New Jersey's role at Antietam, past and present

By Steve Janoski

As the suns descends over one of the many cornfields that divide the rolling hills of western Maryland, a scene not witnessed in over a century-and-a-half is taking place as thousands of men – some wearing blue, some wearing gray – file into a field, their steel rifle barrels glinting in the light as they march.

Minutes later, a thunderous roll of drum beats calls the infantry to battle, and a battery of cannons roars to life, its bellows shattering the quiet country evening as its crew swarms around it. One officer yells to his men, "Alright boys…get ready for hell!"

In one cornfield, a swirling firefight has broken out, and all that can be heard over the din of artillery muzzles and rifle cracks is men yelling in a mad chorus, shouting orders, and firing at each other while horses careen about and the sulfur smoke settles just over the tops of the 7-foot stalks… and for a brief moment, it becomes all too easy to lose one's place in time.

The confusion is endless. Northern sharpshooters thread between the plants in guerilla-fashion more suited for the jungles of Vietnam, but a line of rebels soon overwhelms them, charging forward with their high-pitched "rebel yell." Minutes after, however, a thick line of blue follows and drives those same southerners before it.

An hour later, a bugle blows in the distance to signify that the scenario is being brought to a close, and the firing slows. It appears that the North has won the exercise, called a "tactical" in the reenactment world. 

Unscripted and unmapped, it is a real competition where the Northern and Southern commanders use tactics from the mid-19th century to match soldiers and wits.

Or, as 56-year-old West Milford resident and 17-year Civil War reenacting veteran Mike Belgie said, it's "two generals looking for each other, and they know they're out there, and they're going for it."

Sometimes, at formally-scored events, referees are even present, but many (such as this one) are done on the honor system.

The tactical stands in stark contrast to the reenactment that the public will see the following day in a massive but scripted performance meant to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Antietam, he said, precisely because it is not intended to follow history — the generals have "taken the script and thrown it away."

"When we do a tactical, we're writing our own history," he said.

In this case, the rewritten history mirrors the actual battle as the Union troops continually outmaneuver and outwit the rebels, but the chaotic atmosphere gives Belgie a thorough appreciation for what the soldiers of the mid-1860s went through when the bullets began flying.

"Once the guys got into the corn, the only way we knew where they were was the smoke…that's a great way to run a battle: Which way is the smoke?" he said with a laugh.

Belgie isn't the only one who looks forward to the private battles, said Tony Daniels, a retired history teacher from Jackson Township whose thick brown beard and propensity for smoking cigar after cigar gives him an uncanny resemblance to Ulysses S. Grant. In his 30 years, he said, he has been in nearly 100 of the running fights, and can recite story after story about one match after another.

But for Daniels, who as a general often commands a wing of the army (or sometimes the entire army), going head-to-head with an opposing leader brings out his competitive streak, and he can recall only twice where he lost convincingly.

"Although you're not using real bullets, it's like, 'I don't want this guy to trick me, I want to kick his ass,'" he said. "It's almost like chess, and I love it."

One of the officers on Daniels' staff, Pennsylvanian Carl Popadick, has been reenacting for 17 years and said that when there's no choreography, everything changes, and all the sensations are heightened.

"You get out there in that field, and you're fighting because you don't know what's going to happen. Your awareness changes, it really does," he said.

But even the reenactors are keenly aware that they can get only so close to history, and that even the most hectic tactical is tame compared to the real thing — especially when "the real thing" is Antietam.

During the historical battle, which took place on Sept. 17, 1862, the artillery did a good amount of the work of clearing out the real cornfield, Belgie said, by firing canister — a metal cylinder packed with hundreds of little metal balls and shards of metal — into it.

By the time dusk gathered around the 3,000 or so acres east of the little farming town of Sharpsburg, 23,000 Americans would lie in various states of death or agony, with 3,600 killed outright. That's eight times as many casualties as Omaha Beach, and eight times as many as in 9/11. Even with the horrific wars fought in the 20th century, Antietam today remains the single bloodiest day in American history.

And, nearly 150 years ago to the day, just a few miles away from the reenactors' frenzied fight, the young soldiers of the 13th New Jersey volunteers crouched near another cornfield, waiting for the orders that they knew would send them to their deaths.

Jersey boys' baptism by fire

The 937 men of the regiment had been recruited from Passaic, Essex, and Hudson counties during the summer of 1862, and by mid-September, it was attached to the XII Corps of the General George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac as it traveled north from Virginia in pursuit of an invading southern army.

The stakes could not possibly have been higher. A series of Confederate victories in front of Richmond during May and June, coupled with Robert E. Lee's crushing defeat of another Union army at Second Bull Run in late August, had shattered the Northerners' spirit, and it appeared that one more big win for the rebels might have ended the conflict.

Even if it did not, a victory somewhere in Pennsylvania or Maryland might convince the major European powers — namely, England and France — to intervene on behalf of the South in the same manner that the French had during the Revolutionary War 81 years earlier.

When the two armies finally met, it was along a tiny tributary of the Potomac River called Antietam Creek, and when the 13th New Jersey moved into position on the west side of its banks on the night of Sept. 16, it was impossible for them to know what the next day would hold.

Samuel Toombs, a sergeant who became the de facto regimental historian after the publishing of his 1878 book "Reminisces of the War: Comprising a Detailed Account of the Experiences of the Thirteenth Regiment New Jersey Volunteers in Camp, on the March and in Battle," wrote that the 13th, situated on the extreme right of the federal line, would be a part of the assault force charged with turning the rebel flank and driving it back toward Sharpsburg.

The sounds of skirmishing in the distance made the green regiment skittish; they'd barely heard a shot fired in training, much less in battle.

"It was a trying situation for us," Toombs wrote. "The certainty of death never before seemed so near. The approach of dawn was dreaded as though it was to witness our last day upon earth, and our thoughts wandered back to home and the loved ones there."

For David and Peter Ryerson, two brothers hailing from Pompton Lakes, thoughts of loved ones might not have been of so much comfort — earlier in the year, their 63-year-old father (born in 1798) had fallen at the Battle of Williamsburg, his body pierced by several bullets, while commanding another New Jersey regiment. 

He was buried in the graveyard of the Pompton Reformed Church on Hamburg Turnpike with full military honors.

Months later, the brothers, who were both officers (27-year-old David was a captain in Company C and Peter was a 1st lieutenant), would face their first real battle. Also in that company was Private J.M. 

Shepperd, whom much less is known about other than he was likely from the Pequannock area and fought in the battle.

The order to attack came so early in the morning on the 17th that there wasn't even time to cook their breakfast rations of fresh meat, Toombs wrote, and he described the scene that greeted them as they arrived on the field at around 7 a.m.

"Shot and shell were doing their dreadful work. The roar of musketry grew louder…we lay under a severe artillery fire for some time, and the hissing, screeching sounds which accompanied the deadly missiles in their flight produced anything but a pleasant sensation," he wrote.

An Irish brigade from Boston marched by and into the West Woods, which would have sat to the 13th's front, and the New Jerseyans were ordered to move in behind them.

An unimaginable scene

Belgie, who has been researching the regiment, said that because they were initially held as a reserve, their advance would have been slowed by the mangled bodies of slaughtered comrades who'd fallen earlier in the fighting.

"They would have been stepping over dead bodies, over the wounded, and be trying to keep to their ranks. As soon as they cleared the cornfield, they would have been in range of the (rebel) artillery, and they would have started dropping shells on them," he said.

Once through the cornfield, which prior currents of lead had destroyed, they jumped over the wooden fences that lined the sides of the Hagerstown Pike and began to draw small arms fire from the southerners positioned in the woods.

They continued forward toward the Dunker Church, a small white building that would become infamous because of the severity of the fighting that took place around it, and ran head-on into the troops of legendary Southern General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

Confusion reigned supreme — the Union troops were initially ordered to stop firing because it was thought that the soldiers they were shooting at were actually Northerners, but when the "friendlys" began advancing toward them, the firing resumed.

"The advance of the enemy was persistent and in strong force, and they poured a fierce and destructive fire into us," wrote Toombs, somewhat matter-of-factly.

The fighting scattered the regiment, which later reformed and pushed toward the church once more, this time led by Brigade Commander General George S. Greene himself. Jackson's troops, ever the veterans, attempted to ruse the New Jerseyans into believing they were surrendering, but that illusion was shattered when they leveled their rifles and began pouring a murderous fire onto the federals.

After an hour of fighting, Toombs wrote, the 13th was forced back "before the strong fire of the enemy, who were in superior force."

But in reality, Toombs placid field reporting belies the terror that actually occurred; the National Park Service's battlefield guide states that the area where the men of the 13th New Jersey and its sister regiments met the stalwart defenses of Jackson's Confederates was the site of some of the "most horrific fighting" in U.S. history.

A reenactor from the 3rd New Jersey reenactment group noted that, because the exit wounds for the .58-caliber rifles used during the Civil War were so large, men who were gutshot would often have their insides blown out their backs. In the vicinity of the cornfield, he said, this meant that the stalks behind the rows of dead men were colored brown and red with entrails.

Belgie, for his part, admits that he can't imagine what it must have been like to storm the position, and that he would have quickly made a "strategic advance to the rear" in the real battle.

"My ass woulda' been outta' there…I would have been in the rear with the gear," he said.

After seeing horrors like that, it was hard for him to imagine that the veterans didn't have long bouts with post-traumatic stress disorder, even though there was no such diagnosis back in the 1860s.

Some of the units engaged in that part of the field would lose four out of five men — an 80-percent casualty rate unthinkable for any American unit in this day and age. And though it may be hard to truly figure out how the 13th felt during their baptismal firefight, Daniels reached back to what his father, a World War II veteran of the 101st Airborne who was badly wounded during the Normandy Invasion, told him about how men react during battle.

"He said that when you see someone get shot…when they hit the ground, they start digging at their clothes to see where they're shot, and if they're going to live or die. And you don't want to see the looks on their faces," said Daniels. "There had to be a lot of guys who were just scared to death…a lot of prayers, a lot of fear, a lot of rage, and you can get all that out of the same person in 10 minutes during combat where it's (either) your life or the life of the guy across from you."

But of course, no matter who is quoted, or what source presented, it is not possible to replicate the sheer heart-stopping fear that the average soldier felt that day as Americans butchered each other in record numbers.

And few of us will ever know what it felt like to be Private J.M. Shepperd, who probably grew up in some little town along the Pompton or Pequannock River and went off to war never thinking that there was a bullet or shell fragment with his name on it.

Toombs, however, reports that there was, and Shepperd is listed on his roll of those wounded in the fight. He is buried in Pequannock's First Reformed Church, although it's unknown when he died, or how.

Confederate General John B. Gordon wrote that the Union assault had landed "with the crushing weight of a landslide," and that Lee himself had ridden to rally the troops.

"Again and again….by charges and counter-charges, this portion of the field was lost and recovered, until the green corn that grew upon it looked as if had been struck by a storm of bloody hail," he wrote. "From sheer exhaustion, both sides, like battered and bleeding athletes, seemed willing to rest."

By mid-morning, both North and South on the 13th's part of the field would retire, having fought to a bloody standstill, and it would be up to other troops to decide the battle's fate. The 13th had suffered 90 casualties, 9 of whom were killed.

And although by nightfall the Union army would be victorious, Lee's army, kicked in the teeth and badly wounded, was allowed to escape across the Potomac and into Virginia, leading to the war's continuation for three more increasingly desperate and brutal years.

David and Peter Ryerson would both survive the fight to represent Pompton Lakes in more of the war's gruesome battles… but death was not done with the family.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

Old wounds remain unhealed

By Steve Janoski

It was but a single item among the scores of pieces on loan from dozens of museums and private collections that, brought together inside Morristown's stately Macculloch Hall, formed what was probably the finest exhibit ever assembled in regards to New Jersey soldiers in the Civil War.

Named "Gone for a Soldier – Jerseymen in the Civil War," the display featured everything from swords and firearms to devil-adorned playing cards and a blood-soaked prayer book.

Small placards next to each piece strove to tell the story behind the piece and bring the war home on a personal level, and no attempt was made to hide that the man who wore this specific jacket or carried that stag-handled bowie drew his last breath just inches from Virginia's green grass or mud-soaked trenches.

One piece in particular drew my eye: a gorgeous .58 caliber Springfield Model 1861 rifle that, sitting behind the thick glass of a display case, featured a muzzle that was once the pinnacle of man's innovative killing power, now silenced for the ages.

This, however, was more than just another old gun. Into its dark wooden stock, the iron cross-like emblem of the Army of the Potomac's Sixth Corps was carved, and down the side of the barrel, its owners name — New Jersey's own Corporal James Taylor of Co. B of the 14th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry – was engraved (no doubt a product of the hours upon hours of intense boredom that bookended the moments of terror that formed the soldier's life).

But those simple markings lent a human touch to the murderous tool and spurred the viewer to the sobering realization that, yes, this gun belonged to a man, a man not unlike any of us, who used it to end lives in some of history's most savage battles.

Later that day, at a Masonic lodge just a few blocks from Maccullough Hall, the museum hosted a talk by world-famous historian James McPherson, who may be the finest Civil War scholar that the nation has ever produced.

McPherson, who looks decades younger than his 76 years, was the picture of class in both speech and manner, and his remarkable talk, which outlined the numerous breakdowns in the peace negotiations between North and South, kept his audience of armchair historians intrigued.

The peace process, after all, is something that is oft-overlooked in the thousands of books written about the war, and maybe for good reason; the two sides were so impossibly far from any common ideal of what "peace" could even look like that some might consider it wholly irrelevant.

That's not to say that during the war there weren't plenty of people on both sides actively lobbying for an armistice, especially during the later years when bullet-swept battlefields produced mammoth casualty lists.

McPherson said that the opening of peace negotiations, Northern "Peace Democrats" claimed, would be the first steps towards the "brotherly reunion of North and South," and although "it might take a long time," it would be have to be done one step at a time.

But as his talk continued, and he discussed the stubborn reluctance on the part of both sides to settle for anything less than what history might consider a total victory, I began to see his words mold themselves into the current political landscape.

With each passing election, and especially in the light of the recent Supreme Court decisions on healthcare, immigration, and the role of the federal government in the life of its citizens and its states, it becomes abundantly clear that the Civil War never really ended.

The way we fight it may have changed, and although our politicians today skip the apocalyptic rhetoric their nineteenth century forebears used to such great effect, the arguments are essentially the same.

But now, instead of grabbing a rifle, we grab the keyboard. Instead of taking to the field, we take to Facebook and Twitter, venting our frustrations and backing up our assertions with Wikipedia crash courses on constitutional law and quotes from men long since dead.

And I cannot help but wonder where our "brotherly reunion" between North and South, liberal and conservative, went, and if at the end of the great crucible, Corporal Taylor and his compatriots thought that the issues that had ignited the "mighty scourge of war" had finally, and forever, been settled, and that America might one day heal the conflagration's crimson wounds.

I wonder how shocked he would be to see that even 150 years later the voting map regularly reflects the old boundaries of the old Confederacy, or to read our internet postings and see that we are every bit as divided today as we were on the day that he carved that cross into the stock of his rifle.

I wonder if he would think his sacrifice, their sacrifice, was all worth it.

Alas, I cannot ask him. And all we have left of him, of those troops, of that Grand Army of the Republic that freed the slaves and ended the insurrection, is that cold, murderous accoutrement that serves as a constant reminder of a country that once tore itself apart, only to rebuild stronger in some places… but just as vulnerable in others.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

For more information on the Macculloch Hall summer programs, go to maccullochhall.org.


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Veteran's gravestone finally commemorates black Civil War soldier'sservice

By Steve Janoski

Staff Writer

On a spring day in April 1898, the members of the Bloomingdale Coronet Band gathered in the cemetery of the First Reformed Church of Pompton Plains to perform a final tribute to one of their own, a black Civil War veteran who played the kettle drum and was considered something of an honorary member of the local group.


It has been 113 years since that day. But on Saturday, May 7, members of the band visited the gravesite once again, this time to help dedicate a veteran’s headstone that finally commemorates the military service of their musical forbear during the nation’s greatest period of tribulation and internal strife.

The soldier’s name is Charles “Tully” Schuyler, and local officials have searched far and wide to piece together as much information as they can on what was surely an interesting life.

When Schuyler was buried in the last years of the 19th century, Councilman Ed Engelbart said, there was no money to buy him a gravestone. As a result, he lay in an unmarked grave with no one knowing who he was or what he’d lived through until a member of the Pequannock Historic District Commission (HDC) came upon his obituary in an old copy of the Butler Argus.

That member, Dave Wisneski, said he was helping his wife do research on local history for her mas

ter’s degree when he came upon the colorful obituary, which described Schuyler’s love of the band.

Wisneski had an immediate interest in Schuyler’s story. Besides being in the HDC, Wisneski also has been a trombone player in the Coronet Band for the past 22 years, and he did further research into Schuyler’s life, using census records and the website ancestry.com to track backward through the years.

At the same time, Engelbart contacted Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11) and asked him for help in procuring information about Schuyler from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as for assistance in securing a veteran’s headstone.

In the past few months, large chunks of the soldier’s past have been filled in through these combined efforts and have painted a picture of the life of a former slave who fought for theUnion.

Schuyler’s life

The HDC issued a pamphlet during the dedication of the veteran’s stone that states that Schuyler is believed to have been born inPassaicCountyin 1833.

Engelbart said that Schuyler appears to have been a slave who was freed;New Jerseywas slow to abolish the practice and didn’t do so officially until 1846.

In 1850, Schuyler was listed in theU.S.census as being one of the “free” residents of the township, and by 1860, he seems to have been living inBerry’s Hotel, which was acrossJackson Avenuefrom Jones Hardware.

Wisneski said that Schuyler lived there along with 15 other people, a mixture of both couples and single individuals. That building burned down during World War I when lightning struck it, and is now the site of the PNC Bank.

In January 1864, as the Union armies in the East were set to begin their most vicious series of battles, Schuyler left his wife, Hannah, and their 2-year-old child Francis at home to enlist with Company K of the First New Jersey, and was assigned the position of “Colored Cook.”

At 30 years old, Schuyler stood at just 5 foot 3 inches tall and was said to have a black complexion and black eyes, Engelbart said.

“Though African-Americans were frequently given low-level jobs, they also could get caught up in combat very, very quickly,” Engelbart said. “And if you were in the Union Army as an African-American, you were putting yourself at tremendous risk.”

Little is known about the particulars of his service, except that he was with the Army of the Potomac while it fought through General Ulysses S. Grant’s “Overland Campaign,” the final, ferocious advance onRichmondintended to pin down Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

It was a bloody time for the army— in the course of two months, from the start of May to the end of June in 1864, the Union Army racked up 55,000 casualties.

Schuyler was nearly among these, as he was listed “missing” at some point during the spring, but no information remains on what was surely a grueling period of being lost in the slaveholding South before he made his way back to the army.

He eventually returned to the army and finished out his tenure, being mustered out with an honorable discharge in June 1865.

Schuyler would have two more children, one in 1867 and another in 1870, and was baptized himself at the First Reformed Church in 1867.

Wisneski said that the 1870 Census recorded Schuyler as living in the Bloomingdale area and working as a “laborer/handyman.”

He was also playing as a drum major in the Bloomingdale Coronet Band, which was founded in 1884, and although he was not an official member per se, records say he was often in rehearsals and in parades as a drummer.

Schuyler was undoubtedly one of the few blacks in the area and likely the only one in the band at that time, but Wisneski said that he figures Schuyler was a local character who band members knew and let join.

“They seem to have liked and respected him,” Wisneski said. “If he wasn’t an official member, he was definitely ‘part of the gang’ so to speak.”

When Schuyler died on April 21, 1898, the band attended his funeral and played “several appropriate selections,” his obituary noted.

A headstone a century in the making

On May 7, several parts of the community came together to mark the dedication of the headstone to Schuyler, from the First Reformed Church to American Legion Post 242 to the HDC to the Bloomingdale Coronet Band themselves.

Englebart said that Frelinghuysen was able to get the process of securing a stone moving and that within three months of Engelbart’s initial calls, the congressman had the stone delivered.

Frelinghuysen also presented a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol to the church in celebration of its own 275th anniversary this year.

“Everything clicked with this. I couldn’t believe it,” Engelbart said.

About 20 residents turned out to see the dedication on the warm spring afternoon, and comments were made by Master of Ceremonies Lou Hebert of American Legion Post 242 and Engelbart about the significance of the event.

It was important, Engelbart said, to recognize this man who served in the Civil War with a veteran’s stone to acknowledge his existence and to carve out his own piece of the cemetery.

“It was these men who volunteered and joined who saved theUnion,” he said.

Wisneski agreed, saying that without a stone, it feels like Schuyler was completely forgotten.

“He was one case where nobody knew anything about him,” he said.

Wisneski said that he thinks that having about 20 members of the Bloomingdale Coronet Band play the dedication is something that Schuyler himself would have enjoyed.

“I think he’d especially like the fact that it was still there all these years later, that the group’s still there and able to play,” he said.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com