Antietam Battlefield

Last Sunday, my family and I visited Antietam, site of the bloodiest day of fighting in the Civil War. The battlefield is only about fifteen minutes from Shepherdstown. My parents and I had actually visited once before, back in May when we were trying to get the lay of the land and find housing options for my move here. At first I wasn't too excited about going back to a place I had just been to a few months before, especially with a couple of kids in tow, but it turned out to be a nice afternoon.

I didn't actually to look through the small museum the battlefield has this time, as Aidan was being fussy. Since I'd just seen it a couple of months ago, I took him outside in the stroller. The park, of course, has tons of green space and lots of interesting things to look at--the perfect kind of place to let an antsy two-year-old expend some energy. We eventually wound up at the New York monument near the main entrance, a big impressive tribute to the soldiers from my home state, complete with stairs for Aidan to run up and down and four sides to play peek-a-boo around while we waited for the grown-ups to finish inside.

I asked Aidan to make a funny face, and here's what I got:



Actually, visiting with the kids (especially with Kelsie) gave me a new perspective on the battle, or at least a new perspective on how kids learn history. Kelsie is only 8 and is about to start fourth grade, so she doesn't know that much about history and wars yet. It's kind of sad that part of growing up and getting educated is learning about so many painful events from the past. This is something that's been on my mind this past week, as we are discussing what it means to be educated in my English 101 classes, reading works like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and the excerpt from Frederick Douglass's Narrative in which he discusses how learning is both a blessing and a curse. I am reminded of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, who wants so badly to keep children from losing their innocence and growing up.

So all of this is context for me seeing Kelsie experience Antietam. I don't think she really got the magnitude of what happened there in 1862, but who among us can really say we fully understand a battle in which 23,000 men were killed or wounded in twelve hours? Kelsie seemed intrigued by the photo below. It's a rather iconic photograph, taken by Alexander Gardner and shows dead bodies in front of the Dunker Church. The museum at the battlefield has a blown up version of it right as you come in, and later on, while we stood at the Dunker Church, she asked if that's where the photo was taken.

After we were done watching the reenactors (a post on that will come next) at the church and made our way back to the cars to drive to the next stop (the battlefield is, of course, so big that you drive from stop to stop), she asked if that small bit of field we just saw was the battlefield. I tried to explain that the battlefield stretched for miles and miles, and again, I am not sure if it sunk in completely.

At another stop, we saw a monument dedicated to one of the generals who died at Antietam (post on that to come, too), and she asked, "Was he on our side?" That was a complicated answer, since the general had fought for the confederacy. "Yes and no," I explained. So we talked about the Civil War--how the North and South fought each other--and how after the war was over, the nation (slowly) healed. She asked, "Why did they fight?" and I gave her my own answer, which I know people like to argue about. "Well, basically it was over slavery." "Lincoln freed the slaves!" she eagerly volunteered, proud of something she learned in school. Earlier that day, she had also confidently identified Lincoln in this other iconic picture where he's meeting with General McClellan. Again, this was all quite interesting to me--to see what she knew and try to teach her just enough for her to know some more without her getting overwhelmed and confused. Here's a picture of her posing at the site known as "Bloody Lane."

In the end, I am not sure how much Kelsie learned at Antietam. I know that she had fun walking around the green spaces and seeing the monuments, trees, and flowers. Seeing it all through her eyes gave me a lot to think about--and reminded me of when I was a kid and we visited places like Gettysburg and Fort Ticonderoga.