at Antietam foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] we have driven over now to Hagerstown Maryland to the Rose Hill Cemetery and within the Rose Hill Cemetery there's another Cemetery called Washington Confederate cemetery and I've never been here before I didn't know what to expect but this one is different so in 1871 the Washington Confederate Cemetery was purchased by the state of Maryland to have a place for the Confederate dead of course the Antietam National Cemetery had already been established and this is it uh you were looking at all of the Washington Confederate Cemetery which obviously is completely absent of any grave markers I was hoping to maybe tell the story of a few of the Confederate soldiers who were buried here but I I have to be honest this is unlike anything that that I've ever seen uh kind of kind of sad so there are 2 468 soldiers who are buried here 346 are identified so this Monument was placed here in February of 1877 and the the dedication was later that year they had Major General Fitzhugh Lee who was a Cavalry General and was the nephew of Robert E Lee he was here and spoke and later there was a rededication where um President Eisenhower spoke this is pretty hard to see but they have an etching here that is essentially a map of the Washington Confederate cemetery and they're in the corner it says dedicated June 12 1877 speaker Major General Fitz Hugh Lee CSA and as I'm looking at this you know if we were to to look out here ahead of us well you can refer to to this map and see that for example right here are buried 34 boxes and 68 unknown bodies just ahead so a little bit closer to us are 26 bodies or 26 boxes and 47 unknown bodies and then kind of out along the fringes there there are some names of the the identified dead but most of what we are looking at here in the Washington Confederate Cemetery is a large what really amounts to a mass grave of mostly unknown soldiers [Music] well uh for what it's worth that's uh Washington Confederate Cemetery like I've said already a few times definitely different than anything that I expected whenever I came here there's another Confederate Cemetery that's not too far away uh in the town of Frederick that I think we're going to go take a visit to next [Music] [Music] I've moved now to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick Maryland and the Frederick County during the Civil War was kind of like a Hospital Center so a lot of soldiers on both sides found themselves right here in this County if they were wounded uh in any of the battles that were fought in this area so there's South Mountain and there's Sharpsburg later in the war there's going to be a battle not too far from here in Monocacy and then there's also you know a lot of skirmishes and things like that so a lot of Confederate dead ended up right here at this cemetery and it's kind of unique there are over 300 of them buried in a straight Row in something called Confederate row right here in Mount Olivet Cemetery we are looking at what is known as Confederate row and and what it looks like is that they just dug one straight Trench and buried all of these bodies side by side now one thing that is nice is that we have headstones for these men and even if it's kind of illegible like this one well they have newer markers up behind so for example this guy right here raisin Pitts who was a private Company B of the sixth Alabama infantry he died September 26th of 1862. I may not know anything about him you know as far as biographical information but I do know something about the sixth Alabama that was John B Gordon's Brigade and they fought at the Bloody Lane uh the death date of September 26th well maybe he was wounded there and then just died shortly after uh here are a couple more guys who were in Rhodes Brigade so the 12th Alabama and the sixth Alabama another one from John B Gordon's regiment and then it just continues on and on and on man here's one from the eighth floor of the seventh South Carolina um a lot of 1862 dates here so these could have been South Mountain or Antietam or uh some of the the skirmishes also in that campaign okay so here's another guy from the the 12th Alabama died October 3rd of 1862. [Music] and this line of Confederate dead just keeps going and going and going foreign [Music] well there you go those are just some of the final resting places of the men who fought for both the union and the Confederacy on the bloodiest day in American history [Music] [Laughter] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 635,929

Keywords: history, history traveler, history underground, antietam, battle of antietam, american battlefield trust, civil war, battle of sharpsburg, sharpburg, mcclellan, george mcclellan, civil war documentary, sharpsburg, burnside bridge, civil war photography, alexander gardener, dead of antietam, civil war graves, civil war haunted, civil war ghosts

Id: vprKeu8HiNI

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022