National Post (National Edition)
AND IN THAT CORNFIELD, CALIXA LAVALLÉE HIMSELF WAS WOUNDED. Song of a nation
The bridge of horrors, as seen by the composer of O Canada.
Before Calixa Lavallée composed the music to O Canada, he played across the United States — first as part of a minstrel show, then as a member of the Union Army band. As Robert Harris writes in his new book Song Of A Nation, the 18-year-old from rural Quebec likely enlisted for adventure rather than battle. But a year into his service with the Fourth Rhode Island Regiment, he was thrust into one of the most brutal clashes of the Civil War.
It is remarkable enough that Lavallée fought in the U.S. Civil War at all. For him to have been present at the Battle of Antietam is doubly so — it was the battle that gave rise to the Emancipation Proclamation, making it perhaps the turning point in the entire Civil War.
But for Calixa Lavallée and the tens of thousands of other men who were thrown into the Battle of Antietam, it had another meaning entirely — as a charnel house of unimaginable proportions. This bucolic rolling countryside, an area just four miles long and a mile and a half wide, was the scene of the single bloodiest day in American military history. For just about 12 hours on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 1862, approximately 19,000 men — along with their cannon, muskets, and horses and caissons, surrounded by rampaging and terrified livestock maddened by the noise — faced off and set about trying to destroy each other as efficiently and thoroughly as they knew how.
And they were brutally successful. Twenty-three thousand men were either killed, wounded, or missing when the darkness of night forced the Battle of Antietam to an exhausted end. That’s the equivalent of over 30 casualties a minute — one every two seconds — for 12 consecutive hours. Eight thousand men were either wounded or killed just in the battle’s first few hours, in Miller’s Cornfield. That’s more than the number of casualties American troops suffered on all of D-Day. By
noon, another 5,500 men had fallen a few hundred yards south at Hog Trough Road, a depression worn in the earth by years of taking animals to market (and known since Antietam as Bloody Lane). Later in the day, there was more heavy fighting further south, near Rohrbach Bridge over Antietam Creek, now known as Burnside’s Bridge after the Union general who stormed it time and again with disastrous consequences.
By most accounts, Calixa Lavallée was one of the 23,000 wounded at Antietam. He implied so himself, and many other writers have made the same claim, although his war records make no mention of this fact. How serious the wound, no one knows, but he did spend several weeks convalescing in southern Maryland following the battle. He was 19 — a child, really, caught up in one of the bloodiest military days in history.
Lavallée and the rest of the Union army found themselves at Antietam because Robert E. Lee was a born gambler, and an audacious, daring, almost irresponsible general. After his victory defending Richmond against George McClellan’s superior forces, Lee had decided to do the totally unexpected — attack the North on Northern soil. For some, then and now, this was the height of foolhardiness. Attacking an army that outnumbered you almost two-to-one on its home turf seemed a sure recipe for destruction.
But there was much method in Lee’s madness. He knew that the Northern advantage in manpower and supplies meant that the longer the war continued, the more likely it was that the South would lose. The North would simply wear it down. So, gambling on an early knockout blow — a decisive, unexpected Southern victory on Northern soil — actually made sense. Lee also knew that Abraham Lincoln led a far less unified country than many supposed. A lot of Northerners simply wanted the war to end and to make peace with the Confederacy. A big Southern victory would embolden those Northerners. And finally, Great Britain, always happy to see the United States falter, was just about ready to announce its support for the Confederate side in late 1862, which would have enormous international consequences. A great Confederate victory in Maryland might make it happen.
And so, in the first week of September, without waiting for Jefferson Davis’s permission, Lee marched his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac, invading Maryland, hoping to entice the North into a response. As anticipated, he got it. George McClellan had been assembling an enormous army in Washington, expecting to have to defend the capital, but now he moved it out across Maryland to counter Lee’s manoeuvres. Calixa Lavallée was part of this immense, 60,000-strong force, with his Rhode Island regiment having been recalled from South Carolina specifically for an occasion just like this one.
Lee, on the offensive, had the early advantage in what became known as the Maryland Campaign. But, incredibly, two Union soldiers taking a break in their march towards Lee’s army found a copy of the order that Lee had sent to his generals outlining his entire campaign strategy. At first, McClellan thought the order, which the soldiers had found in a field, wrapped around two cigars, was a forgery — it was too outlandish that his opponent’s strategy should be revealed to him so easily — but he eventually took it for the true document it was. All of a sudden, Lee was in trouble; McClellan knew exactly where he was headed. The Union army turned towards South Mountain in Maryland in pursuit. Lee fell back and considered abandoning the campaign altogether, heading back home to avoid a complete disaster. But he liked the layout of the terrain just west of Antietam Creek; its rolling hills and forests seemed perfect for the construction of tough-to-penetrate defensive positions. He stopped there, set up his artillery, positioned his forces, and waited. It was Sept. 16, 1862.
Late that night, in the rain, Calixa Lavallée arrived at Antietam. He and his regiment were positioned just on the other side of Antietam Creek, at the far southern end of the battlefield. Confederate forces were so close at hand that Lavallée and his comrades had to set up camp in the dark. Any light would have immediately drawn enemy fire. No band concerts or diversions this evening. Instead, an anxious, wet, rainy night.
Lavallée and his regiment camped beside a little bridge that spanned the Antietam, just 125 feet across and 12 feet wide. The idea was for Burnside’s forces to cross the bridge at first light and attack the Confederate army from the south while other Union forces were joining the battle from the north, crushing Lee in the middle. Calixa Lavallée was ready to be among the 9,000 men who would cross that tiny bridge under heavy Confederate sniper fire and bombardment. He may well not have survived — thousands were killed or wounded trying to cross that span during several attempts over a three-hour period.
But Lavallée was spared that crossing. Early in the morning, Burnside sent the Fourth Rhode Island on a mission to outflank the Confederate snipers guarding the bridge by fording the creek a mile downstream and sneaking up behind them. The manoeuvre was supposed to take an hour but ended up taking six. (The maps they had been provided were wildly inaccurate.) Six hours of trying to make their way through dense underbrush, lugging artillery behind them, fending off the occasional sniper fire and artillery blast. Finally, at about four in the afternoon, Lavallée and his comrades, having made their way across the creek, appeared just to the west of Burnside’s Bridge, ready to join the battle.
And join the battle they did. While Lavallée was fording the Antietam, Burnside had finally gotten the rest of his forces across, and the final phase of the battle was about to begin. By this point in the day, tens of thousands of men had already been killed or wounded on the Antietam field, but the battle still hung in the balance. The Fourth Rhode Island started advancing towards the town of Sharpsburg, where Lee had set up his headquarters, and were making great gains. It looked as though Antietam was going to be, finally, a Union victory. But at the very last moment, in a scene right out of Hollywood, a new supply of Confederate troops, who had marched all day to get to Antietam when it was clear they would be needed, streamed onto the battlefield exactly where Lavallée and the Fourth Rhode Island were fighting their way to Sharpsburg. Had the Confederate troops arrived a halfhour later or half a mile distant, they would have had no effect whatsoever. As it was, they caused chaos for Calixa Lavallée and his comrades. Fighting fresh and superior forces, the Fourth Rhode Island eventually had to retreat after a vicious battle in what is now referred to as the “40-acre cornfield.” The regiment lost 15 men in that brief, intense battle (by way of comparison, they only lost 12 other men during the entire rest of the war).
And in that cornfield, Calixa Lavallée himself was wounded. The nature of his injury is not entirely certain, although many sources from his later life say it was his leg. Leg wounds were common during the Civil War because exploding shells would cause rock fragments to act like shrapnel. Whatever the nature of the injury, it was serious enough to necessitate a convalescence of several weeks. And it ended his wartime career. A year in the army, spent under the most harrowing of circumstances, reaching its climax on the fields of Antietam, was over. Although Lavallée spoke little of his wartime experiences in later life, they scarred him as they scarred everyone involved in that conflict. The man who would write the national anthem for his country saw at first hand the agonies of another country facing the trauma of its possible dissolution. It was a haunting vision of disunity he would never forget.