“Nature Covers Even Battle Grounds”

I begin most of my tours of Antietam National Battlefield in the same place where many other people do: behind the visitor center with a vista of two-thirds of the battlefield that witnessed the bloodiest single day in American history. The view of rolling farm fields, cannons, and monuments, framed by South Mountain in the background, stops people in its tracks. It is too beautiful of a place for something so horrible to have transpired there.

Speaking at the dedication of the 125th Pennsylvania monument across the Hagerstown Turnpike from today’s visitor center, Reverend Theodore Flood, a veteran of the regiment, remarked similarly: “As we look abroad on these hillsides and in this valley, one would suppose that no such bloody conflict had ever taken place on this soil, but history will tell another story—how the Union army met the Confederate army in the bloodiest open field battle of the Civil War—one in which there were more soldiers killed and wounded in one day than in any other one battle of the war.”

We go to great lengths to keep these once terrifying battlefields peaceful. We fight to keep them free of traffic and development, to keep them beautiful places. But the one thing we cannot beat in a fight is nature itself. Nature has erased the furrowed ground cut up by bullets and shells, the battle-scarred trees (most of them, anyway), and has brought these battlefields back to quiet, scenic places.

It did not take long for nature to impose its will on battlefields. Just over one year after the Battle of Second Manassas, a passerby was amazed at how “pretty, pure delicate flowers [were] growing up out of emptied ammunition boxes, a rose thrusting up its graceful head through the head of a Union drum…and a cunning scarlet verbena peeping out of a fragment of bursted shell…”

Veterans returning to battlefields recognized the danger nature posed in wiping away their deeds. At the dedication of the monument to Durell’s Pennsylvania Battery at Antietam, Samuel Rhoads commented, “This monument is designed, and has been erected, to stand on this place through the long ages which its massive foundation and enduring granite may survive the processes of nature and the decay of time…”

Robert M. Green spoke similarly of the 124th Pennsylvania monument, which, he said, “is made of granite and bronze that will for ages to come resist the elements of nature…”

Despite nature’s destructiveness, its ability to bring down monuments and wipe away the debris of battle, people who lived at the time of the Civil War recognized its peaceful traits, too. “The scenes all about us after these forty years have past speak of peace,” said Reverend Flood. “The sod on the fields is green. Some of the woods have been felled, but the remaining trees show no signs of the awful rain of shot and shell that plowed through the branches and the trunks of the trees that stood here on that awful day.”

After viewing flowers popping up out of war’s detritus, the Manassas battlefield walker asked, “Wasn’t that peace growing out of war? Even so shall the graceful and beautiful ever grow out of the horrid and terrible things that transpire in this changing but ever advancing world. Nature covers even battle grounds with verdure and bloom. Peace and plenty soon springs up in the track of devastating campaigns…”

It is through nature that many people find peace on battlefields, places that were anything but peaceful over 160 years ago.