During the Civil War, the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), near the quiet little town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, resulted in the bloodiest single day in American history. The 22,720 casualties included 3,650 dead and 1,770 missing in action. In addition, at least one out of seven of the 17,300 wounded later died.

Strategically, it was considered enough of a victory for the North to provide President Abraham Lincoln the political cover he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, casting the Civil War as a conflict over slavery and thus preventing England and France from intervening or recognizing the Confederacy as a separate country. But the ordinary people who lived in the area were now filled with fear, confusion and anguish, and they lived in the midst of human corpses rotting in the fields alongside dead animals, smashed carts and ruined farm machinery.

After the tumult died away, two things were apparent: First, the armies had taken away most of the food they hadn’t already destroyed or eaten. Second, they’d left behind thousands of wounded who desperately needed care, without any supplies to care for them.

In the midst of this economic crisis, what choices would people make? Some chose shady business practices. Prices soared. Exorbitant prices were charged for the most ordinary things — a dollar a pound for butter, for instance, or 50 cents for six small cakes.

But others gave food away despite scarcity. They helped bury the dead — and later helped to dig up those corpses for grieving relatives who arrived to carry the bodies of their loved ones home. And at tremendous cost to themselves, the local residents fed, nursed and cared for absolute strangers.

Churches and homes became hospitals, as ordinary folks tended those horribly wounded, scarred and marred by the battle, caring for both their physical and spiritual needs.

A month before he died of his wounds, for instance, a wounded Georgian named Benjamin Prather wrote home about the care he received: “The Dunkard preacher Pastor Emmanuel Silfer sees us every day. He loaned me his pen and ink. Mrs. Amanda Silfer, the pastor’s wife, brings me her Bible every morning.”

This was a typical example of the way the community, torn between sympathies toward North and South, found unity in Christian service.

—See Kathleen Ernst, Too Afraid To Cry (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1999), 181–182.