Losses

Some historical events are easy to remember because you were alive at the time (as you presumably are right now). Where were you when you heard of President Kennedy’s assassination? I was bending over the drinking fountain in the hall outside my 6th grade class when Melissa Scholl, in tears, told me. Maybe you weren’t around yet. What were you doing when the attacks on the twin tours and the Pentagon occurred? I’ll bet you remember well. In my parents’ generation, it was Pearl Harbor and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. (In my family the first one evoked anger and patriotism, the second one, relief.) In any case, our corporate memories bookmark certain significant national occurrences, usually of a tragic nature.

Our ancestors of the 19th century noted the same phenomena though the knowledge normally came days after the events themselves, through the newspaper or telegraph message. For the Civil War generation, reading the casualty lists posted at railway stations and courthouses and on endless columns of the newspapers, the great tragedies took on a very personal dimension when their loved ones turned up in the statistics. The American people suffered in this week in 1862 and 1863 the bloodiest single day in American history near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland along Antietam Creek, and the bloodiest two days in our history among the fields and forests of Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia.

It is difficult for us to imagine the scale of loss in these two battles. At Antietam, on September 18th, 1862, an astonishing 23,000 men in the blue and gray were struck down on a fairly narrow battlefield front in a matter of 12 hours. In comparison, about 6,500 American men were hit on D-Day June 6, 1944.
One year later, on September 18th and 19th, 1863, Confederate and Union armies clashed at Chickamauga in a fierce encounter producing more than 35,000 casualties long before the use of automatic weapons. To conquer the Island of Iwo Jima in World War II, American forces sustained 26,000 casualties, in FIVE WEEKS.

My intention is not to diminish the sacrifices of our heroes in World War II but rather to show that our own War Between the States produced such horrendous casualties that families and survivors remembered those dates for the rest of their lives. It is no wonder the war is not forgotten in many American families even today.

In one of the mysteries of providence, there were a number of regiments who were transferred from the eastern theatre of the war where they had fought at Antietam, to the western, just in time to be caught up in the fighting in Georgia. In fact, General James Longstreet’s Corp in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was at both battles and at Gettysburg, the bloodiest three day battle in U. S. history. My newly adopted State of Georgia was well-represented in those bloody battles in the 2nd, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th,24th, 50th, 51st, and 53rd Regiments.

Civil War re-enactors will commemorate the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga on 20, 21 September (this weekend). A reenactment can’t really approximate the horror of real battle but the fact that we still remember what our fathers sacrificed is a wonderful memorial to their honor and courage.

For the few men who actually stood in the firing lines at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, and  lived to see the end of the war, those days were seared into their memory. To the families of the dead, life was never the same again.

Bill Potter