Hoosier Regiments in Stone: The Indiana Monuments at Gettysburg and Antietam

In October 1885, a party of middle-aged men traveled from Indiana to a meadow in Pennsylvania to look at a piece of granite. The meadow was near Spangler’s Spring, on the southeastern edge of the Gettysburg battlefield. The granite was a new monument to the 27th Indiana Infantry, and the men were the regiment’s survivors — veterans who, twenty-two years earlier, had crossed that exact ground under fire.

The monument they had come to dedicate stands today on Colgrove Avenue, a battlefield road that carries the name of the regiment’s wartime colonel, Silas Colgrove. Ninety yards north of the monument is a smaller marker. It shows the point of the regiment’s farthest advance — the place where the charge of July 3, 1863, stopped.

This is the second post in the Hoosier Union History series’ Memorial Day weekend arc. The first looked at the largest Indiana monument of all, the shaft at the center of Indianapolis. This one looks at the smaller stones — the ones the regiments placed themselves, on the fields where they had fought — and at how long it took the state to follow them there.

The stone at Spangler’s Spring

Early on the morning of July 3, 1863, the third day at Gettysburg, the 27th Indiana and the 2nd Massachusetts were ordered to attack Confederate troops holding the low ground near Spangler’s Spring, at the southern end of the Culp’s Hill fighting. The order sent the two regiments across open meadow against an enemy under cover. It went badly. The 27th Indiana carried roughly 339 officers and men into the attack; about 110 of them — close to a third of the regiment — were killed, wounded, captured, or missing in a matter of minutes.

The 27th Indiana did not attack alone. The order put two regiments into the meadow in sequence — the 2nd Massachusetts in front, the 27th Indiana behind it — and both were thrown back with heavy loss: by the figures kept for that action, roughly 43 percent of the Massachusetts men were down, and roughly 32 percent of the Hoosiers. The charge across Spangler’s Meadow is remembered now as one of the costliest small actions of the third day — an attack that gained little and was paid for at the price of nearly a third of a regiment.

The monument the survivors dedicated in 1885 marks the regiment’s line. The advance marker ninety yards forward marks the high-water line of the charge. Between the two stones lies the ground the regiment gained, and it is not much ground. A visitor who walks from the monument to the marker is walking the distance the 27th Indiana bought with a third of its strength.

The stone in the Cornfield

The same regiment has a second monument, on a second field. The 27th Indiana fought at Antietam on September 17, 1862 — nine months before Gettysburg, in the regiment’s first great battle. Readers of Post 9 of this series know the regiment’s connection to that campaign: it was two soldiers of the 27th Indiana who, four days before the battle, found the copy of Lee’s Special Orders, No. 191 that history calls the Lost Order. Four days later the regiment was carried into the fighting around the Cornfield, the deadliest few acres of the deadliest single day in American history.

At Antietam the 27th Indiana belonged to the division of Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, the Twelfth Corps formation it had marched with through Maryland. The division pushed out of the East Woods toward the Confederate units defending the Cornfield, and it was in that advance that the regiment took its loss. The Antietam monument’s inscription places the regiment’s line of battle several hundred yards from the stone itself — the marker, like the one at Spangler’s Spring, separating where the regiment formed up from where it fought.

The regiment’s Antietam monument stands on Cornfield Avenue. It was dedicated on September 17, 1910 — the forty-eighth anniversary of the battle, and twenty-five years after the Gettysburg stone. It is cut from Barre granite. Its inscription records the arithmetic without softening it: the 27th Indiana, under Colonel Silas Colgrove, went into action with 440 men, and 209 of them were killed and wounded. Nearly half the regiment, carved into the face of the stone, on the road named for the field it died on.

The Antietam monument did not stand alone. It was one of a set: the Indiana Antietam Monument Commission oversaw monuments to the Indiana regiments engaged on that field — five of them — and published a formal report, Indiana at Antietam, recording the dedication ceremonies and the histories of the regiments. At Antietam, the state and the survivors did the work together.

Why a regiment marks its own ground

The years that produced these stones — roughly the 1880s through the 1910s — were the years the Union’s veterans were entering old age. The Grand Army of the Republic was at its largest. The men who had fought the war understood that they would not always be present to tell what had happened on a given acre, and they set about fixing the record in granite while they still could. Returning to a battlefield to dedicate a monument was, for a veteran, both a reunion and an act of testimony.

The dedications themselves were events. A regiment’s survivors would travel together, often by rail, to the field; there would be speeches, a roll of the dead read aloud, and the unveiling of the stone. For many of the men it was the first time they had stood on that ground since the battle. The monument was the occasion, but the gathering was the point — a chance for the survivors to be on the field together once more while enough of them were still living to fill a railcar.

A regimental monument is a different kind of object from the monument at the center of Indianapolis. The capital monument speaks for the whole. The regimental stone speaks for one regiment, on one piece of ground, and it carries the count. It says which unit stood here, what it was ordered to do, and how many of its men did not walk off the field. It is remembrance at the scale of the company roster rather than the scale of the state.

The state comes last

The regiments did not wait for Indiana to act. The 27th Indiana’s veterans placed their Gettysburg stone in 1885, and the state’s Antietam commission did its work in 1910. But a state monument — a single memorial speaking for Indiana as a whole — was a separate project, and at Gettysburg it was an astonishingly slow one.

Indiana did not place a state monument at Gettysburg until 1971. It was built the previous autumn by a Gettysburg monument firm, of Barre granite and Bedford limestone quarried in Indiana, and it was dedicated on July 1, 1971 — one hundred and eight years, almost to the day, after the battle began. By then every Hoosier who had fought at Gettysburg was long dead. The regimental veterans had not waited for the state. They had set their own stone in 1885 and left the state to catch up when it would.

That gap — 1885 for the regiment, 1971 for the state — is worth sitting with. The official, institutional act of memory came nearly a century after the men who fought were able to see it. The act that came in time, the one the survivors themselves attended, was the regimental one.

The count on the stone

The Hoosier Union History series follows Indiana’s citizen-soldiers into the war and records what their service cost. The regimental monument is the form of remembrance built to carry that cost in figures: 339 engaged and 110 down at Spangler’s Spring; 440 engaged and 209 down in the Cornfield. The stones do not generalize. They name the regiment, the ground, and the number, and they leave the number where weather and visitors will read it for as long as the granite lasts.

The next post in this weekend’s arc follows Indiana’s Union dead home from the battlefields — to the national cemetery in Indianapolis, where the soldiers who died in the state’s own hospitals and camps were gathered and given individual graves. The battlefield stone counts the dead. The cemetery names them. The dead earn the page.

Sources

• Antietam National Battlefield, National Park Service — 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Monument and the Indiana State Monument.
• Indiana at Antietam: Report of the Indiana Antietam Monument Commission — dedication ceremonies and regimental histories, 1911.
• Gettysburg National Military Park, National Park Service — 27th Indiana monuments and the Indiana State Memorial.
• Edmund R. Brown, The Twenty-seventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1899) — regimental history written by a member of the regiment.
• U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies — Gettysburg and Antietam returns.
• This series, Post 9 — “Three Cigars and a Lost Order: How the 27th Indiana Found Lee’s Battle Plan,” and Posts 1 through 10, at the blog index.