September 18, 1862, Town of Sharpsburg

I have just come home from Sharpsburg. Since we were given new rifles instead of our old muskets there were a lot more deaths in the battlefield. Both sides of the battle field had high ground advantages where they put over 500 cannons. These cannons were constantly firing which made the battleground more dangerous. The other troops call this artillery hell. I heard it was hard to fire the cannons because it took more than 8 men and there were seven different models. In general the cannons were called smoothbores. The most dangerous and fastest ones were the 1841 model guns which we had none of, the Confederates had around 50 of them. During the battle which was only twenty four hours in total, I could see my comrades falling on either side of me, as you can imagine this was very unsettling. To keep myself from going crazy, I tried to think about coming home to my family which helped me keep my sanity. I guess the fighting could be worth it if President Linoln ends up issuing the Emancipation Proclamation but otherwise we have lost too many soldiers. 

I went to the town of Sharpsburg after the battle because there was some rioting. There was nothing violent until some boys started throwing rocks at us and the crowds followed after. We just had to slightly adjust our guns and the crowd stopped. Sometimes I wonder if all of this death is really necessary, which also makes me ask what does war accomplish? I would say humans should really just talk about their disagreements instead of fighting about them and killing hundreds of thousands of people, but in reality there is never going to be world peace, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to prevent war from happening.