'With You in Shame or Fame They Dwell'

Among the more conventionally rousing poems Herman Melville collected in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is “The Victor of Antietam,” a celebration of Union Gen. George B. McClellan. Here is the seventh of its eight stanzas: 

“Your medalled soldiers love you well,

        McClellan:

Name your name, their true hearts swell;

With you they shook dread Stonewall’s spell,

With you they braved the blended yell

Of rebel and maligner fell;

With you in shame or fame they dwell,

        McClellan:

Antietam-braves a brave can tell.”

 

President Lincoln was less enthusiastic. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation five days after the Battle of Antietam, fought in Maryland on September 17, 1862, and six weeks later removed McClellan, an emancipation opponent, from his command. McClellan’s forces had halted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s first attempted incursion into the North at a horrifying cost. Antietam remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing. All of the dead, Union and Confederate, were Americans. Only in death is there reconciliation. Melville fervently supported the Union cause, but melancholy permeates his Civil War poems.

 

In March 1986 I was driving from Washington, D.C., where I had visited a friend, to my home in upstate New York, when I decided to visit the battlefield at Antietam. It was late afternoon, the sun was already setting, and my car was the only one parked in the visitors’ lot. The only other person present was a ranger in uniform, complete with campaign hat. I explained my interest and he offered to take me on an abbreviated tour of the battlefield, including the “Bloody Angle” or "Bloody Lane," a sunken road where four hours of intense combat resulted in 5,600 casualties. The ranger’s commentary was conversational, not canned or academic. He knew the history and explained it to me clearly. The ranger was black.

 

Visitors often note the quiet of battlefields, what Allen C. Guelzo in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), calls “the silent witness of places like Gettysburg,” whether Omaha Beach or Antietam. Chatter seems indecent but conscious memory remains a sacred obligation. The ranger’s tone was respectful.

 

I inherited my copy of Battle-Pieces from my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and scholar of Melville and the Civil War. Here’s something Helen, author of Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Archon Books, 1987) and Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2009), wrote to me in an email in 2011:

 

“Melville’s mind I found almost endlessly fascinating, and reading about the period made it even more so. Today, we think we have political problems. We should try dealing with an issue of the magnitude of slavery. Melville grew intellectually enormously in pondering the problem. He also grew into a philosophical pessimist about human nature and a political conservative, which the current PC Melvillians refuse to recognize.”

 

By coincidence, today is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, in observance of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signing the document in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were ratified in the wake of the Civil War.              

 

[Among the wounded at Antietam was Sgt. Oliver Hardy, who enlisted at age nineteen in the 16th Georgia Infantry and took part in sixteen engagements. His son, also named Oliver Hardy, was born in 1892 and in 1927 would team up with Stan Laurel.]