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My project, "Antietam", started at the National Cemetary and with this view of the "Private Soldier" statue, beneath which form on the pedestal has been inscribed the phrase, "Not for themselves, but for their country."
One knows this is common stuff for school children and tourists.
There is always the drive through Maryland's congenial countryside, the walk in the fresh air, the brief encounter with the Gettysburg Address (displayed on a large plaque on a nearby building), but it takes more time than that for the meaning of those rows of uneven tombstone teeth to sink in.
As a photographer local to the battlefield (and not far from several others), I have better ability than most to return again and again to its ground, and that early in the morning to near dark, from winter through the fall.
I've joked with myself, "Everyone shoots September 17, 1862. I am working on the year prior, and getting the digital files to look like it too."
In his work, This Hallowed Ground, historian Bruce Catton foretells the end of the struggle near its start with three critical variables set into place: the development of the Soo Locks enabling massive growth of America's steel industry; the cordon made of the border states and Mississippi River at the outset of hostilities; and, most telling, the sense of country unified and set on its egalitarian principles held in the hearts of those who would fight, and that seems a common sentiment held across boundaries even though loyalties and politics were articulated otherwise.
The Civil War is the one that ended with Confederate officers entitled to their sidearms and soldiers provided with horses and mules, what would have been the spoils of the northern armies, paroled out of uniform to return to their farms and work.
Strangely, and with not much made of it, so it seems, the first charge seems to have been led by rebels out of Baltimore under the command of Captain J. B. Brockenbrough (Baltimore Battery, Jackson's Division, CSA). [1]
If decorative art is about making pleasant and hosting company, retro-historical fine art may be about reflection and wonder, and nothing more compelling about that than the ghosts of this old and resonant conflict most hard to fathom.
1. National Park Service. "Baltimore Battery, Maryland, Confederate."
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
