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| The 51st Pennsylvania's Lt. Col. Thomas Bell fell mortally wounded from a Confederate artillery round within 50 feet of the Burnside Bridge (digitalcommonwealth.org) |
Standing at the Burnside Bridge makes one feel cut off from the rest of the Antietam battlefield. Antietam presents great vistas that allow visitors to examine large swaths of the battlefield at once. Not so at the Burnside Bridge. There, after a long drive from the Bloody Lane on the auto tour, visitors stand and look into two hillsides, their visibility limited to just a few hundred yards. At the bridge, you are down in a deep swale that you can hardly see out of when you are in it and you can barely see into it unless you are standing on top of the hillsides that surround it.
Then how, in this secluded low point on the battlefield, do
numerous Union accounts at the bridge mention coming under Confederate
artillery fire? No Confederate guns were perched alongside Henry Benning’s
Georgians overlooking the bridge and Antietam Creek. What is to account for
these Federal tales of being struck by enemy artillery shells?
At least two mentions of this made their way into Ezra
Carman’s chapter on the fighting at the Burnside Bridge. First, when relating
the attack of Crook’s brigade, Carman mentions the left-wing of the 11th Ohio
Infantry being exposed to a “severe fire of infantry and artillery.”[1]
Later, after the 51st Pennsylvania and 51st New York carried the bridge, “Confederate
guns on Cemetery hill threw their shell and shrapnel into the ranks of the
[Federals] lying in the road near the bridge, killing and wounding many…”[2]