A Day with Clara Barton at Antietam, 1862
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History Firsthand.
Historical Backdrop
On September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate armies collided along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, producing the bloodiest single day in American history. Nearly 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing in twelve hours of fighting across three landmarks — Miller’s Cornfield, the Sunken Road, and Burnside’s Bridge. Our subject is Clara Barton, forty years old, a former Patent Office clerk from Massachusetts who had left her government job to bring supplies directly to the front. Unlike Dorothea Dix’s official nurses working in rear hospitals, Barton drove her own wagons of bandages, lanterns, and food straight to the firing line. At Antietam she would tend wounded within musket range at the Poffenberger and Samuel Mumma farms, extract a bullet from a soldier’s cheek with a pocketknife, and famously feel a Minié ball pass through the sleeve of her dress and kill the man she was holding. This is her day, seen through her eyes.
September 17, 1862 — 3:40 AM — Boonsboro Pike, four miles east of Sharpsburg, Maryland
You bounce on the hard bench of a canvas-topped supply wagon as the mule team plods west in the dark. Ahead of you and behind you stretch other wagons, their lanterns swinging like fireflies. Cornelius Welles, your assistant, rides silent beside you. The air smells of harness leather, mule sweat, and a faint metallic edge you have learned means gunpowder carried on the wind. You hear the distant thud of picket muskets, no louder than a book dropped in another room. Your fingers, chapped from a week of loading crates, rest on a wooden box of lint bandages.
September 17, 1862 — 5:55 AM — Joseph Poffenberger farm, north of the Miller Cornfield
You dismount stiffly as the first artillery salvo splits the sky. The concussion rolls through your ribs. Ahead, a stand of dark corn shivers though there is no wind — men are moving inside it. A surgeon in a bloodied apron runs to you shouting for lint. You seize a bundle from the wagon and thrust it into his hands before he has finished asking. The east reddens. You smell burning powder for the first time today. It will not leave your nose for a week.
September 17, 1862 — 7:20 AM — Edge of Miller’s Cornfield
You follow stretcher parties toward the corn. What comes out is worse than what went in. Rows of blue and butternut lie between splintered stalks, some still, some clawing at the dirt. You kneel beside a Pennsylvania boy of maybe seventeen with a hole through the ribs. He asks for water. You lift his head against your thigh and pour from a tin cup. He drinks, coughs pink foam onto your sleeve, and looks past you at nothing. You close his eyes with your thumb and move to the next man.
September 17, 1862 — 9:00 AM — Samuel Mumma farm, improvised field hospital under an apple tree
Confederates set fire to the Mumma house at first light; you can see black smoke behind you. Under a heavy apple tree, Dr. James Dunn is operating on a plank laid across two barrels. He looks up when he sees your wagon and calls out, “God has indeed remembered us.” You unload crates of chloroform, lint, and candles. A pile of amputated limbs is already growing beside the tree. You do not look at it directly. You count crates.
September 17, 1862 — 10:30 AM — Behind a low fence rail near the East Woods
Cornmeal — you find sacks of it in the wagon and remember they were meant for horses. But there are men who have not eaten in a day. You mix it with water in a barrel, ladle it into tin cups, and press them into the shaking hands of soldiers laid in rows. One Wisconsin corporal weeps as he swallows. Another cannot open his jaw because of a wound and you dribble the mush between his lips with your fingers. Bullets whip through the leaves overhead, cutting twigs that fall in your hair.
September 17, 1862 — 11:15 AM — Behind the Union line, ridge above the Sunken Road
A young sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts is brought to you shot through the cheek, the ball lodged just under the skin on the other side. He begs you not to send him back to a surgeon — the wait is hours, the pile of limbs is growing. He hands you his pocketknife. You wipe the blade on your skirt, hold his head steady between your knees, and cut. The ball drops into your palm still warm. He thanks you and asks for his hat.
September 17, 1862 — 12:40 PM — A ravine behind the East Woods
