“I Hate Cannons”

Confederate Colonel Stephen D. Lee positioned his batteries to repel Union attacks toward the Dunker Church, and when the attacks came the guns fired solid shot, explosive shells, and canister, tin cans filled with small lead or iron balls that transformed the cannon into a terrible shotgun. A South Carolina surgeon, Captain J.R. Boulware, spoke for soldiers of both armies at Antietam: "I was never so tired of shelling in my life before. I hate cannons." Alexander Gardner, an assistant of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, was at Antietam two days after the battle, and Brady exhibited Gardner's photographs in New York, where the New York Times wrote on October 19, 1862, "The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollections with the coffee. Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrific reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it."

Keedysville, Maryland · United States