SHARPSBURG - The last time such destruction was seen on these shores, it happened in places like this, set amid serene farms and rolling hills where Americans fought each other and died.
The battle of Antietam nearly devastated the two armies that fought it and forever changed the community that was its accidental host. And photography, then an emerging medium, dramatically increased its impact on the country, in a way not altogether different from today's images of American lives lost to terrorism.
The wars in Europe that claimed so many in the 20th century were thousands of miles away; the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam even further. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been compared to Pearl Harbor, but in 1941, that was an outpost on a distant island - a small colonial territory, not a state - its bombing leaving America feeling more victimized than vulnerable.
Once, though, armies marched through this very land, bent on destroying each other with the explosive fury of those fuel-laden hijacked airplanes.
"One of my rangers came up to me on Tuesday," says David Howard, superintendent of Antietam National Battlefield in Washington County. "He said we had always called this battle the bloodiest day in the history of this country. But that might not be true anymore."
Four thousand people were killed here - another 19,000 left wounded or missing - in the one-day battle that occurred 139 years ago tomorrow. That's twice as many American deaths as on D-Day. No one can say for certain if it is more than died Tuesday.
There are 4,776 Union dead buried in Antietam National Cemetery - from this and other battles fought in Maryland - 1,836 of them unknown. Another 200 veterans of subsequent wars were buried here before the cemetery was closed in 1953. It was reopened this year to accept the body of Patrick Howard Roy, a 19-year-old sailor from nearby Keedysville who died in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole.
Many of the dead of Antietam lay on the battlefield for days, their corpses captured by the cameras of Alexander Gardner and James E. Gibson, assistants of Mathew Brady. A few weeks later, Brady opened an exhibition in his studio at 10th Street and Broadway in New York, not far from what would be the site of the World Trade Center. No one had ever seen anything like "The Dead of Antietam." These pictures were seared into the minds of those who saw them as deeply as the image of the jetliner slicing into the World Trade Center is now etched into ours.
