Pacifist Takes Charge Of Battlefield Battle Of Antietam Re-Enactment Directed By Man Who Abhors War

The bloodiest single day in U.S. military history will be re-enacted this month with a cast of 12,000 on a cornfield that was planted and tended so it can be slashed and trampled.

And the man overseeing the noisy, dirty re-creation of the Civil War Battle of Antietam is a pacifist.

“I don’t have any interest in pointing a gun at someone,” said Dennis Frye, president of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites.

Instead of blazing away with the others during the re-enactment Friday through Sept. 14, Frye will be on the sidelines providing play-by-play commentary for up to 50,000 spectators.

“My role is as an educator to help people understand why fellow Americans were killing each other,” he said.

It’s not for lack of passion that Frye declines to participate. He practically bleeds Civil War history, from his ancestral roots in the farmland along Antietam Creek, to his pacifist Dunker faith - a German Baptist sect - to his 20 years as a historian at Harpers Ferry National Park.

“It is my history, my heritage,” Frye said during a tour of a 612-acre field south of Hagerstown. The field is being transformed into a near-replica of the Antietam National Battlefield, 10 miles away. The re-enactment will be held at the field because crowds could damage the historic site.

His goal is to make the public understand the events and decisions that led to the 12-hour clash between 80,000 Union and 40,000 Confederate troops on Sept. 17, 1862. At the end of the battle, which the Union won, 23,100 soldiers were dead, wounded or captured.

“None of us in this society can comprehend the horror of Antietam,” Frye said. “This represents America’s self-inflicted Holocaust.”

The Union victory convinced European rulers not to recognize the Confederate government and gave President Lincoln the political strength to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Ten months after Antietam, Union forces decisively turned back the Confederates at Gettysburg, Pa.

Frye envisions this year’s re-enactment as a production for the ages, “the model re-enactment for all future times.”

Authenticity is paramount. In addition to the 30-acre corn field, the setting for one of three battle scenes, workers excavated a 200-yard ditch and lined both sides with split-rail fences to mimic a sunken road, nicknamed Bloody Lane for the bodies that eventually filled it.

A paved road that bisects the property will be camouflaged, buried under 135 tons of mulch. The encampments of Union and Confederate soldiers will get city water from buried pipelines, but their only fuel will be firewood - 100 cords of it.

If the number of re-enactors exceeds 12,000, as Frye expects, the event will be larger than the 1988 recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg - but not for long. A Gettysburg 135th anniversary re-enactment planned for next July likely will be bigger.