Eighteen years after the Battle of Antietam, the old battlefield summoned its veterans back. On September 17, 1880, a special train left Baltimore carrying former soldiers to Sharpsburg, Maryland, where a monument honoring the fallen was to be unveiled in the national cemetery. Among the passengers was Major General John Gibbon, a regular army officer who had risen to prominence during the Civil War and later served in the Indian Wars. His account of that return journey, published under the title “Antietam, After 18 Years” in the Milwaukee Sunday Telegraph, offers a vivid personal recollection of the ground where his brigade, the famous Iron Brigade, had fought and bled.
The trip did not go smoothly. The train stopped short of its destination, stalled by a disabled locomotive ahead. Gibbon and three companions, one of whom had fought on the Confederate side, decided to walk the remaining distance. They followed the railroad track for three miles, then turned onto a country road that led east.
After half a mile, Gibbon found himself on the Hagerstown Pike. He stopped and looked around. He recognized the ground immediately. Across the road stood a growth of oak trees, and beyond it, the Miller house, exactly as he remembered it.
Climbing over a fence, he entered the woods and let his memories surface. It was here that the Iron Brigade reformed after the morning’s bloody fighting. It was here they stopped the flood of fugitives streaming back over this very ground after Major General Edwin Sumner’s attack had been repulsed. And it was here, among the trees, that his men received their breakfast, hurriedly brought to them by servants after fighting since dawn on empty stomachs.
Gibbon never forgot how quickly those servants disappeared once Confederate shells began screaming over their heads. He moved through the timber, each step bringing back another scene. He reached a strip of woods running over the hill, perpendicular to the other stretch that ran along the Hagerstown Pike, and walked to its northern edge. Beyond it lay rolling, elevated ground.
There, beside this shelter, Major General Joseph Hooker had established his headquarters. On that distant hill, Gibson’s unit had spent the night, packed tightly in divisional formation. Along the hill stretching directly toward him, the brigade had advanced when Gibbon received Hooker’s order to bring it up to the front. The old brigade marched in columns of regiments, closed up in the dawn light.
Less than two hundred yards from where Gibbon now stood, one of the first artillery shells meant for them exploded in the ranks of the 6th Wisconsin, killing and wounding twenty-seven men. Even after eighteen years, he recalled the horror of that moment, and his own fear that the shock would break the regiment apart like a flock of panicked sheep. He had not yet learned the full strength of the discipline his brigade possessed. When the shell burst, scattering dead and wounded around the point of impact, a tremor seemed to pass through the regiment.
But the voice of the lieutenant colonel in front rang out: “Steady, men of the 6th. ” The regiment closed ranks and advanced, stepping over the trembling bodies of their fallen comrades, and within moments had passed the very ground where Gibbon now stood, marching in tight order toward the infamous cornfield. Nearby, Gibbon met General Hooker, who was mounted beside Major General George G. Meade, his division commander.
Hooker’s instructions were short and direct, and the brigade never halted as he gave them. The open grass field across which they advanced was now planted in corn, so the eye could not reach the position where Battery B’s guns had first been posted. From that spot, the battery had supported the brigade as it pushed past the Miller house and collided with the forces of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in the cornfield and the thick woods beyond the road.
Gibbon led his companions across that field, pointing out where the fence along the Hagerstown Pike had been demolished to let the battery pass down the road to positions near the haystacks behind the barn. They followed the ground to the highway, past the Miller house and the strong spring where many of their weary men had gotten a good drink of cold water that day. They reached a point opposite the barn, where Gibbon paused to reflect. The land was essentially unchanged.
The defenses remained as they had been, and the gates through which the artillery had been hauled into the barnyard and adjacent field were still in place. The old barn stood, but the haystacks that had absorbed so many enemy bullets were gone. The only noticeable differences were that what had been a cornfield in 1862 was now grass, and where the guns had stood, the earth was plowed. Still, Gibbon could identify the exact position of nearly every cannon.
To the right, in front of the haystacks and just over the gentle slope, stood the three pieces of the right section. Slightly advanced, near where the crest met the highway, were two more guns. Wallace, the left piece, had been posted on the road slightly behind the others. The limbers, with their horses and drivers, had crowded into the narrow space between the guns and the fences.
One incident involving the gun posted on the highway had spawned much exaggerated reporting at the time. Its position sloped slightly toward the enemy, and every time it was fired, the recoil down the incline was strong. In the chaos of battle, little attention was paid to the elevation screw, left to work loose with each discharge, until the muzzle tilted upward so sharply that the shots passed harmlessly over the heads of the advancing Confederates. Gibbon noticed the fault and called to the gunner to raise the elevation.
The noise of battle drowned his voice. Seeing the man could not hear him, Gibbon dismounted, turned the elevating screw himself, and motioned for the gunner to pull the lanyard. The first shot carried away the upper rails of the fence. The next shots tore terrible gaps in the enemy ranks.
All the while, men and horses in the battery were falling quickly. Wounded men returning from the brigade’s line, now scattered and fighting in groups and fragments, were numerous. At last, the shattered units themselves came back, torn and exhausted, in thin ranks. But they quickly rallied beside the guns, and supported by their fire, they repulsed the desperate enemy charge.
Double charges of canister were fired from the mouths of the twelve-pounders in rapid succession. The dead piled up literally on top of one another. The attack was broken. The firing gradually slackened, and during the lull, the battery was hurriedly prepared for withdrawal and pulled away from its dangerous position, leaving the corner of the field covered with the bodies of its men and horses, while the exhausted ranks of the brigade followed.
Gibbon then guided his companions to the crest of the slope on the main road, a position none could have occupied safely eighteen years earlier. From there, they had a clear view of the field. They stood near the southwest corner of the cornfield where so many of his own brave men had fallen. To the right lay the ground across which the enemy had charged, where so many of their men had fallen before the double-shotted guns.
To the left was the field across which the gallant old General Sumner had moved with his second division. On that day, it had been a vast space churning with a panicked mass of men retreating from the deadly fire pouring from the rocky ledges and trees on the far side of the highway. Beyond the field ran the road to Dunker Church, whose peaceful white walls now glimmered among trees that bore no trace of the fierce struggle. Behind the church, barely visible through the timber, were the white tents of Battery B of the 2nd Artillery, sent there for the monument’s unveiling.
Its camp stood exactly where a line of gray-coated Confederates had awaited the Union advance eighteen years before. Back on the highway, near the battery position, more memories flooded back. In the cornfield, many brave Wisconsin men had died, lying side by side with the gray-coated dead and the peaceful cattle caught in the crossfire. In the middle of the road lay the body of the gallant Von Buschel of the 6th Wisconsin, his faithful dog dead beside him.
Near a small clump of trees on the west side of the road, in a long, deep trench, were buried the dead of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana, lying together in death as they had stood together in battle, sleeping their final sleep on the very ground consecrated by their blood. Standing there looking down the road, Gibbon understood more clearly than ever the danger his battery had been in, and how fortunate it was that no attempt had been made to withdraw the guns before they had cleared the double gates of the farmyard. Behind them stretched that long, straight road, completely controlled by the enemy once their sharpshooters reached the crest of the small hill. A single horse killed or badly wounded in that narrow passage would have made Battery B the prize of Lee’s army.
It was hard to say how many Iron Brigade men would have survived to tell the story had the battery been lost. Battery B and the Iron Brigade had always stood together and fought together, and it was clear they would have died together. The brigade lost 773 men killed and wounded supporting the battery at Bull Run on August 28–30, another 289 at South Mountain on September 14, and now, at Antietam, performing the same duty, 343 more were added to the list of casualties. This did not include the battery’s equally heavy losses.
No wonder the army unanimously called it the Iron Brigade.
