Maj. John H. Brinton and the Aftermath of the Battle of Antietam

         Major John H. Brinton carries a name that sounds like it should be associated with some great battle in the Civil War (perhaps “Brinton’s Ambush”, or ‘Brinton’s Charge”), some act of heroism that would become synonymous with the battlefield on which it was performed, as Pickett and Gettysburg are associated. Brinton was no fighting man, however; he was a surgeon. After reading his memoir, I am inclined to call him, as opposed to “heroic”, both stuffy and pompous, but most certainly interesting. Born in Philadelphia in 1832, Brinton attained his medical license in 1852, and when war broke out in 1860, Brinton joined the United States Volunteers as a surgeon. In his time as a field doctor, he served directly under the Surgeon General of the United States, dictated the official manner in which all field hospitals in the Union army would be constructed, and became a personal friend (and physician) to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. While much of his time on the battlefield was spent organizing hospitals, he was directly involved in the aftermath of the battle of Antietam, and this is the portion of his memoir that I have selected for review.

                Antietam was one of the most ferocious battles of the Civil War, and while Brinton was in Washington during the actual fighting, he did hear about the coming fight, and when Gen. McClellan was reinstated as commander prior to the battle, Brinton noted that he (McClellan) was received by the soldiers with the “greatest enthusiasm”, and that the Army of the Potomac (which he described as “almost disintegrated”) “crystallized into…an efficient force” once more. He was ordered “with all due haste” to make way to the battlefield by the Surgeon General the day after Lee’s retreat. His mission   was not merely to perform surgery on wounded Union soldiers; he was also commanded to determine “the loss (of life) after a battle”, i.e the factual death toll which had been suffered by the Army of the Potomac. Brinton wrote that often, Union Generals would falsely lower their reported casualties, to avoid a reprimand from the Secretary of War. Brinton indicated that such a command was one of the primary responsibilities of surgeons during the war, and was his true purpose for being dispatched to the battlefield.

                Upon arriving at Antietam on the 19^th of September, Brinton noted the devastation which had been caused by the fighting, finding the southern-most stone bridge over the Antietam creek completely destroyed (this was the bridge over which Gen. Burnside had fought the entirety of the battle).  The Surgeon General met Brinton at the battlefield, and he was dispatched to inspect every hospital at Antietam (which he describes as “very many”). He described the care of the wounded soldiers, who “covered the fields”, as excellent, and commented that those casualties who had been treated in the established battlefield hospitals had fared “far better” than those who had been sent to the city hospitals. He goes on, at length, to describe the treatment of the wounded; they were kept in small groups, often in tents (or ripped up fencing boards) in the open air, and the gathering of food and water was left as the responsibility of the least wounded of the group. Men who were dependent on others would be (eventually) evacuated to larger, more established and organized “field hospitals” (which Brinton himself had designed).

                This memoir (in particular this portion I have decided to use) of Maj. Brinton’s stay in the Antietam area after the battle is both extremely informative and often disturbing. In the most casual of ways, Maj. Brinton described the corpses which lay in the corn field at Antietam, writing with a detached, doctorial air, at times recounting a particular corpse which had landed in a peculiar manner (and what had most likely caused this). Several facts can be learned from this memoir: it reinforces the fact that General McClellan, despite being viewed in the modern era as a sort of “bungler”, was a powerful motivational force for the soldiers under his command. It also establishes some of the makeup of Union hospitals, and it mentions that the fleeing Confederates had left their own surgeons behind to care for the Rebel wounded (which is mentioned in other chapters, which I certainly did not know). By Brinton’s own description, the battlefield was awash with blood. Finally, while McClellan’s refusal to pursue Lee after the battle is widely regarded as  one of the great mistakes of the war, Brinton wrote that the army “might have broken” if they had been forced to pursue, and wrote with secondhand knowledge that McClellan had been ordered by General Halleck not to pursue the fleeing confederates. Major John Brinton was a hero, certainly, but one of a different sort. 

Brinton, John Hill. Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Major and Surgeon U.S.V., 1861-1865. New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1914. Obtained as Microfilm.