Military History | Maryland State Monument, Antietam — One Hexagon, Two Armies

On Decoration Day, 30 May 1900, President William McKinley came to the east side of the Hagerstown Pike, across from the Dunker Church, and dedicated a monument the State of Maryland had built for soldiers who fought on opposite sides of that field.

Maryland stayed in the Union and sent men to both armies. At Antietam, called Sharpsburg in Confederate accounts, Maryland units were engaged on both sides on 17 September 1862. When the General Assembly took up a state monument in 1898, the governor appointed nine veterans of the battle to build it: six who had served in the Union army and three who had served in the Confederate. Their charge, by the state's own account, covered marking where each Maryland regiment and battery had stood, and choosing the design.

One of the three was Captain William F. Dement. His battery, the First Maryland, is named on a bronze panel inside the monument he helped commission. The Baltimore Light Artillery is there as the second Confederate unit; the Purnell Legion, Wolcott's Battery and the Second, Third and Fifth Maryland Infantry stand alongside them.

The inscription never says what the two sides had disagreed about. It reads: "Erected by the State of Maryland to her Sons, Who on this field offered their lives in maintenance of their Principles." Which principles, the stone leaves open.

McKinley spoke to thousands of veterans, most of his cabinet, and Governor John Walker Smith. The monument is a hexagon of granite under a copper dome, and the panels inside it still carry Confederate and Union units on the same six walls.

📸 Cover: Maryland State Monument, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (public domain).