Antietam

On the morning of September 17, 1862, around 6 AM, my great-grandfather, Silas Shepard Everett, was wounded by Confederate fire at the beginning of what would become the bloodiest day of American warfare in our nation’s history. He was serving in Company H of the 13^th Regiment of the Massachusetts Infantry as part of the Army of the Potomac. When the bullet passed through his right side, he was only twenty-one years old. He was evacuated to a hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and eventually recovered from his wounds and later reassigned as a letter carrier for General U. S. Grant from March to July, 1864. 

Periodically  throughout my life I have joined with other family members to return to the cornfield where he fought to celebrate the line of descendants that emerged because of his recovery. And so, for probably the last time, Sylvia and I recently returned to the historic site to remember his patriotism and bravery. Now a historic battlefield administered by the U. S. Park Service, it has a fine reception center, where we were greeted by two young people in appropriate uniform. Upon hearing of my ancestor, one of them quickly went into a back room and soon re-emerged with a printout about the regiment and every detail of its actions on that day. After viewing a well-made film about the battle and its significance in the Civil War, we drove over to the site, marked by a handsome plaque. I found myself deeply moved by the experience of absorbing the terror of that day in the very place where over 22,000 men were killed or wounded in a struggle over whether this land would be free for all persons or would tolerate continual enslavement for millions. Indeed, because of the Union repulsion of the Confederate troops at Antietam, Abraham Lincoln issued the first announcement of his Emancipation Declaration five days after the battle. It was Sheppy’s distant cousin, Edward Everett, who would join with Lincoln a year later to dedicate the cemetery where the Confederate forces suffered their decisive defeat in 1863, ending their invasion of the northern states.

Sheppy, as he was nicknamed, must have found the land where I grew up hospitable and promising. In 1871 he brought his family, including my months-old grandfather, to Washington, leading to my own birth there in 1940. And so I grew up along the Potomac River where North and South had fought and where the work of reconciliation must begin anew in every generation. Whether I will live to see a new flowering of the ideals that were secured in the events at Antietam and beyond is a real question. My life now is lived more in gratitude than in anticipation.

At a moment when our public life is being fractured once again by the racism and violence that has coursed through our history, I gave thanks for his life and all those who gave their last breath that day for a union of free people. And yet, all around me were also testimonies to the men of the Southern army, who were defending slavery and lost their life in that defense. Many were without shoes or adequate clothing. Many gained no economic benefit from slavery. The blood  of both sides had mingled in the earth at this very spot. And now, in a time of increasing political violence, it is mingling again, captive to an unreconciled past.

Leaving Antietam and the nearby town of Sharpsburg, we crossed the Potomac River to Shepherdstown, West Virginia, where we had lunch outside a café on its Main Street. Across the way, clustered in front of the old Courthouse, was a group of people with signs protesting the regime of tyranny, cruelty, and corruption which is overwhelming us today. A lone young man passed by us and shouted to them, “Freedom is for all!” Some responded in affirmation, knowing of the gulf that separated them. And so, in some tangled way, voices of intense opposition were struggling to affirm a unity in the midst of division, a hope for comity amidst the strife. We finished our lunch and drove across the Shenandoah River at Harper’s Ferry, back to the old family home just 20 miles south. Antietam prepared to see another night, another dawn, another day.