Battle of Antietam: Union Surgeons and Civilian Volunteers Help the Wounded

By John H. Nelson | America's Civil War  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

For more than a week, Surgeon Dan Holt of the 121st New York Volunteer Infantry had been doing his best to manage his hospital, a grandiose name for what was really nothing more than brush and boughs thrown over pole frames near Bakersville, perhaps a mile north of the Antietam battlefield. Tired and homesick, he wrote to his wife on a warm September 25 day: “I have seen, stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads. Then add the scores upon scores of dead horses, sometimes while batteries lying along side, still adding to the commingling mass of corruption and you get a faint, a very faint idea of what you see, and can always see after a sanguinary battle. Every house for miles around is a hospital and I have seen arms, legs, feet and hands lying in piles rotting in the blazing heat of a southern sky unburied and uncared for, and still the knife went steadily in its work adding to the putrid mess.”

Holt’s graphic description provides only a vague picture of the horrors of the struggle of September 17, 1862. In one full day of fighting between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in the vicinity of Sharpsburg, Md., 23,000 men were killed, wounded or captured. The Battle of Antietam still has the regrettable distinction of being the bloodiest day in American history; from dawn to dusk, Americans killed each other like they never had before.

For many soldiers, the battle was just the beginning of a weeks-long ordeal. Within 48 hours of the slugfest, hospitals were situated in virtually every farmhouse to the north and east of the battlefield. Wounded were also taken to nearby communities, including Sharpsburg, Williamsport, Hagerstown, Boonsboro, Keedysville and Middletown in Maryland, and to Chambersburg, Pa. Overall, more than 120 separate hospitals initially were used.

Even as fighting still raged on parts of the battlefield, ambulances began hauling their sad cargo to the hospitals. For the first time in the Civil War, the ambulance corps was fairly well organized, and most of the injured left on the field, Union and Confederate alike, were in hospitals within 24 hours. More than 300 ambulances were utilized to transport the wounded.

A New York Tribune reporter making his way to the battlefield on September 18 was staggered by the scale of the carnage and the seemingly endless number of ambulances. He wrote, “the wounded are coming in by the thousands…around and in a large barn…I counted 1,250 wounded. Along the same road and within the distance of two miles are three more hospitals each having from 600 to 700 in them, and long trains of ambulances standing in the road waiting to discharge their bloody loads. Surgeons with hands, arms and garments covered with blood, are busy amputating limbs, extracting balls and bandaging wounds of every nature in every part of the body.”

The gore-slick ambulances presented a frightful site that was burned into the mind of the cook at the Jacob Grove house in Sharpsburg. Years later, he could still recall ambulances “comin’ into town, and the wounded men were hollerin’ ‘Oh Lord, Oh Lord,’ Poor soul! And the blood was runnin’ down through the bottom of the wagons.”

Blood continued to flow in the hospitals, where limb amputation was one of the most common procedures. As Dr. Theodore Dimon of the 2nd Maryland Volunteer Regiment wrote, “besides fingers and toes I have made 11 amputations here of legs, thighs, forearms, arms at the shoulder joint. The minnie ball does not permit much debate about amputation.”

Dimon was referring to the fact that the soft lead Minié balls and round musket balls used by both sides would flatten on impact, mangling both muscle and bone. Iron canister and shell fragments also could cause similar damage. The destruction was often so complete that surgeons had no chance of reconstructing a limb. Out would come the dirty saw, and there would go the appendage.

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Tags: America's Civil War, Antietam, Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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