Second Lieutenant Charles Nelson Warner

Battery D, Second Artillery

Goat of the Class of 1862

September 17, 1862, at Antietam became the bloodiest single day of the war. Warner wrote his sister Emma, “I have taken part in the most destructive battle of the war and we are victorious.”

Warner, then part of the First Division, was miles away at Crampton’s Pass when battle was joined. His unit moved quickly towards the sound of the guns. They arrived on the field at noon, taking a position in the center of the Union line, near Dunkard Church on the Hagerstown and Sharpsburg Turnpike, relieving part of the right flank of Sumner’s II Corps. There Battery D engaged in an artillery duel until sundown.

“We were under a very warm fire for several hours from the enemy’s artillery and sharpshooters, and were very fortunate that we had so few casualties,” Warner wrote. Two men were wounded by sniper fire, and two horses killed. “You cannot imagine what horrid noises fall on the ear on the battlefield. I do not speak of the groans of the wounded, I heard much of that, but that being caused by the air being filled with the different kinds of missiles of destruction. The whistle of bullets, explosion of shells, roar of artillery, crackling of musketry almost like a pack of fire-crackers, all going off at once, when two hostile lines come together, is indescribable.” The next day was mostly quiet, and Warner saw only some skirmishing. Soon a truce was declared and both sides tended to the wounded and buried the dead.

On September 19 Warner’s unit had Reveille at three in the morning, and readied to renew the contest. They moved into position before daylight; but Union pickets reported that the enemy had left. Later Warner moved across the field, noticing bodies “corded up like wood” for burial. “It was so dark I could see very little,” he wrote, “but the stench arising from the dead bodies was intolerable.”

In 2006 Charles N. Warner's family donated his class ring to the USMA library, the sole example of an 1862 ring in the library collection. Warner's great great great granddaughter is attending the Academy as a member of the Class of 2009.

Read Charles N. Warner's War Diaries 1862-1865, transcribed and with photos included by his great great grandson James R. Lafferty, Jr., used here by permission.

Please send comments to Author@LastInTheirClass.com