Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  In the predawn hours of October 21, with Colonel Devens in command, the raiding party crossed the hundred yards of swift-running river between the island and Ball’s Bluff in three small boats, carrying about thirty men at a time, which took several hours. Once across they made the steep ascent unopposed. But when they came out of the woods onto the grassy field, they saw that the thirty or so Confederate tents the scouting party had reported were just trees in an apple orchard. Devens sent a dispatch to Stone asking for new orders, deployed his men in the tree line on the southern end of the field, and sent a scouting party toward Leesburg. A hundred men of the 20th had also crossed the river, with Colonel Lee in command, and were moving up the bluff.

  After reading Devens’s dispatch, Stone instructed Colonel Edward D. Baker, commander of the 1st California, a sitting U.S. senator, and close friend of President Lincoln, to assume command of the force at Ball’s Bluff. As he rode north, Baker encountered a Union lieutenant on his way to report that soldiers had stumbled upon pickets from the 17th Mississippi, a skirmish had ensued, and the small force of Federals in Virginia were now believed to be in trouble. The gunfire had alerted Confederate Brigadier General Nathan G. “Shanks” Evans in Leesburg that the enemy was on his side of the river. He sent a regiment and three troops of cavalry to meet them. Baker began ferrying the rest of the 15th and 20th and the Californians across the river as more skirmishing was heard on the bluff.

  By three o’clock most of General Evans’s brigade was on the scene, deployed along the west tree line and in the south and north woods. He ordered a general attack, planning to envelop the Federals. The 15th Massachusetts was deployed in a crowded front line along the northern tree line. Company H of the 20th, Pen Hallowell’s company, anchored the right flank. It took the hardest hit in the early fighting; the company’s commander was seriously wounded, and Hallowell assumed command. When the main action began the 20th was lying bunched tightly together near the edge of the bluff, their backs to the river. Company A, Holmes’s company, formed the center of the line. Bartlett’s Company I was on the right.

  The Confederates had the advantage in numbers, position, and experience. The inexperience of the Federals quickly showed; their firing was random and often misdirected. The rebels’ fire was concentrated, low, and deadly. The Union artillery hadn’t any canister, only shells, which were nearly useless on such a small battlefield. But the Federals’ courage was evident as well. The fire was so fierce it’s a wonder such green troops, most of them never tried in battle, didn’t break in the first bloody exchange. As the battle lengthened and casualties mounted, the Federals steadied somewhat, but their situation was hopeless. An hour and a half into the battle, Colonel Baker, who had shown immense courage, if not good sense, by constantly exposing himself to enemy fire, was shot in the head by a Confederate pistol at close range. When he struggled to his feet a volley of musket fire from the woods cut him down for good.

  Around the time Baker fell, Colonel Lee ordered the reserve companies of the 20th to move forward. As soon as Holmes stood up a spent ball struck his stomach and knocked him down. Lee ordered him to the rear, but Holmes, realizing he was not seriously wounded, drew his sword and returned to the front. A second shot hit him in the chest. “I felt as if a horse had kicked me,” he wrote. He was taken to the rear and laid down near the body of “poor Sergt Merchant . . . shot through the head and covered with blood.”

  Holmes started to spit up blood and remembered the bottle of laudanum his father had given him; he resolved to drink it when the pain became intolerable rather than suffer an agonizing death. He was carried down the bluff and ferried across the river with the other wounded to a field hospital on Harrison Island. The next morning he asked a surgeon if he would recover. “You may recover,” came the reply. Holmes explained that he had bled “at the mouth” very freely through the night. “That means the chances are against me, doesn’t it?” “Yes,” the surgeon agreed, “the chances are against you.”

  The Federal lines contracted as their losses increased, making their encirclement more likely. A doomed if valiant attempt to cut their way through Confederate lines failed and demoralized the survivors. When the Confederates fixed bayonets and charged the weakened lines, some of the Union soldiers simply leaped off the edge of the bluff or tumbled down it onto the heads of soldiers making their way down the path in an orderly retreat. Those who reached the bank alive were pinned down by the rebels’ fire while they waited for the wounded to be evacuated.

  Most of the officers, many as inexperienced as their soldiers, kept their composure. None abandoned their men. Some, including Hallowell, bravely led skirmish lines to keep the Confederates at bay as the shattered Union forces tried to get back across the river. But their boats were too few and too small. Men tried to swim while rebels fired at them, and many drowned in the swift current. Others swarmed and overturned boats with the same result. Over five hundred Federals surrendered on the bank; over two hundred were killed and a roughly equal number wounded. The “butcher’s bill” for the 20th, as Holmes called it, was forty killed and over forty wounded. Of the twenty-two officers of the 20th who fought at Ball’s Bluff, thirteen were killed or seriously wounded. Colonel Lee and Major Paul Revere and his brother, the surgeon Edward Revere, were taken prisoner. It was the worst Union defeat since Bull Run, a poorly planned and ill-informed assault, broken up and routed by an enemy who knew his business better than they did—and the newspapers reported it that way. But on that bloody bank the officers and men of the 20th Massachusetts forged bonds of respect and trust that would see them through other, much worse battles in the years ahead.

  Holmes seems to have drifted in and out of consciousness. He heard someone remark about the soldier lying next to him, “He was a beautiful boy,” and he knew it must be his cousin and classmate, Willy Putnam. Putnam had been shot in the stomach and, knowing the wound was mortal, had refused the surgeon’s assistance. He lingered a day in great pain.

  Holmes stopped a surgeon from another regiment, gave him his address, and asked him, in the event of his death, to write his parents and tell them he had done his duty. “I was very anxious they know that,” he recalled. When he confided that he intended to take a fatal dose of laudanum, the surgeon appears to have given him a nonlethal dose instead and confiscated the bottle. Holmes claimed his most vivid memory of the experience was fearing he was “en route for Hell” and debating with himself whether he should renounce his agnosticism. He decided at length that it would be cowardly to do other than “take a leap in the dark.” Eventually he was ferried to the Maryland side of the river and taken by ambulance to the regimental hospital, where a “cockeyed Dutchman . . . bound me with an infernal bandage . . . having first rammed plugs of lint into the holes . . . and told me I should live.”

  Two days later he scrawled a letter to his mother: “Here I am flat on my back after our first engagement—wounded but pretty comfortable—I can’t write an account now but I felt and acted very cool and did my duty I am sure.”

  BY THE END OF the month the young combat veteran was at home in Boston recuperating from his wounds. He was visited and feted by the city’s elite, enjoyed pleasant holidays, and reportedly held spellbound the young ladies for whom he recounted his brush with death at Ball’s Bluff. As he grew stronger, the nights grew even longer for the hero of the hour. His social calendar was so crowded his physician wondered if he wouldn’t be better off back with the regiment. He was well enough to rejoin the 20th just after New Year’s, but recruiting duties kept him in Massachusetts until March.

  Holmes returned to Poolesville late that month in time to join the Peninsular Campaign, McClellan’s four-month failed attempt to slog his way from the tip of the Virginia peninsula through swampy low country to Richmond, the Confederate capital. It was a memorable failure for a number of reasons, not the least of which were the high cost in dead and wounded, McClellan’s indecisiveness, and Johnston’s wound at the Battle of Seven Pines (
also known as the Battle of Fair Oaks), which resulted in the transfer of command of the Army of Northern Virginia to Robert E. Lee.

  By the end of May 1862, after more than two months of excruciatingly slow progress, the Army of the Potomac was finally closing in on the rebel capital. McClellan had deployed his five corps north and south of the Chickahominy River just six miles from Richmond. Johnston, usually as cautious a commander as McClellan, decided to forestall a siege by attacking the two corps nearest his lines, south of the Chickahominy. Had it been better executed the attack might have resulted in the biggest northern disaster of the war to date. As it turned out, the battle, fought over two days, May 31 and June 1, was inconclusive. The Confederates suffered somewhat higher casualties and failed to destroy McClellan’s two isolated corps, but the attack did stop the Union advance on Richmond.

  It was also one of the bloodiest battles of the war to date, second only to Shiloh. The Federals lost more than five thousand killed and wounded; the rebels more than six thousand. The butcher’s bill shook McClellan’s confidence, but his curious combination of insecurity and vanity always made him as prone to doubts as he was to self-aggrandizement.

  It seemed to also affect the temperament of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the idealistic young veteran of Ball’s Bluff and romantic hero of Boston salons. War was making him grimmer, wearier, and fatalistic. The 20th had fought well at Seven Pines, and Holmes had distinguished himself in his first battlefield command. He had recently been promoted to captain and given command of Company G. The company repulsed an attack at Seven Pines and drove the surviving enemy from the field. The day after the battle he sent his parents a brief account. In it he mentioned the “indifference one gets to look on the dead bodies in gray clothes wh. lie all around. . . . As you go through the woods you stumble constantly, and, if after dark, as last night on picket, perhaps tread on the swollen bodies already fly blown and decaying, of men shot in the head back and bowels.” He closed the letter with the following request: “If I am killed you will find a Mem. [sic] on the back of a picture I carry wh. please attend to. I must sleep a few minutes I can hardly keep my eyelids raised.”

  General Lee spent several weeks after Seven Pines reorganizing the Army of Northern Virginia and planning a new offensive. The result was the Seven Days Battle, six battles over seven days, which drove the Union Army away from Richmond, effectively ending the campaign. Union casualties in the campaign approached twenty thousand. Included among the dead was James Jackson Lowell, Holmes’s cousin.

  Lincoln ordered the army’s return to Washington in August. Confederate General Stonewall Jackson was marching north, threatening the Federal capital. The Army of Northern Virginia would inflict a second defeat on the Federals at Bull Run. Then Lee would launch his first invasion of the North, and McClellan would have to chase him.

  In the predawn hours of September 17, Holmes sent his parents a letter to let them know another battle was imminent:

  It’s rank folly pulling a long mug every time one may fight or may be killed. Very probably we shall in a few days and if we do why I shall go into it not trying to shirk responsibility of my past life by a sort of death bed abjuration—I have lived on the track on which I expect to continue traveling if I get through—hoping always that though it may wind it will bring me up the hill once more with the deepest love.

  HE GAVE HIS ADDRESS as “Beyond Boonsburg [Boonsboro].” The 20th was encamped for the night on a hill a few miles southwest of the little Maryland village and just east of a creek called Antietam. He noted that the regiment had “not been in any recent fight” but “may fight today,” and assured his parents they would “lick ’em if we do.” He would write them again the very next day.

  The Battle of Antietam was really three battles fought in one long day along a five-mile front, beginning at a stand of oak called the North Woods and ending at Burnside Bridge to the south. McClellan had nearly twice the numbers Lee had at Antietam, six infantry corps to Lee’s two. But as usual he feared he was at a disadvantage. The 20th Massachusetts was assigned to Major General Edwin Sumner’s II Corps, as it had been during the Peninsular Campaign, and formed part of a brigade commanded by Brigadier General Napoleon J. T. Dana. It was in reserve when the Battle of Antietam began around 5:30 in the morning with an attack on Stonewall Jackson’s corps on the Confederate left flank by General Joseph Hooker’s I Corps, with Brigadier General Joseph Mansfield’s XII Corps in support. Federals streamed out of the North Woods into a cornfield and after an intense artillery exchange met Confederate General John Hood’s division. Confederates and Federals fought bayonet to bayonet, hand to hand in hellish combat. Possession of the Cornfield changed hands over a dozen times.

  A little after seven o’clock McClellan, watching the battle from his headquarters a mile away, concluded that Hooker and Mansfield were in trouble. I Corps had been repulsed and XII Corps looked as if it were about to be overrun. Hooker had been wounded, and Mansfield would be too, mortally. McClellan ordered General Sumner to send two of his three divisions to woods west of the Cornfield. They moved in three columns, with General Dana’s 3rd Brigade and 20th Massachusetts in the center, across Antietam and to the East Woods, where the columns formed into three battle lines crowded close together. Dana’s brigade formed the second line, with the 20th on the left flank.

  The 20th marched from the East Woods at the quick step, across a creek, through an open field in the teeth of rebel artillery fire, down a hill to the Hagerstown Pike, past the Dunker Church to the Cornfield. Wounded soldiers from I and XII Corps streamed past them, heading for the rear with a good number of able-bodied soldiers accompanying them. At the Cornfield they beheld the wreckage of the morning: dead and wounded littered the field, bodies intact and in pieces. The heaviest Confederate artillery fire of the morning commenced with canister and shell. Sumner had rashly pressed his lines so closely together—at some points only fifty feet or less separated them—that the barrage killed nearly as many in the second and third lines as in the first. At around nine o’clock the Federals reached the West Woods and charged through them.

  The 20th halted near the western edge of the woods as the brigade battle lines tried to disentangle themselves. The front line climbed over a fence and into a field where several hundred rebel infantry and artillery batteries were waiting. The second and third lines could only watch the firestorm in their front even though they were being hit as well. They couldn’t return fire without hitting the Massachusetts men in their front. Suddenly they began to take fire from their left and rear. Parts of five Confederate brigades had enveloped the Union lines unnoticed. Holmes was looking toward the action in the front when an Irish soldier standing next to him took a knee and started firing to the rear. Holmes called him a “damn fool” and struck him with the flat of his sword before realizing they were being shot at from behind.

  Incessant fire poured down on the Federals from three sides. Survivors would remember the intensity of the fire and the immediate devastation it caused as the worst of the war. Some regiments broke instantly. Green regiments misdirected their fire on other Union soldiers. The 20th Massachusetts held its ground in the best order it could manage until Sumner ordered them to retreat. Colonel Palfrey, the regiment’s second-in-command, was wounded, as was Lieutenant Colonel Revere, again. Pen Hallowell’s left arm was shattered. Edward Revere, operating on a wounded soldier in the field, found himself suddenly at the front as the retreating Federals streamed past him; he was shot and killed. General Dana was wounded in the left leg as he tried to lead his brigade to safety and turned over his command to one of his regimental colonels. Most of the 20th emerged from the northern end of the West Woods in good order, regrouped, joined fresh reinforcements, and turned to face the pursuing Confederates. Federal artillery eventually managed to push the rebels back, and with that, the battle in the north at Antietam would end.

  As soon as the order to retreat had been given, Holmes began to run with his company to the
rear. A bullet struck him in the back of the neck, missed arteries and spine, exited the front of his throat, and knocked him unconscious. At some point he managed to get on his feet and walk several hundred yards to a log cabin known as the Nicodemus House, where Federal wounded had taken refuge. There he found his friend Hallowell and took a place beside him on the floor. Expecting he would die, he tore a piece of paper from his notebook and scribbled, “I am Captain O. W. Holmes 20th Mass. Son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D. Boston.” Then he waited for whatever would come.

  Rebels came. Hallowell recounted in his memoir their arrival at the Nicodemus House as they advanced:

  The first Confederate to make his appearance put his head through the window and said: “Yankee?” “Yes.” “Would you like some water?” A wounded man always wants some water. He off with his canteen, threw it in the room, and then resumed his place in the skirmish line and his work of shooting retreating Yankees. In about fifteen minutes that good-hearted fellow came back to the window all out of breath, saying, “Hurry up there! Hand me my canteen! I’m on the double-quick myself now!” Someone twirled the canteen to him and away he went.

  As the fighting moved elsewhere, a Union surgeon entered the house, briefly examined Holmes, told him the wound wasn’t fatal, and made a splint for Hallowell’s broken arm. Late in the afternoon both men were taken by ambulance to a Union hospital in the nearby town of Keedysville. Dana’s brigade quartermaster, Captain William Le Duc, had taken charge of the wounded and called a surgeon over to attend to Holmes. But the busy physician refused, saying, “I’ve no time to waste on dead men.” Le Duc asked what he could do for Holmes. The surgeon told him to clean off the blood, plug the hole with lint, and give him an opium pill. Le Duc did as instructed and managed to get Holmes out of the crowded hospital tent and into a private home.