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