The Turning Point

Wednesday, September 10th

September of 1862 was about as dry as the people of the Antietam Valley could remember. The whole summer had been a season of troubling excesses: sustained high heat, oppressive humidity, and drought. Farmers of the valley had fretted all summer, frowned impatiently at the sun and prayed that God would not withdraw his favor utterly; and God had answered them but with rains so infrequent and severe, the hardened earth could barely absorb them. Only now that summer was ending, could those who worked the land begin to breathe easier. The year’s wheat crop was smaller than usual and the corn late, but with prices high and markets plentiful, the year would be good enough.
In Sharpsburg, second largest town in Washington County, there was little to show for the passing season except for parched, crumbling earth and swirling eddies of dust along the web of roads that transected it. Wagons clattering along the dry streets threw up clouds of earth and powdered limestone that choked residents and covered everything with a layer of white film. But though the dryness and heat numbed people’s spirits and frayed their nerves, they prayed less about the weather than they did about the dreadful war tearing the nation apart. It was not going well. After a year and a half of agonizing conflict, the cause of the Union, which most of the people of Sharpsburg embraced, was looking grim. And the longer the war dragged on, the more certain it was that their region, sandwiched as it was between battle-torn Virginia and the so-far-untouched free-states to the north, would be drawn into the maelstrom.
Some in town were already feeling the winds. Only this morning, fifteen-year-old Meg Hamilton had learned that her uncle, Hal Smithson, was planning, on account of the war, to close the Sharpsburg office of his merchandising firm and move the household, consisting of his wife Winnie, his niece Meg, and the Smithson’s female slave Sallie, to Baltimore where he lived most of the time. At first, the news had thrown Meg into a panic, but the hours since had settled her resolve and propelled her into action. She had to find someone who would have her. She could not live under the same roof with her uncle. Things were bad enough with Aunt Winnie. With a firm stride, therefore, she paced along the narrow, dusty streets of Sharpsburg from the Smithson house on West Potomac Street to her teacher’s home on High Street at the southern edge of town. She wasn’t at all sure Mrs. Whitley would be able to help her, and she trembled at the thought of having to ask something so personal, but she had no choice. There were only two families she knew well enough to ask: the Whitleys and the Brandts. The Brandts were a Dunker farm family that lived about a mile outside of town.
As Meg crossed Main Street, she reached into her pocket for a handkerchief to shield her face from the dust churned up by the wagons and horses that passed her. Glancing up, she noticed dark clouds moving in from the west. It crossed her mind that they might bring some relief, but the summer had taught her not to be too optimistic.
The Whitleys’ house was a small white frame structure at the end of High Street. You could not help but notice as you approached that it needed a man’s attention badly. The paint was peeling, the porch steps were loose, and the latticework along the foundation was broken with pieces of it missing. In the narrow side yard, a few dried-out tomato plants holding the last fruit of the season stood surrounded by a multitude of weeds that seemed to flourish even in drought.
Meg had known Helen Whitley and her husband John since they’d moved into town four years earlier and opened a small school out of their home. Grand, Meg’s grandfather and mainstay until his death two years ago, had enrolled her there when she was eleven, mostly because he liked the fact that John Whitley had graduated from Harvard. Mr. Whitley had advertised himself as the master teacher, but in truth his wife Helen did most of the instruction. Mr. Whitley devoted his time to riding a Methodist circuit through the hill country of northwestern Virginia and was gone more than he was home.
What John Whitley “really did”—besides keep his wife with child—was a subject of discussion around town and some negative feeling. Most thought he was mixed up with anti-slavery radicals somehow. He had moved into town about the same time John Brown had rented the Kennedy place in early ‘59, and it was widely known that he subscribed to radical journals like Garrison’s Liberator. Children who attended the school had seen them. After Brown’s raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal in October of that year, people expected Whitley to be charged as a co-conspirator, but though questioned on several occasions, he never was. Of course, that didn’t stop people from talking. When Meg’s uncle got wind of the rumors, he ordered Meg to stop attending the school and refused any longer to pay the tuition. But as he lived in Baltimore, Meg simply ignored him and arranged with the Whitleys to work off her tuition by helping with the teaching. If Meg’s defiance bothered her uncle at all, he never made an issue of it. He could not enforce his will over her from a distance. As for Meg, she was pretty sure he didn’t really care what she did as long as he wasn’t paying. . .