The Final Attack Trail Part 3

Stop 8 - Artillery Ridge

This ridge line was used by the artillery of both sides. Early in the battle two Confederate batteries held this ground and used it to hold Burnside’s men at bay. Capt. Benjamin Franklin Eshleman’s and Capt. John Richardson’s batteries each had four smoothbore cannons and were both part of the famous Washington Artillery of New Orleans. Eshleman pulled out at noon to move south and cover Snavelys Ford. Richardson moved west to higher ground at 1:00 p.m. firing at the advancing 9th Corps and dueling with the Union artillery that then took position here.

After the bridge was taken and the Southern cannon left this ridge, two U.S. batteries would pull into the same position facing in the opposite direction. Four rifled cannons of Capt. Joseph Clark’s Battery E, 4th U.S. joined six rifled guns of Capt. George W. Durell, Independent Battery D, PA Light Artillery. West Point graduate Capt. Clark wrote how when taking position here, “my 1st Lt. was killed. My horse killed under me, and I was wounded by a bursting shell. I received four bullets—one through the bridle glove and left thumb, one above the knee joint, one through the thigh and one above the hip of my right leg.” Capt Clark would survive the war, but on September 17, command of the battery fell to Sergeant C. F. Merkel who fought the battery until dark.

At the other Union guns, Lt. Charles Cuffel of Durell’s battery remembered that “the cannonading was very heavy, each side appearing to employ all the guns at their command, and to use them with utmost vigor. The air seemed to be filled with shrieking missiles, and there was ocular evidence on every hand that somebody was getting hurt.” Such was the devastating barrage that emanated from, and fell upon this ground.

From here the trail turns east. You are now headed back towards the Burnside Bridge.

 

Durrell's Battery in Action at Antietam

NPS Photo

 

Sgt. William McKinley

NPS Antietam

Final Stop - The McKinley Monument - Soldier, Statesman and Martyr

Ohioan William McKinley survived the Civil War, only to be killed by an assassin’s bullet while serving as the nation’s 24th President.

Sergeant McKinley was a Commissary Sergeant with the 23rd Ohio of Colonel Hugh Ewing’s Brigade. During the battle, Sergeant McKinley bravely served the soldiers in his regiment. Another U.S. President from the same Civil War regiment, Rutherford B. Hayes said that, “Early in the afternoon, naturally enough, with the exertion required of the men, they were famished and thirsty, and to some extent broken in spirit. The commissary department of that brigade was under Sergeant McKinley’s administration and personal supervision. From his hands every man in the regiment was served with hot coffee and warm meats.... He passed under fire and delivered, with his own hands, these things, so essential for the men for whom he was laboring.”

After the war, McKinley served as a Congressman and Governor of Ohio. He was twice elected as President before he was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Shot on September 6, 1901, the President held on for eight days before succumbing to his wound on September 14th. This monument was dedicated in his memory two years later on October 13, 1903.

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