Eastern Excursion 31: Harper's Ferry & Antietam

You could also title this post "Adventures in Potty Training and Other Random Tangents."

HARPER'S FERRY

An aerial of Harper's Ferry taken when the trees actually have leaves.

Although we actually went to Antietam first, for the sake of fluidity I'm going to start with Harper's Ferry. First, we finally made it to West Virginia!! (Lindsey, you are right. It is gorgeous! Melanie, I couldn't help but think of you, too. So I sang Take Me Home Country Road for Sam, thought of your mom crying, and teared up myself. I'm such a sap. :)


Harper's Ferry is most famous for John Brown's raid. John Brown was a white abolitionist who hoped to free the slaves by helping them take up arms against the slave holders. So on October 16, 1859, he took 19 men and attacked the Federal Arsenal in Harper's Ferry in an attempt to seize 100,000 weapons for the army he hoped to assemble. His plan didn't work so well. He failed, was found guilty of treason, and was hanged. But his raid is widely considered one of the huge events that led to the Civil War.

I, too, would like to know what he is doing with his face.

Okay, wanna know something really bizarre about John Brown? Well, the union army made a marching song out of his story. They called it "John Brown's Body." Here are two of the verses:

Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,

While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;

But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,

His soul is marching on.

He captured Harper’s Ferry, with his nineteen men so few,

And frightened "Old Virginny" till she trembled thru and thru;

They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew,

But his soul is marching on.

Does anything about that song strike a familiar chord? It should. Cuz Julia Ward Howe heard this song early in the war, and at the suggestion of a friend, wrote some new lyrics for the tune. Her song? The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Crazy, huh?!

John Brown's Fort

Apparently John Brown is a controversial figure. So says Wikipedia. Which, as we have already established, is the fount of all truth. Sam and I read that after we got home and laughed, mostly because of this conversation he and I had while looking at the John Brown Fort and the plaque there.

Sam: So they're painting him as a freedom fighter.
Me: He was a freedom fighter.
Sam: He was not a freedom fighter. He was a crazy man.
Me: Are you kidding? He was trying to stop slavery!
Sam: By starting a war. It's the same thing as 9-11.
Me: It is not. He was just trying to encourage the blacks to stand up for themselves. They should have. They should have long before that. In the very beginning they should have told the dumb white people, "No way! We're not gonna be your slaves!"
Sam: He was trying to start a guerrilla war. He's like Che Guevara without the people. He took 19 men and tried to attack an armory. That's stupid.
Me: At least he tried. That's more than anyone else did. Anyway, what's wrong with starting a war? I mean, over an issue like that. They should have had a war about it. A hundred years earlier.
Sam: Whatever. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

I have no clue why, or how, they all thought to lift their arms above their heads at the same time!

See Seara's cute sweatshirt? We try to put that on her for a lot of our trips as a little secret code message for other Mormons. (BYU is a private university owned by the church, so you can pretty much assume anyone with a BYU sweatshirt is LDS.) It works, too. When we went to Jamestown, VA, we ran into a family that lives near my sister in Nebraska. This time an LDS family walked by us and we overheard the guy say to his wife, "That looks like a good Mormon family." We chuckled. Later on a couple stopped us because of the sweatshirt and told us they were medical missionaries in the DC mission. Which brings up my love/hate relationship with Johns Hopkins...

TANGENT: Okay, you know Johns Hopkins is pretty much the best medical university in the entire world, right? And that it happens to be in Baltimore, right? Yeah. So we're talking to this couple and they ask what we are doing out here. We say grad school. And they ask the inevitable, we-get-asked-this-every-single-time, question: "Oh, Johns Hopkins?" UGH!!! I mean, anything we say after that will sound stupid. No. No, we don't go to Johns Hopkins. No, Sam is not in medical school. He's an artist. Which we love. And we adore the grad program he is in. But man that sounds like a downer after the JH question. I will admit, though, that I love Johns Hopkins for the fact that brilliant medical people surround me. Like my dear friend Michelle in the ward. She is a child psychologist at JH and specializes in, among other things, potty-traning. Yeah, does that rock or what?! She's given me some brilliant ideas. So I gotta love JH for that!

ANTIETAM

So John Brown's Raid helped lead to the Civil War. Which, of course, leads to the Battle of Antietam. It was fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, and is famous for two reasons.

First, it was the bloodiest single-day battle in US history - 23,000 people died in just one day. To put that into perspective, 2974 people died on September 11th. Nearly eight times that died at Antietam. That's an entire generation of people wiped out.

Then

and now.

Second, up to this point, the northern states were trying to fight to preserve the union without touching slavery. Antietam was the first time the Confederates attacked the Union on Northern soil, and afterward Lincoln implemented a new plan to stop the rebellion: crush the Confederacy by destroying slavery, which was the basis of its economy and society. What was a war to save just the union suddenly became a moral crusade to free the slaves. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation five days after the Battle of Antietam on September 22, and it took effect on January 1, 1863. From that day on, all slaves were considered free. Finally.

Lincoln & McClellan (Major General of the Union Troops)

TANGENT: I know what you are thinking. "Wait a second, aren't your kids in the middle of potty training??" Why, yes. They are. But we don't have much time left here and we have a LOT to do. So we packed extra clothes and ventured out.

The very first thing we learned is that our kids are TERRIFIED of public toilets. Especially the kind that have the extra-loud, gonna-suck-you-in, sensory flushes that randomly go off while you are sitting on them. They were so scared, they were literally shaking.

The second thing we learned is that it takes FOREVER to convince children to go potty in toilets they are scared of. I sat on the ground in front of the toilet (ew) for twenty minutes before I convinced Seara to go the first time. It took another 30 minutes for Elijah. And he only went because he couldn't hold it any longer. No one warned me of that. I'm shaking my fingers at all of you right now.

Third, we learned that other people laugh at you when they overhear you from the other stalls. Especially when they hear things like:

me: Look, mommy sits on the toilet! Good girl mommy!
Elijah: I'm scared! I'm scared of the toilet!
Seara: Good pee-pee in the toilet, mommy!
Sam: Daddy will go pee-pee first. See, daddy goes pee-pee in the toilet!
me: Look! The toilet is flushing! Yay toilet! Bye, bye pee-pee!

Last, we learned that when Elijah has held it in for nearly six hours because he's afraid of the toilet (bless his heart for not wetting his pants), and you really need him to go because you have an hour and a half drive to get home, all you have to do is sit him on the toilet, pour warm water on him, and he lets loose. But watch out, because that much held in for that long will come shooting straight out. As Sam quickly learned. :)