Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  The two men reached Hagerstown on September 11, having proceeded via Turner’s Gap in South Mountain, where Lee set his troops an example of how he expected them to behave in enemy territory by lifting his hat in salute to a woman who sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” “as he rode through the town.”*

  Despite Lee’s courteous gesture, the good citizens of Hagerstown were as unwilling as those of Frederick to supply the Confederate army (or to accept Confederate dollars for their goods). There was no news from Jackson that Harpers Ferry had fallen; moreover, Lee received the unwelcome news from Stuart that his cavalry scouts had reported Federal troops advancing in force on Frederick, perhaps as many as 90,000. This was the last thing Lee expected—he had been confident that McClellan would be slow and cautious, but instead he was moving rapidly, indeed he was hard on the heels of Lee’s army, not more than ten miles from Turner’s Gap, which was held loosely by D. H. Hill’s division and Stuart’s cavalry. Lee’s decision to divide his army now began to create a dangerous problem. If McClellan reached Crampton’s Gap, only a few miles south of Turner’s Gap, he could prevent Jackson’s three columns now converging on Harpers Ferry from any chance of rejoining the rest of Lee’s army.

  Overnight, Lee’s position changed from that of a general advancing into Pennsylvania with a new line of communication opening up via Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry to that of a general with an enemy behind him and no line of communication at all. Rather than advancing into Pennsylvania, Lee now faced the possibility that he might have to turn his scattered army around and retrace his steps.

  At this moment of crisis Lee and Longstreet had a major disagreement. Called to Lee’s tent on the night of September 13, Longstreet “found him over his map.” Lee explained the situation briefly and asked for Longstreet’s opinion. Longstreet proposed joining his forces with those of D. H. Hill and taking up a position behind Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg, where the whole army could be concentrated. Longstreet recalled in his memoirs that Lee still suffered from “the hallucination that McClellan was not capable of serious work,” and wanted Longstreet to march at daylight the next morning to join with D. H. Hill and defend Turner’s Gap. Given the lateness of the hour Longstreet doubted that his men would be ready to march at daybreak and thought that by the time they got to Turner’s Gap they would be too tired to defend it, even if they reached it in time. Lee politely rejected this advice, and ordered Longstreet to proceed; but Longstreet’s “mind was so disturbed” that he could not rest, so he rose, “made a light,” and sat down to write a letter to Lee, once again urging him to concentrate the army at Sharpsburg. Lee ignored this letter, and did not change his plan.

  This was not merely a difference of opinion about tactics, as Longstreet supposed, but a much larger question of strategy. If Lee could turn and defeat the enemy at Turner’s Gap, he could continue on to the northwest toward Chambersburg, Carlisle, and Harrisburg. If Lee gathered his army at Sharpsburg, as Longstreet wanted him to do, he would have to move south, virtually to the Potomac, with the possibility that McClellan might surround him there, or even make it necessary for him to cross the Potomac back into Virginia—exactly what Lee most wanted to avoid. Following Longstreet’s advice would bring to an end the invasion of the North, and with it the chance of threatening one or more of its major cities and enabling the Confederacy to negotiate peace on acceptable terms. Lee had a larger, brighter vision in mind than Longstreet did, and believed he was on the verge of securing it.

  Lee may have allowed himself to see, in his mind’s eye, the long gray columns capturing Harrisburg and marching on to Baltimore or Washington, battle flags unfurled, but when Longstreet looked at the map he thought it would be more prudent to concentrate the army at Sharpsburg and let McClellan attack it there on ground of Lee’s own choosing.

  Whatever Lee hoped, at this point, half his troops were twenty miles away near Harpers Ferry, and Lee remained “in the darkest uncertainty” about what had become of them. Nor, of course could he possibly have guessed that McClellan had read his order of September 9. Von Clausewitz’s “fog of war” has never been thicker than “at daylight” on the morning of September 14 when Lee and Longstreet rode off—possibly Lee’s first time back in the saddle on Traveller since his accident*—toward South Mountain. They did not get very far before they received “a dispatch” from D. H. Hill that he urgently needed reinforcements. He had been holding Turner’s Gap since the early morning against overwhelming numbers of Federal troops—two Confederate brigades against eight Federal. Longstreet hurried to send four of his understrength brigades to support Hill. Longstreet respected Lee too much to have said the equivalent of “I told you so,” but years later that was certainly on his mind when he came to write his memoirs. As for Lee, he was informed that McClellan had a copy of order No. 191 by ten o’clock that morning. A Confederate sympathizer had been present at McClellan’s headquarters while it was being discussed. At last Lee understood why McClellan was moving at such an uncharacteristically rapid pace. In response to this, Lee moved as many brigades as he could toward Turner’s Gap, and a growing battle raged there from noon until darkness, restrained only by the cautiousness of the Union’s Major General Burnside—McLaws—not surprising in view of McClellan’s belief that Lee had at least 120,000 men on the far side of South Mountain.

  The Battle of South Mountain cost both sides nearly 2,000 casualties, and by the end of the day it was clear to Lee that the Union attack would be renewed again in the morning; that he could not hold Turner’s Gap, or indeed any of the other gaps in South Mountain; and that he also risked losing Major General Lafayette McLaws’s division, which was holding Maryland Heights on the north side of the Potomac as part of Jackson’s forces besieging Harpers Ferry. Lee now faced a very real risk that the Army of Northern Virginia could be destroyed piecemeal the next day. He decided that he had no option but to order a retreat to Sharpsburg, where he could collect the army, cross the Potomac back to Virginia, and live to fight another day—exactly what Longstreet had advised him to do.

  This was reversal of fortune with a vengeance. Lee spent what was, for him, an unusually anxious night, as one general after another informed him that the enemy was “pouring” through the gaps in South Mountain. The next morning, though, there was good news. Harpers Ferry had surrendered. This was hardly surprising, since Jackson had nearly 30,000 men on the heights surrounding a place that The West Point Atlas of the American Wars describes as “indefensible.” Jackson captured 12,000 Federal troops, 13,000 “stands of arms”* and 73 guns, the biggest Federal surrender of the war.

  Lee was relieved by this good news, and his “innate combativeness reasserted itself.” His pleasure was only slightly marred by the fact that Colonel Benjamin F. Grimes had led 1,400 Federal cavalrymen out of Harpers Ferry over a narrow pontoon bridge across the Potomac and had accidentally run into a long train of wagons carrying Longstreet’s reserve ammunition, capturing forty wagons. The prudent move Lee had contemplated during the night was now banished from his mind by the good news from Jackson. It was only twelve miles from Harpers Ferry to Sharpsburg, and as soon as Jackson had secured his booty and sent his prisoners on to Winchester he could rejoin his three divisions to Lee’s army.

  Lee himself could still have crossed the Potomac by the Shepherdstown Ford; concentrated his army at Martinsburg, only four miles away; and waited for McClellan to attack him there on high ground of his own choosing—or he could have ordered Jackson to cross to the north bank of the Potomac now that Harpers Ferry had surrendered, march up the Rohrersville Road, and attack the left flank of the Federal forces as they emerged from Cranston Gap. This would surely have slowed down or even stopped McClellan’s advance. Instead he chose to move all his forces into the small, hilly stretch of farmland and woodland between the Potomac and Antietam Creek around Sharpsburg, which is at no point wider than three miles. For better or worse, he had decided to put all his eggs in one basket.

  Even today Sharps
burg is hardly an imposing town, numbering only 705 inhabitants in the last census. In 1862, however, it was important because it lay astride the road from Shepherdstown on the Potomac; to Centreville, Maryland; and on to Boonsboro, where it joined the main road to Hagerstown and Pennsylvania. The distances are small. It is only three miles from Sharpsburg to the Potomac, and not more than six miles to Hagerstown Pike. Four miles to the south is the meandering Antietam Creek. The distance to the Cranford Gap in South Mountain, through which Federal troops were now “pouring,” is only six miles. There would be no room for maneuvering here, and no chance to pull off one of Jackson’s brilliant flanking attacks. The battle would be an armed head-on collision, fought in a narrow space. Even the ground was not particularly favorable for Lee to fight a defensive battle against an army almost twice the size of his own.

  19. Battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam), September 17, 1862.

  {Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), Edwin C. Bearss, Fields of Honor, courtesy of Edwin C. Bearss.}

  Lee would be obliged to fight with his back to the Potomac, and only one “deep, rocky” ford (Boteler’s Ford) in the rear on the extreme right of his line across which to receive reinforcements and supplies—or to retreat. He placed Longstreet, with half the army, on his right, slightly ahead and south of Sharpsburg, from which gently rolling land stretched down to Antietam Creek about a mile to the east at that point, and directly overlooking one of the bridges across the creek. He would place Jackson when he arrived to the north of the town, farther forward on high ground overlooking Hagerstown Pike and another bridge across Antietam Creek.

  This was not a position of great strength. The ground from Antietam Creek to Sharpsburg rolled gently upward, but there were no commanding heights to hold. The east bank of the creek was more elevated than the west one, and in places densely wooded with first growth, which would give McClellan’s artillery a number of well covered positions to fire from as Federal troops crossed the creek. Although some of the bloodiest fighting would take place at the lowest of the three bridges, which came to be known as “Burnside’s Bridge,” after the Union corps commander who sent regiment after regiment across its short, narrow span to attack Lee’s right, the troops themselves soon discovered that the creek was easily fordable in several places, which might have saved many lives had General Ambrose Burnside bothered to find out.

  On the morning of September 16 Lee woke from a “sound sleep.” Although he had only 18,000 men at Sharpsburg until Jackson arrived, and had already observed the enemy coming up “in great strength” through the gaps in South Mountain, raising clouds of dust as they advanced, Lee could not have been more composed “if he had had a well-equipped army of 100,000 veterans at his back,” in the words of one observer. This was by no means a pose meant to encourage his officers and troops—Lee was one of those rare generals who enjoy battle; underneath the composure was a naturally fierce temperament, all the more impressive because of Lee’s ability to conceal it by means of an impenetrable mask.

  McClellan was technically every bit as good a general as Lee, perhaps even better, and he was no coward; nor was he afraid of losses. But he did not enjoy battle; it did not inspire and thrill him as it did Lee, or for that matter Napoleon. Certainly Lee’s cheerfulness as he watched the Union troops, alarming masses of them, advancing over the hills in front of him toward Antietam Creek, can be explained only by his anticipation of a good fight. Everybody remarked on his calm good spirits on September 16, even as there streamed toward Antietam Creek what seemed like endless blue columns of Federal troops.

  At noon, a cloud of dust on the road from the Potomac to Sharpsburg announced the arrival of Jackson, fresh from his victory at Harpers Ferry, behind him the ranks of his troops. Even so composed a general as Lee must have felt a certain relief as he shook hands with Jackson that his numbers would soon be doubled, though straggling, casualties, desertion, and sheer exhaustion would mean that he would nevertheless have at most 38,000 men to face 75,000 Federals the next day.

  Very fortunately for Lee, McClellan had failed to make any clear plan for attacking, or even to issue a written order to his generals. He expressed only the rather vague intention “to make the main attack on the enemy’s left—at least to create a diversion in favor of the main attack, with the hope of something more, by assailing the enemy’s right—and as soon as one or both of the flank movements were fully successful, to attack their center with any reserve I might then have in hand.” He made no effort to find out if Antietam Creek could be forded, or to see for himself what Lee’s positions were. In devising his idea—to attack Lee’s left, then his right, and then, if one or both of these attacks succeeded, perhaps to attack Lee’s center if any Union troops were available at that point—McClellan woefully underrated Lee’s genius and Longstreet and Jackson’s competence. If McClellan had made a powerful lunge toward Sharpsburg using his numerical superiority at any time before the afternoon of September 16, when Jackson’s troops had only begun to move into position, he might have crushed Lee’s forces by the simple weight of numbers; but, overcome once again by caution, McClellan did nothing, and by mid-afternoon Lee had covered his left by placing Jackson’s troops on ground that would shortly become famous in military history: North Wood, West Wood, Miller’s Farm, “the Cornfield,” Dunker Church, “Bloody Lane.” Above and behind Jackson’s far left Lee placed Stuart’s horse artillery. Lee would shortly have a line that extended for nearly five miles, with the sleepy town of Sharpsburg at its center, and a web of roads and country lanes behind it that would enable him to move units quickly from one wing to the other to meet a Federal attack anywhere as it crossed Antietam Creek, possibly canceling out McClellan’s superiority in numbers. Shuffling regiments and brigades like a master gambler, Lee was in position to resist anything except a general assault—which, as McClellan’s own description of how he intended to fight the battle bears out, was the last thing he had in mind.

  Federal artillery was already firing briskly when Lee walked through Sharpsburg, indifferent as always to the explosions bursting around him. “Leading Traveller by the bridle,” he paused to warn Confederate gunners “not to waste their ammunition in an idle duel with Federal batteries.” He must already have guessed from the direction of the gunfire that the Federal attack was under way on his left. By the time he remounted he heard musketry as the vanguard of Major General Joseph Hooker’s corps of three divisions began to approach down Hagerstown Pike exchanging fire with John Bell Hood’s division of Texans. It was too late for Hooker to mount a serious attack, but his appearance in strength on the far left of the Confederate line gave Lee an indication of where the fight would start in the morning.

  At 4:30 a.m. Lee was awake and warning Brigadier General William Pendleton, his artillery commander, to cover the fords over the Potomac with his reserve artillery in case the army had to retreat. This may have been a reflection of the fact that the divisions of McLaws and Anderson were still strung out on the road from Harpers Ferry. By dawn Lee was going to need every man he could get, however exhausted and footsore. Even then there was a serious chance his forces might not be enough.

  The musket fire from Hooker’s “skirmishers”* began before first light. By six o’clock in the morning Hooker’s corps bore down on the Confederate left, forcing Lee to move more and more men from his center and right to prevent a Federal breakthrough. It is a measure of Lee’s willingness to take great risks that he calmly stripped his right to meet the crisis on the left. If McClellan had mounted an attack on Lee’s right at the same time as Hooker’s troops were pushing Hood’s back across the Cornfield toward Dunker Church, Lee’s entire position at Sharpsburg might have collapsed, but perhaps Lee already sensed that McClellan was not exercising complete control over his battle. The numerous swales and ridges of the ground, as well as the sharp bends and wooded banks of the creek, tended to break up the area around Sharpsburg into three separate battlefields. Lee, who rode from one side of the battle to the
other taking advantage of interior lines, had a clear picture of the whole battle. McClellan, on the other hand, had chosen to establish fixed headquarters for himself more than a mile behind Antietam Creek. The result was that he allowed his battle to drift into three uncoordinated parts: one on Lee’s left in the morning, one on his center around noon, and one on his right in the afternoon. If McClellan had ridden forward and been able to get even two of these powerful attacks to take place at the same time he might have been able to force Lee out of Sharpsburg and back across the Potomac, but by midday he had allowed the opportunity to slip away.

  Even so, some of the bloodiest fighting of the war took place early in the morning as artillery fire and massed musketry cut down the cornstalks and trees, and with them row after row of men who lay as neatly as if they had been scythed. Even “Fighting Joe” Hooker, a heavy drinker and notorious ladies’ man,* hardly a poetic soul, whom Grant said was “dangerous” as well as “insubordinate,” described the scene with a deep feeling that most people would not have suspected he possessed: “every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the [Confederates] slain lay in rows precisely as they stood in their ranks a few moments before.” It was carnage, on both sides, as assault after assault took place across the bodies of the dead and wounded under constant artillery fire at close range and an unending storm of musket fire, all of it in a lurid fog of drifting gun smoke lit by bright flashes of gunfire and shell explosions. Men fired until their weapons became fouled with burned powder or they ran out of ammunition, then fought with the bayonet or used their weapons as clubs. Casualties reached nearly 70 percent in some hard-hit regiments. Even Hood’s Texans were eventually driven back as the Federals advanced toward Dunker Church. Around 7:30 a.m., while surveying the scene, Lee was told that without reinforcements “the day might be lost.” He replied, gently but firmly, “Don’t be excited about it, Colonel; go tell General Hood to hold his ground, reinforcements are now rapidly arriving between Sharpsburg and the ford.”