behind AotW

I’ve been pushing hard the last few months to get more soldiers into the database on AotW, focusing particularly on those who died on the Campaign.

As a result I’ve posted an update to the list of The Dead of the Maryland Campaign of 1862. It’s now up to just over 6,300 people out of the more than 7,600 who died.

There’s so much more to do, but this is a good jump from the previous edition.

Pages for those individuals and thousands more are available on AotW, of course, if you want to see more about them …

I’ve been transcribing and posting some post-battle reports to AotW this week; most were written by Federal medical officers and I’ll write about them later, once complete, but today, thanks to a timely lookup in the Supplement to the OR by Dr Tom Clemens, I’ve added a report from Colonel William Gibson, 48th Georgia Infantry, speaking for Wright’s Brigade, who were at the extreme right of the line in the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg on 17 September and later withdrew to the Piper Farm.

If you think that is a run-on sentence, how about this from Colonel Gibson’s Report:

Yet, seeing the weakness of the brigade and the strength of the enemy, the brigade then numbering under 200 with every field officer, the General and one of his aids wounded and lying on the field, I contented myself with holding our advanced position. The support on our right and left having been withdrawn, and none being in the rear that I knew of, with our cartridges exhausted, upon seeing a new formation of the enemy in our front, of a very large size, and a movement by our right flank, from which a brigade had long since retired, I withdrew the brigade, in order, to a stone fence in the rear, which position was held during the day, by several charges being made on the enemy when appeared in force on our front, and a gun which was lying in the road, seemingly abandoned, which Lieutenant Chamberlain, of the Sixth Virginia Regiment, fired with great accuracy into the advancing columns of the enemy three different times and drove them back.

We’re up to 337 Official Reports on AotW now. If you seek a little light reading you can find them all listed in the OR Index.

(we’ve got 17,000 people now in the Antietam on the Web database)

I am pleased to report that I’ve just added the 16,000th person to the Antietam on the Web (AotW) database. There’s much more to the AotW website than people, of course, but they’re what keep me going at it year in and year out.

16,000 is a nice round number and perhaps large enough to be statistically interesting. It also marks a good point to stop and take stock.  To that end I’ve built some simple charts of summary data about all those people … 

I’ve added a new tool on AotW: an interactive tree diagram display for the Orders of Battle (OOB) of each of the main armies in Maryland. You can click any “node” (dot) on the diagram to drill down further into an Army Corps/Wing, Division, or Brigade at Sharpsburg. Each of the unit names is also a link to a page with more information about it.

I hope this new way of looking at the command organizations will be useful. I find the trees are a lot of fun to play with, too. Here’s a sample of what they look like:

Give ’em a try and let me know what you think! Start at the main OOB page and look for the tree symbol.

Antietam on the Web was a bit overdue for an overhaul: some of the PHP code had been deprecated (gone obsolete), much of the HTML was clumsy and likewise obsolete, and the site navigation didn’t make it easy to find the information on the site. Most of the navigation dated from 2005, and even the newest PHP and HTML code was last updated in 2010.

So I re-wrote and re-organized the whole thing.

The content is now gathered into big clusters for people (soldiers & units), places (maps), events (narrative),  and features (special projects).  I hope you’ll find it easier and more intuitive to use. It’ll certainly run more efficiently and be easier for me to maintain.

Here’s a quick visual comparison, new vs. previous home page design.

I’d love to hear how it works for you.

Antietam Battlefield’s Burnside Bridge (between 1980-2006, by Carol Highsmith, Library of Congress)

The home page of Antietam on the Web is really just a simple table of contents decorated by a photograph taken on the battlefield. Since I did a major redesign/simplification of the site in 2010, I’ve used about half a dozen pictures to represent the place and the history of Antietam.  Here are their stories.

The number of people present on the Maryland Campaign of 1862 cannot be precisely known, but it must have been large. Ezra Carman estimated troops actually engaged on September 17th at about 85,000 (51,536 Union, 32,851 Confederate), with thousands in reserve and in support roles nearby. The armies’ mustering strengths in the first week of September were as great as 85,000 and 65,000, respectively. Adding in the Federal garrisons at Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry, along with local and detached units along the railroad and Potomac River, I think there were something like 160,000 soldiers on the Campaign.

I’d like to know all their names, and get them listed on Antietam on the Web (AotW) so their families, researchers, and other interested people can find them. I can’t possibly get them all, I know. No one could, but I’m working on it.

The end of an era.

Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community,
is closing on October 26, 2009.

Your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web

After years of playing with Antietam battle information and biography on paper, then in spreadsheets and text files, I started putting it online in 1992. I had an email account with a community organization and a little FTP space on their server. The Gopher service was my friend.

When I learned about web browsing and hypertext, I saw before me the holy grail. Finally – an effective way to tie all the people and event threads together. I did a little poking about and found GeoCities’ free hosting. The price was attractive, so I opened Antietam on the Web there in November 1996…

Your assignment: catch up with some new and fascinating online work about the Maryland Campaign of 1862.

Recent and ongoing now is an excellent discussion about who did what at Sharpsburg on TalkAntietam*. Beginning with fine-grain research Dean Essig is doing for his new wargame–with other genuine experts weighing in–the group is exploring the reality of the “numbers” of the battle. The unintentional but inescapable conclusion here may be that it’s impossible to acurately quantify the battle. See what you find …

from Harper’s Weekly, 24 October 1863 (Son of the South).

Be sure also to catch the two latest feature articles Larry Freiheit has contributed to AotW. At the top is his view of Military Intelligence in Maryland from both General’s perspectives. You’ll find a number of ‘hmmm’ moments in that piece. Larry’s also the author of an analysis of JEB Stuart’s cavalry at and before Sharpsburg, which was posted just before the anniversary last year. Mighty fine.

Also fresh is John David Hoptak’s masterful biographical sketch of Brigadier James Nagle. Ranger Hoptak is highly fluent on Nagle and the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, as you probably know from his blog. Thanks to the Save Historic Antietam Foundation for sharing that work online. When you see (or visit) next, ask John how you can help restore the General’s sword, too.

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* Anyone can read the messages on TalkAntietam, but you’ll have to join the group and be approved to contribute. But that’s easy, trust me. I know the group moderator really well; I can get you in :)