Sharpsburg, Maryland

“ Backed against the coils of the Potomac River, with only the ford near Shepherdstown offering an avenue of withdrawal, a reversal in battle could result in rout and consequent loss of thousands of men and scores of guns. Longstreet voiced disapproval of battle at Sharpsburg. Jackson, hurriedly examining the ground on his arrival from Harpers Ferry, strongly favored Lee’s choice.
The village of Sharpsburg lies in a small valley at the western base of Sharpsburg Ridge. From the village, the Boonsboro Pike leads east across the ridge, then across Antietam Creek. ”

“ In Western Maryland is a stream called Antietam Creek. Nearby is the quiet town of Sharpsburg. The scene is pastoral, with rolling hills and farmlands and patches of woods. Stone monuments and bronze tablets dot the landscape. They seem strangely out of place. Only some extraordinary event can explain their presence.
Almost by chance, two great armies collided here. Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was invading the North. Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was out to stop him. ”

“ The visitor center is north of Sharpsburg on Md. 65 and is open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day. All visitor center facilities and most tour route exhibits are wheelchair accessible.
There are interpretive markers at Turner’s, Fox’s, and Crampton’s Gaps on South Mountain (scenes of preliminary fighting) and at the Shepherdstown (W. Va.) Ford where Lee’s army recrossed the Potomac.
While touring the park, stay alert to all traffic. Bicyclists should use caution while descending hills. Please use trails to avoid contact with stinging nettles, ticks, and snakes. ”

“ James’ College, and Vaughan’s cavalry went into Hagerstown. Breckinridge, with his command and Jackson’s cavalry, crossed at Shepherdstown, and took position at Sharpsburg. This position is in full view from Maryland Heights, and a cavalry force was sent out by the enemy to reconnoitre, which after skirmishing with Jackson’s cavalry, was driven off by the sharpshooters of Gordon’s division.
“On the 6th, the whole force recrossed the Potomac at Williamsport, and moved towards Martinsburg; and on the 7th, we returned to Bunker Hill. ”

“ John Walker’s division, arriving from Harpers Ferry in the afternoon, took position south of Sharpsburg.
Jackson now commanded the Confederate front north of Sharpsburg; Longstreet, with a part of his force north of the village, extended the line nearly a mile south.
When Lee’s outposts near Antietam Creek informed him in midafternoon that Hooker’s Federals were massing north of Sharpsburg, Lee moved some of his men to advance positions. Hood established a line east of the Hagerstown Pike, with part of his troops in a cornfield and others extending the front to the East Woods. ”

“ Bitter indeed was the hour that brought to Richmond the story of Sharpsburg. Flushed with hope, undoubting of triumph, her citizens only listened for the wild cheer that would echo back from conquered Washington. But the sound that reached their ears was the menacing roar from retreating ranks that left near one-third their number stark and ghastly on that grim field, where the Death Angel has so darkly flapped his wings. ”

“ A month before she had come out from England to visit her uncle—Colonel Horatio Sharpe, Governor of Maryland—and instantly became the toast of all the young men of the Colony. There was nothing surprising, possibly, in that; Governor Sharpe's niece would have been popular if she had been without any particular attraction, but Miss Stirling had attractions in abundance. ”

“ In 1776 a convention of the people adopted a bill of rights, and a constitution; in the following year, the first elected Legislature was convened at Annapolis, and in March, Thomas Johnson took office as the first republican governor. During the Revolution the Marylanders bore a highly distinguished part, participating in nearly every battle of the war. ”

“ There was need of resources to push the conflict, in which Maryland had common interests with Virginia and Pennsylvania. The delegates were willing to vote grants, provided the revenue of the Proprietary would share in the burden. This the governor refused to consider; but as the war went on, and the western settlements were abandoned before the Indian forays, Sharpe conceded the point, and £40,000 were raised, partly out of a double tax upon Catholics, who were in the main of the upper classes of the people. ”

“ CAPTAIN WILLIAM SHARPE. Captain William Sharpe was born on the 13th of December, 1742, and was the eldest son of Thomas Sharpe, of Cecil county, Maryland. At the age of twenty-one he came to North Carolina and settled in Mecklenburg county, where he married a daughter of David Reese, one of the signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. He was a lawyer by profession and had a large practice. Soon after his marriage he moved to the western part of Rowan county (now Iredell) and took an active and decided stand for liberty. ”

“ Near the mouth of the Monocacy, the Sugar Loaf Mountain (1250 feet) rises abruptly from the plain. From the Catoctin Mountain to the western boundary of the State, the Appalachian region spreads a succession of valleys, separated by nearly parallel northeast and southwest mountain ranges, and all draining into the Potomac. The Blue Ridge, 2400 feet high at Quirauk, near the Pennsylvania line, crosses the State to Weverton on the Potomac, and is the eastern limit of the Great or Hagerstown Valley. ”

“ The purpose of the colony was not all religious. Trading and business were also the objects of those brave settlers, and some of the most successful merchant princes have sprung from that old Maryland stock—“the best out of Old England.” The women of Maryland have been far-famed for their beauty. There is good reason for naming the loveliest of climbing roses, “Baltimore Belles.”
The best thing grown in old Maryland was its patriotism. When the Fathers were signing the Declaration of Independence,{185} the chief man from Maryland was Charles Carroll. ”

“ From the time that Lord Baltimore landed on her shores to the present day no public man has disgraced the fair record or blurred a page of the history of Maryland. And, indeed, the beginning of her civilized days was an eminently fit prelude to her whole subsequent career. From out of the first colony established on the banks of the Chesapeake flowed the doctrines of religious toleration and equal religious rights to all men irrespective of clime and color, at a moment when witch-burning fires lighted up the settlements of Massachusetts. ”

“ Pennsylvania and Delaware are nearly one half inhabited by Quakers, whose passive principles upon questions of government, and rigid opinions in private, render them extremely different from the citizens either of the Eastern or Southern States. Maryland was originally a Roman Catholic colony, and a great number of their inhabitants, some of them the most wealthy and cultivated, are still of this persuasion. ”

“ Of periodicals, Massachusetts has monthly, 1 political, 10 religious, 18 literary, 7 miscellaneous; quarterly, religious 3, literary 2, miscellaneous 1, and 1 annual. Maryland had none. Not a religious, literary, scientific, or miscellaneous periodical or journal in the State! What terrible truths are unfolded in these statistics! None but a political party press in Maryland, all devoted, in 1860, to the maintenance, extension, and perpetuity of slavery, which had 57 advocates, and not one for science, religion, or literature. ”

“ The portion within the Coastal Plain embraces nearly the whole of the south-east half of the state and is commonly known as tide-water Maryland. It is marked off from the Piedmont Plateau by a “Fall Line” extending from Washington (D.C.) north-east through Baltimore to a point a little south of the north-east corner of the state, and is divided by the Chesapeake Bay into two parts known as the East Shore and the West Shore. The East Shore is a low level plain, the least elevated section of the state. ”

“ After a stay of several weeks at Point Comfort, Calvert sailed up the Chesapeake into the Potomac, and founded the town of Saint Mary's. This, however, was not the first settlement in Maryland. In 1631, William Claiborne, returning from England after his unsuccessful attempt to block the issuing of Baltimore's charter, had established a settlement upon Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Here he had built dwellings and mills and store houses, and had laid out orchards and gardens. In thus founding a colony within Baltimore's territory he was sustained by the Council. ”

“ The position of Maryland upon the Chesapeake, the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and Atlantic, is most commanding. She surrounds the Capitol. It was her own noble donation, and she is its natural guardian and sentinel. Her waters, cutting the Blue mountains and the Alleghany, flow into the Atlantic and Mississippi, thus making her an eastern and a western State. Throughout all her borders, not a citizen would lose anything by the change proposed, but all would be enriched. Take down the barriers of slavery, and a new and unprecedented current of population and capital would flow into the State. ”

“ Maryland In Maryland there was little reason why the people should wish for a change of government, save through their honourable sympathy with the general interests of the United Colonies. Not only was the proprietary government deeply rooted in the affections of the people, but Robert Eden, the governor holding office at this particular time, was greatly loved and respected. Maryland had not been insulted by the presence of troops. She had not seen her citizens shot down in cold blood like Massachusetts, or her chief city laid in ashes like Virginia ”

“ By the census of 1790, Massachusetts was the fourth in population of all the States, and Maryland the sixth; but in 1860, Massachusetts was the seventh, and Maryland the nineteenth; and if each of the thirty-four States increases in the same ratio from 1860 to 1870, as from 1850 to 1860, Maryland will be only the twenty-fifth State.
These facts all conclusively attest the terrible effects of slavery on Maryland, and this is only one of the dreadful sacrifices she has made in retaining the institution. As to wealth, power, and intellectual development, the loss cannot be overstated. ”

“ Baltimore is the capital of the State of Maryland. Maryland is the earliest residence of Catholicism in the United States. Lord Calvert Baltimore, who went over from the Protestant to the Catholic faith, and who resigned his post in the English Government in consequence, was the founder of the colony in Maryland, which was intended, in the first place, to afford an asylum for persecuted and suffering Catholics ”

“ Delaware, like Maryland, is also a loyal State, and would be the last to leave the Union, which it was her glory first to enter under the Constitution of 1787. On the west, Maryland is bounded by Preston county, Virginia, containing in 1860 a free population of 13,312, and 67 slaves only. Western Virginia, bordering Maryland on the south, has voted with great unanimity to become a free State, and all appearances indicate that slavery will disappear from Virginia with the close of this year. Maryland then would be surrounded entirely by non-slaveholding States. ”

“ Not long after King Charles made the grant of land to his friend, Lord Baltimore, a woman of queenly daring and republican courage found her way to the new colony and into the councils of its leading men, and her name, Margaret Brent, stands for the most vigorous force in the early history of Maryland. She was born in England, about 1600, and died at Saint Mary's, Maryland, about 1661. A writer of this time has said about her, "Had she been born a queen she would have been as brilliant and daring as Elizabeth; had she been born a man she would have been a Cromwell in her courage and audacity." ”

“ They found that Kent Island had been settled three years before the settlement of Maryland; that Clayborne had been unlawfully dispossessed of it; that Baltimore had exacted oaths of fealty to himself; that several laws of Maryland were repugnant to the statutes of England, such as the one protecting Papists; that persons of Dutch, French, and Italian descent enjoyed equal privileges with the English in Maryland; and that in March, 1652, the governor and council of Maryland had refused to issue writs in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England. ”

“ Society was distinctly democratic, for while there were favored families there was no privileged class, and the existence of African slavery and the temporary servitude of convicts and redemptioners tended to place all freemen on an equality. As there was no state church, educational opportunities in the province were small, but it was a land of plenty and hospitality, and charity in religion made the execution of the criminal law singularly mild. In spite of turmoils and dissensions, Maryland prospered and flourished. ”

“ But Maryland presents the example of complete success. Maryland is secure to liberty and union for all the future. The genius of rebellion will no more claim Maryland. Like another foul spirit being driven out, it may seek to tear her, but it will woo her no more.
At the last session of Congress a proposed amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery throughout the United States passed the Senate, but failed for lack of the requisite two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives. ”