Antietam, South Mountain, and Harpers Ferry:
Orders of battle, bibliography, maps, softcover, 263 pp., 2008. University of Nebraska Press, 1111 Lincoln Mall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0630, $21.95 plus shipping. Battlefield guidebooks don’t usually provide much in the way of interest for the people who are the best acquainted with those battlefields. But Ethan Rafuse’s contribution to the University of Nebraska Press’ “Hallowed Ground” series, Antietam, South Mountain, and Harpers Ferry, provides nearly as solid and illuminating a narrative of Antietam as one could wish from a free-standing book on the subject. And it has the added virtues of including detailed travel, tour and orientation directions, and a highly useful addendum on the two other major battles of the 1862 Maryland Campaign, at South Mountain and Harpers Ferry. Rafuse’s guidebook is organized around a detailed series of “stops and substops” all around the battlefield, with each stop unfolded in the text by directions, orientation, a “what happened here” narrative, and a zoom-in vignette by a participant in the action. Beginning with a description of the situation in September 1862 as Lee crossed his army over the Potomac into Maryland, Rafuse uses the Antietam Visitors Center as his first orientation point, carefully describing and identifying the major geographical points to be seen along South Mountain and Elk Ridge (to the east) and on the Dunker Church plateau (closer at hand) and the roads radiating from it. The tour narrative follows the chronological development of the battle itself, starting with the deployment of Hooker’s First Corps on the morning of Sept. 17, giving unusually even coverage to both the advance of Doubleday’s division into the Miller Cornfield and Ricketts’ division along the Smokehouse Road to the east. Rarely have I read a clearer account of the back-and-forth pushing through the Miller Cornfield by Doubleday, then Hood, then Mansfield’s Twelfth Corps, until Greene’s division finally breaks through to seize the Dunker Church plateau. The same gift for clarity runs through Rafuse’s handling of the deployment of Sumner and the Second Corps and the fight for the Bloody Lane, and the slow-motion effort of Burnside and the Ninth Corps to get over the Lower (Rohrbach) Bridge that today bears Burnside’s name. But the best evidence of Rafuse’s skill at imposing order on some the most challenging terrain of any Civil War battlefield is his narrative of the near collapse of Lee’s right flank and its last-minute rescue by the arrival of A.P. Hill’s division. Nothing presents more confusion in understanding Antietam than the struggles for the Otto and Sherrick farms and the last-ditch defense of the Harpers Ferry Road, but Rafuse accomplishes it with immediacy and sure-footed detail. No one gets through Antietam without scattering a number of interpretive tacks after them, and Rafuse has more than a few of his own to scatter. He is more critical of Sumner and less severe on McClellan’s management of the Army of the Potomac’s right wing than is Marion Armstrong in Unfurl Those Colors! (2008). Much as he concedes the really formidable difficulties posed by the Antietam Creek above and below the bridge, Rafuse is far less indulgent to Burnside, or at least less inclined to regard him as McClellan’s victim, than William Marvel, but also not as dismissive as B.F. Cooling in Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam (2007).
And Rafuse in Antietam, South Mountain, and Harpers Ferry is marginally less willing to apologize for McClellan’s failure to renew the battle on Sept. 18 than Rafuse in McClellan’s War (2005). This will be a wonderful resource to take around the Antietam battlefield for the eight hours Rafuse estimates his tour will take. What is more remarkable is what a resource it is simply to sit and read. Reviewer: Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
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