by Tony Horwitz
As we drove to the edge of the battlefield park, Rob disclosed our plan of attack. We’d hike under cover of darkness to our camping spot in Bloody Lane, the sunken road where the South lost several thousand men in the space of three hours. It was a loony scheme, not to mention illegal. I knew from my visit to Shiloh that darkness didn’t protect us from park rangers trolling with night-vision goggles. Anyway, sleeping in a ditch that had once brimmed with Confederate dead struck me as vaguely necrophiliac.
“Don’t worry, I went there with Joel,” Rob said, raising the ghost of Gasms past. “I bloated in the Lane and had my picture taken, but I felt bad about it and tore the picture up. This time we’ll just sleep there.” As for trespassing after dark, Rob said we were actually protecting the park. “If I ever catch a vandal touching a monument or cannon, they’ll wish for a ranger to come save their ass from me.”
So we suited up, with our haversacks and canteens and blankets rolled and tied like sausage and slung across our chests. Rob poured a last bottle of ale into a wicker jug. “It looks so much better that way,” he explained, leaving me to wonder who would appreciate this touch of authenticity as we crept through the dark.
As we set off down a road skirting the park, lightning began to flash, illuminating our path. There was also occasional traffic. Each time headlights approached, we sprinted off the road and flung ourselves in the tall wet grass, lest the passing car belonged to a park ranger or policeman or local citizen who might choose to report a Confederate and a Union soldier sneaking onto the battlefield at night. After ten minutes we were soaked and exhausted from this ludicrous exercise, which reminded me of a wretched high school football drill: running full tilt in pads and helmet and then sprawling on the fifty-yard line.
A half-mile down the road, we climbed awkwardly over a split-rail fence and bushwhacked in what Rob guessed was the direction of Bloody Lane. Night-blind, he led us straight into a tangle of brambles and barbed wire. Scratched and bleeding, we pushed on, through woods and fields and woods again. At one point, crunching through chest-high thorns and listening for Rob’s tramp in the dark ahead, I began to appreciate the utter misery of marching. In some memoirs, soldiers told of welcoming battle simply as an end to the agony and boredom of another day’s march. I also felt the reckless urge that soldiers so often succumbed to, shedding their gear and staggering on unburdened. And we’d only been walking an hour; in the summer of 1862, many of Lee’s men marched over 1,000 miles.
“At least we’re losing some weight,” Rob said, dripping with sweat. “I need to drop five pounds if I’m going to look good at Gettysburg next weekend.”
We glimpsed the outline of a building that Rob recognized as Piper’s Farm, a bed-and-breakfast that had served as James Long-street’s headquarters during the battle. A light still glowed inside, so we slipped through the garden and into the cornfields beyond, hoping no one would hear us or decide to let fly a barrel of buckshot.
By then, the moon had risen. As we hiked between the tall rows of corn the view opened up, with mountains silhouetted on all sides. The moon was bright enough to read by. Loose clouds and distant flashes of lightning flitted across the night sky, matching the ground-level flicker of fireflies. Rob’s scarecrow frame formed a clear outline just ahead of me, with his slouch hat and pointed beard and bedroll humpbacked on his shoulder. He looked less like a Confederate than a freight-jumping hobo.
Swigging from his jug of ale, Rob turned and said, in a giddy stage whisper, “This sure as shit ain’t normal.” Meaning us, trespassing in the dark, searching for a corpse-haunted ditch to spend the night in. I felt the same surge of Dharma Bum glee I’d experienced that morning as we set off on the Gasm; as though I’d crawled out my bedroom window for a lark with some dissolute buddy my parents didn’t approve of.
Our spirits deflated a moment later when we spotted, at what seemed an impossible distance, the observation tower that marked one end of Bloody Lane. “We’ve been walking the wrong way for an hour,” Rob confessed. Using the tower as a guidon, we turned and marched through yet more fields and woods and over fences, stopping every few hundred yards to make sure we could still see the tower through the trees.
It was 2 A.M. when we reached Bloody Lane. The sunken road was much deeper than Shiloh’s, a full man-height below ground level and fronted by a snake-rail fence. In 1862, this made it a natural trench from which the Confederates could repel wave after wave of Federal infantrymen charging across an adjoining field. Eventually, the Federals seized one end of the Lane, allowing the Northerners to fire down and along its length. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” a New Yorker recalled. The bodies lay so thick, another soldier wrote, that “they formed a line which one might have walked upon” without touching the ground.
This “ghastly flooring” was now covered in low grass and we unfurled our gum blankets, heavy tarps made of vulcanized rubber. I looked quizzically at Rob. “Charles Goodyear, patented 1844,” he assured me. Then, lighting candles, we read aloud from our final selection for the day: the memoir of John Brown Gordon, who commanded an Alabama regiment defending Bloody Lane.
“With all my lung power I shouted ‘Fire!’ Our rifles flamed and roared in the Federals’ faces like a blinding blaze of lightning. The effect was appalling. The entire front line, with few exceptions, went down.” Gordon was shot five times at Bloody Lane, with one bullet shattering his cheek. “Mars,” he later observed, “is not an aesthetic God.”
Rob closed the book and snuffed out the candles. We lay on our tarps, still soaked with sweat from our long hike. A breeze came up and the sweat turned cool. Ground moisture began to leach through our tarps. The damp—and our body funk—began to attract mosquitoes. Then, around 3 A.M., came the coup de grâce: a low-lying fog from the nearby Potomac, rolling through the swales and valleys and into the Sunken Road. The temperature dropped precipitously, making it unseasonably cold, like San Francisco on a foggy summer’s day.
I tossed and turned in my sodden clothes, vainly searching for a position that might afford some warmth. Spooning seemed the only hope for sleep, except that Rob—wet, wretched and writhing—looked about as comforting to hug as a sick walrus.
“This kind of night will give you a good phlegm roll, like they had in the War,” he groaned.
“What’s that?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.
“It’s when you’re so congested with phlegm that you can’t cough it out and it just sort of rolls around in your chest and throat. There’s a guy who writes in his diary that ‘when one hundred thousand men began to stir at reveille, the sound of their coughing would drown that of the beating drums.’”
Rob coughed a bit and went on, “There’s also stuff in the pension rolls about pneumonia and bronchitis that made these guys miserable for the rest of their lives. And if your feet don’t dry well after a night like this, you’ll have horrible blisters. The wet skin just tears right off when you march.”
At least no one was shooting at us. “I was at the National Archives the other day,” Rob said, “reading about this guy who got popped in the balls and the bullet came out his sphincter. Had to wear diapers the rest of his life.”
Rob droned on in this vein until he talked himself to sleep. I lay awake, afflicted by the creeping paranoia known only to 4 A.M. insomniacs—especially those camped illegally in a foggy ditch where the dead once lay in heaps. Something rustled on the grassy bank above our heads. A park ranger with infrared goggles? Why was my breath suddenly so raspy? And who was that huge white figure standing down the Lane, pointing straight at us?
I finally managed a shallow doze until dawn. Opening my eyes and peering through the still-dense fog, I realized that the specter eyeing me in the night was a tall stone soldier clutching a stone flag. Rob lay in a fetal curl and looked at me with what seemed a rare flash of hardcore self-doubt. “Sometimes I wonder how I ended up here,” he moaned. “I tend to blame that Blue and Gray set from Sears.”
“These are some of the best shots you’ll ever see of bloated people,” Rob said. “See this guy with the puffy eyelids and the mouth all puckered? Classic bloating. The lips can’t close, so they swell outward, in an O. Or they can curl in. See, here’s an innie, there’s an outie.”
Rob soaked up some yolk with his toast and turned the page. “Look at the legs on that guy, real thick, no wrinkles in the fabric. And the pants are pinched around the groin. He wasn’t that thick in real life.” The man beside us glanced up from his sports page and paid his bill. “I guess I’m intrigued by these pictures,” Rob went on, “because I haven’t seen corpses in real life.”
The photos also offered clinical evidence Rob could use to refine his Confederate impression, live as well as dead. “The pictures are close-ups and they aren’t staged, so you can study the belt buckles, the piping on their trousers, the bits of carpet that Confederates sometimes used as bedrolls. See that dead guy’s canteen with the corrugated tin? It’s captured Federal issue. That’s the sort of solid documentary evidence of what rebels wore that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Mathew Brady’s display of these pictures at his New York studio soon after the battle proved a pivotal event in the history of both war and photography. Visitors to Brady’s gallery confronted a reality they’d often seen represented in art and print but rarely if ever in photographs. “With the aid of the magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished,” reported the New York Times, which likened Brady’s exhibit to “a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who had traveled to Antietam in search of his wounded son, glimpsed the pacifist message inherent in Brady’s stark portraits of the dead. “The sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as the savage might well triumph to show its missionaries,” he wrote. For the first time, Holmes realized, mankind possessed images that stripped war of its romance and revealed combat for what it really was: “a repulsive, brutal, sickening hideous thing.”
The military certainly understood this; after the Civil War, it censored photographs of American battle dead for almost eighty years. Not until the 1960s would the public routinely see vivid images of their own sons at war. In that sense, the TV-fueled opposition to Vietnam wound back to the pictures of the Antietam dead that Rob and I studied over coffee and eggs.
As we returned to the battlefield, I was also struck by how closely the landscape still resembled the one shown in the 1862 photographs. It was easy to align each grim portrait with the bucolic farmland across which the soldiers fell: flung promiscuously along a split-rail fence by the Hagerstown Turnpike, surrounding artillery Caissons near the Dunker church, sprawled across a cornfield where advancing troops had been exposed by the glint of their bayonets above the man-high stalks. Over 130 years later, the corn was still there, tended by descendants of the German-American family that had sown the same field in 1862.
There was one photograph in particular Rob wanted to revisit. Enlarged to wall size and hanging inside the Antietam visitors’ center, it showed Confederates marching through the streets of Frederick on their way to the battle. The image was believed to be the only photograph from the entire war showing rebels on the move (rather than in camp, dead on the field, captured, or posing stiffly for a studio portrait). Though blurred and faded, the photograph—crowded with lean jaunty men in slouch hats—perfectly captured the ragged panache of the rebel army.
The photograph had inspired Rob and his fellow Southern Guardsmen to concoct a peculiar fantasy. They wanted to stage precisely the same scene, with hardcores filling the role of each Confederate pictured, right down to their equipment, expression and stance. Then, they’d position an old camera in a window and take the exact picture all over again. “That’s about as close as you could ever get to Being There,” Rob said.
Our own time-travel was drifting off course. We’d lingered around the battlefield for twelve hours, a veritable epoch by Gasm standards. And Antietam was what Rob called “early war;” we still had the rest of ’62 and the first half of ’63 to tour in what remained of the day. This meant speeding several hours south to central Virginia, where most of the action occurred in the eight months following Antietam.
As we drove back across the Potomac, Rob took out his notebook and updated the list of stops we’d made so far. “We’re up to ten, if we count First and Second Manassas as separate hits,” he said. “Not too bad for the first twenty-four hours.”
MIDWAY THROUGH the long morning drive, Rob twiddled the radio dial until he found a rock ’n’ roll station to keep us awake. Then, shouting over the music, he previewed the next phase of the War, between Lee’s retreat from Maryland in September 1862, and his ruinous march to Gettysburg the following June.
“These were the South’s Glory Days,” he said, borrowing from Bruce Springsteen. At Fredericksburg in late 1862, Lee repelled a Union invasion in one of the most lopsided slaughters of the War. Then, the next May at Chancellorsville, Lee crushed “Fighting Joe” Hooker and his 134,000 Federals, the largest army ever assembled on American soil and a force twice the size of Lee’s.
Chancellorsville proved Lee’s greatest triumph and also sealed the sainthood of Stonewall Jackson, who was mortally wounded while flanking the Federals—the apogee of his brief military career and ultimately that of the Confederacy’s. “Stonewall was a lot like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison,” Rob said. “They were all peaking when they died and didn’t stick around to become has-beens.”
The analogy wasn’t airtight. Morrison and Hendrix were sex-crazed hippies who OD’d on drugs; Stonewall was a Bible-thumping teetotaler who sucked on lemons and sipped warm water because he thought the human body should avoid extremes. But Rob was onto something. If Jackson had survived, and failed to change the course of the War, his luster might have been dulled by the South’s eventual defeat. “Better to burn out than to fade away,” Rob wailed, echoing Neil Young.
We were doing both by the time we reached the outskirts of Fredericksburg, which bore a depressing resemblance to Manassas. Developers had achieved what several Union generals never could, conquering Fredericksburg and littering the elegant colonial town with acres of modern crud. As we crawled along Jeff Davis Highway, past a shopping mall called Lee’s Plaza, Rob scanned the ranks of franchise restaurants. “Fast food’s one of the compromises you make on the Gasm, in the interest of speed,” he said. “When you power tour, sometimes you have to power lunch.” Rob ticked off our options, slotting in his own tags for all the familiar names. “Toxic Hell,” he said, pointing at a Taco Bell. Then came “Pizza Slut.” Arby’s, inevitably, became “Farby’s.” We settled for the drive-thru window at Hardee’s, which at least bore the name of a rebel general in the Army of Tennessee.
Lunch made us even drowsier, so we decided to do what Rob called “a drive-by hit” on Fredericksburg (appropriately, an urban battle fought partly at night). Then we headed to Chancellorsville, ten miles west of town. In 1863, Chancellorsville wasn’t a ville at all, just an inn called the Chancellor House located at the intersection of the Orange Turnpike and a plank road (literally, wooden planks nailed to logs laid over the mud). The battle also formed the unnamed backdrop to The Red Badge of Courage, in which Stephen Crane described a landscape of “little fields girted and squeezed by a forest.”
Now, Chancellorsville was slowly being sucked into the maw of greater Fredericksburg, with subdivisions and faux plantation houses poking through the trees at eve
ry turn. The Park Service oversaw only a fraction of the vast battleground; earlier in the century, the government had been slow to acquire land near Chancellorsville, arousing suspicions that it wasn’t eager to commemorate the most resounding of Southern triumphs.
Now, every inch not formally protected by law appeared slated for ruin. The local paper reported that a company called Fas Mart planned to build a gas station and convenience store on the spot where Stonewall Jackson turned the Confederate army in the famous flanking maneuver that won the day for the South. The irony was unintended—a Fas Mart supplanting Jackson’s fast march—but the neglect of history was not. “It’s just a handful of people concerned about the battlefields,” the county supervisor told the newspaper, defending Fas Mart in the name of “property rights.”
Near the center of the sprawl-pocked battlefield, we turned in at the small visitors’ center. Rob told the ranger behind the desk, “We want to see everything relating to Stonewall Jackson’s getting popped.” The ranger interpreted Rob’s question in narrowly anatomical terms. “All we have here is Stonewall’s arm,” he said. “The rest of him’s in Lexington, along with his horse.”
I caught Rob’s eye. Stonewall’s arm? We knew, of course, that surgeons amputated Jackson’s shattered arm near Chancellorsville. But nowhere in the visitors’ guide was there any hint that the sacred limb still resided on the premises.
“We don’t really tell people about it,” the ranger explained, “unless they specifically ask.” Then he pulled a map from beneath the desk and showed us how to reach the arm’s burial ground, on private property a short drive west. “You may find some lemons lying around,” the ranger added.