When History and the Present Collide

The cross-country road trip with my son this past June was a lot of things: long stretches of highway, late-night hotel check-ins, and a mutual discovery of roadside diners. For both of us, it was also a pilgrimage through history, adding another chapter to our long list of battlefield and museum visits. We walked the grounds of Little Bighorn, stopped at Mount Rushmore, and spent a genuinely odd morning at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. On June 12, we found ourselves on a quiet ridge in Maryland, standing over the ground where America nearly broke in two.

Ted was a year out of college, getting ready to move to New York and begin his new career. I was in full dad mode: proud, a little anxious, acutely aware that this kind of trip wouldn’t come around again easily. For me, there’s something about being at a Civil War battlefield with one or more of my kids that makes the distance between 1862 and right now feel very small.

Standing on Sacred Ground

Burnsides' Bridge - 2018

September 17, 1862, remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men fell in twelve hours, more casualties than America suffered on D-Day. The numbers are hard to hold in your head when you’re standing on grass that looks like any other grass, under a sky that looks like any other sky.

We made two stops that demanded longer than the others.

The first was Burnside’s Bridge, known at the time as Rohrbach Bridge. It’s a low stone span, twelve feet wide, with three graceful arches, built in 1836. Twelve feet. Standing on it, you can touch both walls without fully extending your arms. For hours that September morning, a small force of Georgian sharpshooters held it against repeated Union assaults, picking men off as they funneled onto the bridge. When the 51st New York and 51st Pennsylvania finally charged across in the afternoon, they paid for every inch. The bridge is beautiful now, quiet, a little mossy, the creek running below it exactly as it did that day. It’s easy to forget what it cost.

Bloody Lane - 2018

The second stop was Bloody Lane. What had been a sunken farm road became a Confederate defensive position, and then a killing ground when flanking movements collapsed the line. The men who died there were close to Ted’s age, many of them far from home, fighting their first and last battle on the same day.

Gardner's photo of Union troops inspecting piles of
Confederate bodies at Antietam's “Bloody Lane.” 

Walking that lane in the June heat, I kept thinking about Alexander Gardner’s photographs taken here in the battle’s aftermath. His images of the corpse-strewn road went on display in Manhattan weeks later and drew enormous crowds. For the first time, ordinary Americans could see what the war actually looked like: not paintings, not illustrations, but photographs of real men who had been alive that morning. It shattered any romantic notion of battle as something glorious. Ted and I walked the lane quietly, not saying much. Sometimes you don’t need to.

The Divided Present

It’s hard to stand on a Civil War battlefield in October 2018 without feeling the pull of certain parallels. We’re weeks from a midterm election that feels, to a lot of people, like something more than a normal election. The political conversation this fall has been defined by what feels like irreconcilable differences: fierce debates over immigration, a public discourse that leaves little room for nuance, and a sense that we’re not just arguing about policy anymore but about who gets to define the country.

The Confederate invasion of Maryland was timed deliberately to fracture Northern resolve before the 1862 midterms, a calculated attempt to swing Congress toward a negotiated peace. Reading Justin Martin’s account of that strategy over the past few months, the echo is hard to miss. Much of our current political rhetoric feels built the same way: designed to mobilize through fear rather than appeal to anything shared.

The polling this fall describes a nation more polarized than at any time since the Civil War era. We’re not just disagreeing about tax policy or healthcare. We no longer seem to agree on basic facts. Lincoln observed that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Standing on the ground where that division nearly became permanent, it’s hard not to wonder how much strain a house can take before the framing gives.

Gardner’s photographs shattered illusions about warfare in 1862. What shatters illusions now is social media and round-the-clock news, doing something similar to our politics: stripping away the comfortable distance between what we’d like to believe and what’s actually happening. Gardner’s photographs were meant to show the truth. I’m not always sure what our current media environment is meant to do.

The Continuing Work

Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg about “the unfinished work” that each generation must take up. The soldiers at Antietam didn’t choose the moment history handed them. They had no idea whether dying in a Maryland cornfield would change anything. They couldn’t see past the smoke and noise to whatever came next. They just kept going.

Whatever happens in November, I suspect we’ll end up in roughly the same place Antietam left the country in 1862: somebody will claim victory, and then the harder, slower work of actually governing together will resume, no matter who ends up with more seats in Congress. That work isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t have a monument. But it’s the work that keeps the house standing.

Ted has settled into his new life in New York now, and I find myself thinking about what his generation is inheriting. The summer road trip, the quiet walk down Bloody Lane, the bridge that cost so much to cross. Those things stay with you. I hope they stay with him.

The conversation between the past and the present keeps going. So does the unfinished work. Standing on that Maryland battlefield with my son, I had every reason to believe his generation will be up to it.