Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 31, October, 1873. Various
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of South Mountain. An ordinary rifle-cannon on Maryland Height can with the greatest ease play at bowls to the other summits. From this eminence one Colonel Ford, on September 13, 1862, toppled down his spiked and coward cannon: the hostile guns of the enemy quickly swarmed up the summit he had abandoned, and the Virginia crests of Loudon and Bolivar belched with rebel artillery. The town was surrendered by Colonel Miles at the very moment when McClellan, pressing forward through the passes of South Mountain from Frederick, was at hand to relieve it: Miles was killed, and the considerable military stores left in the village were bagged by Stonewall Jackson. Flushed with this temporary advantage, Jackson proceeded to join Lee, who then advanced from Sharpsburg and gave unsuccessful battle to the Union forces at Antietam Creek.
This stream pours into the Potomac just above, from the Maryland side. It gives its name to one of the most interesting actions of the war. The fields of Antietam and Gettysburg were the only two great battle grounds on which the Confederates played the rôle of invaders and left the protection of their native States. Antietam was the first, and if it could have been made for Lee a more decisive failure, might have prevented Gettysburg. It occurred September 15th to 18th, 1862. Lee had just thoroughly whipped that handsome Western braggart, General Pope, and, elated with success, thought he could assume the offensive, cross the Potomac, and collect around his banner great armies of dissatisfied secessionists to the tune of "Maryland, my Maryland." McClellan (then in the last month of his command over the army of the Potomac) pushed with unwonted vigor over the mountains, inspired, it is said, by the accidental foreknowledge of Lee's whole Maryland plan, and clashed with Lee across the bridges of this pretty highland stream. As an episode he lost Harper's Ferry; but that was a trifle. It was a murderous duel, that which raged around the Dunker church and over the road leading from Sharpsburg to Hagerstown. Lee's forty thousand men were shielded by an elbow of the Potomac; his batteries of horse-artillery under Stuart were murdering the forces of Hooker, when that general was relieved by the support of Mansfield; then Mansfield was killed and Hooker wounded; and then Sedgwick was sent up to replace Mansfield; then, when Sedgwick was getting the better of Jackson and Hood, McLaws and Walker drew up to the Confederate left, and burst completely through Sedgwick's line. Presently, Franklin and Smith came across from the stream and reinforced the Federals, driving the Southern advance back to the church, and Burnside rendered some hesitating assistance; but then rushed up the force which had received the surrender of Harper's Ferry, singing victory, and drove back Burnside; and when McClellan, on the morning of the 19th, found that Lee had withdrawn across the Potomac, he was too much discouraged with his own hurts to venture a pursuit. He had lost twelve thousand men, and Lee eight thousand. But Antietam, though for us a costly and unsatisfactory victory, was for the South a conclusive lesson. The Peter-the-Hermit excursion into Maryland lasted just two weeks, and its failure was signal and instructive. Intended as an invasion that should result in the occupation of Washington and Philadelphia, it led to nothing but to Stuart's audacious raid into Pennsylvania with his thousand troopers—a theatrical flourish to wind up an unsuccessful drama. As for Harper's Ferry, its overwhelming punishment and precipitate conquest were not without their use: the retention by the Federals of the little depot of army stores on the Virginia bank surprised and thwarted Lee. To reduce it, he had to pause, and ere the operation was complete McClellan was upon him, and cornered him before he was enabled to take up a firm position in Western Maryland and prepare for the Pennsylvania invasion. The Ferry fell into our hands again, but as a ruin. As for the elaborate bridge approaching it, its history is the history of the Potomac campaign: three times has it been destroyed by the Confederates, and twice by the Unionists. Eight times it has been carried away by freshets.
An earlier interest, yet intimately connected with the rebellion, belongs to Harper's Ferry. From the car window you see the old engine-house where John Brown fortified himself, and was wounded and captured, while these wooded hills were bathed with October red in 1859. The breaches in the walls where he stood his siege are still apparent, filled in with new brickwork. No single life could have been so effectually paid out as his was, for he cemented in the cause of the North the whole abolition sentiment of the civilized world, and gained our army unnumbered recruits. Truly said the slaves when he died, "Massa Brown is not buried: he is planted."
Of the site of all these storied ruins we can only say again and again that it is beautiful. The rocky steeps that enclose the town have a Scottish air, and traveled visitors, beholding them, are fain to allude to the Trosachs; but the river that rolls through the mountains, and has whirled them into a hollow as the potter turns a vase, is continental in its character, and plunges through the landscape with a swell of eddy and a breadth of muscle that are like nothing amid the basking Scottish waters.
On an eminence immediately overlooking Harper's Ferry, and some four hundred feet thereabove, is the enormous turtle-shaped rock, curiously blocked up over a fissure, on which Jefferson once inscribed his name. Chimney Rock, a detached column on the Shenandoah near by, is a sixty-foot high natural tower, described by Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia. Upon the precipice across the river, on the Maryland side, the fancy of the tourist has discovered a figure of Napoleon: it forms a bas-relief of stupendous proportions, having the broad cliff for background, and clearly defining the hair, the Corsican profile and the bust, with an epaulette on the shoulder. The Blue Ridge, as it traverses from this point the breadth of Virginia, breaks into various natural eccentricities—the Peaks of Otter, rising a mile above the sea, the Natural Bridge, Weyer's Cave, Madison's Cave—and gives issue to those rich heated and mineralized springs for which the State is famous.
The tinge of regret with which we leave Harper's Ferry is mitigated by the hope that greater wonders may lie beyond. In two miles the railroad, as if willing to carve out a picture-frame in which the heroic river may be viewed, excavates the "Potomac Tunnel," as it is named, through which the water is seen like a design in repoussé silver, with two or three emerald islands in it for jewel-work. The perforation is eighty feet through, but in contrast with its rocky breadth our picture-frame is not too deep: whenever we shift our position, the view seems to increase in art-beauty, and as a final comprehensive picture it recedes and crowds under the spandrels of the arch the whole mountain-pass, with the confluence of the two rivers in the finest imaginable aspect.
Poor Martinsburg! during the rebellion a mere sieve, through which the tide of war poured back and forth in the various fluctuations of our fortune! It is said to have been occupied by both armies, alternately, fifteen times. The passenger sees it as a mere foreground of big restaurant and platform, with a conglomeration of village houses in the rear—featureless as the sheep which the painter of Wakefield put in for nothing. One incident, however, supervenes. An old man, with positive voice and manners, and altogether a curious specimen in looks, gait and outfit, comes through the train with a pannier of apples and groundnuts. He is pointed out as one of the men of importance in Martinsburg, owning a row of flourishing houses. With the anxious servility which wealth always commands, we purchase an apple of this capitalist, blandly choosing a knotty and unsalable specimen.
Pretty soon, as we look over into Maryland, we have indicated for us the site of old Fort Frederick, until lately traceable, but now completely obliterated. It was an interesting relic of the old Indian wars. Shortly after Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela, when the Indians had become very bold, and had almost depopulated this part of Maryland, Fort Frederick was erected by Governor Sharpe as a menace, and garrisoned with two hundred men. It was an immediate moral victory, awing and restraining the savages, though no decided conflict is known to have occurred from its construction to its quiet rotting away within the present generation. Those were the days when Frederick in Maryland and Chambersburg in Pennsylvania were frontier points, the Alleghanies were Pillars of Hercules, and all beyond was a blank!
Still continuing our course on the Virginia side of the Potomac, through what is known in this State as the Virginia Valley, while in Pennsylvania the same intervale is called the Cumberland Valley, we admire the increasing sense of solitude, the bowery wildness of the river-banks, and the spirited freshness of the hastening water. At a station of delightful loneliness we alight.
Here Sir John's Run comes leaping from the hills to slide gurgling into the Potomac, and at this point we attain Berkeley Springs by a dragging ascent of two miles and a half in a comfortable country stage. Sir John's Run was called after Sir John Sinclair, a quartermaster in the doomed army of Braddock. The outlet into the Potomac is a scene