The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Even though McClellan had had Lee’s lost orders for twenty-four hours, and was moving more rapidly with them than he would have without them, he was still advancing with caution. There were still some uncertainties, and uncertainties made McClellan nervous and tentative. The lost orders had not been helpful in telling him Lee’s actual present position or strength. Instead of moving immediately and at full speed, he had waited a day. It was now the fourteenth. Lee had had time to hurry D. H. Hill with his little division back to South Mountain to try to slow the northern juggernaut. And he had recalled Longstreet from Hagerstown to back up Hill. Lee now needed time more than he needed anything, time to pull his widely scattered army together again or face disaster. If the Union force broke through at South Mountain before he could do that, it could easily fall on the rear of Lafayette McLaws on Maryland Heights and in Pleasant Valley and imperil Jackson’s Harpers Ferry expedition.

  D. H. Hill, Tom Jackson’s brother-in-law, was dug in on the South Mountain passes with but five thousand men painfully outmanned and outgunned. All morning and into the afternoon he had not been able to drive the Federals back. But neither had McClellan been able to force his way over the mountain, not until late afternoon, when the breakthrough came at Fox Gap. There Reno had been in the thick of it, leading the advance. As the rebel line was about to break, a musket ball found him and slammed into his stubby body.

  Sturgis stepped to the side of his stretcher as Reno’s soldiers carried him past.

  “Hallo, Sam, I’m dead,” Reno said, his voice firm and natural as always.

  Sturgis could not believe him seriously hurt. “Oh, no, General, not as bad as all that, I hope.”

  “Yes, yes,” Reno said. “I’m dead—good bye.”

  Within minutes the war was over forever for Jesse Reno.57 He had been killed by Confederate rifle fire.

  But the Union army had broken through, and Lee began backing down, pulling into an enclave around the little town of Sharpsburg. There he stopped, deploying that part of the army that was now with him—Longstreet and D. H. Hill—in a triangle of undulating land behind a little creek called the Antietam. At his back rolled the Potomac. From there he began calling all the scattered parts of his army to his side. There was going to be hell to pay now, and he would need everybody he could get.

  McClellan came on, following slowly, pulling into view of Sharpsburg and the Confederate line at midafternoon on September 15. The Confederates were in battle array, so favorably positioned and strong, McClellan thought, that only desperate fighting could drive them out. A great and terrible battle was at hand; the situation must be studied. So all the rest of that day and the day following—the sixteenth—he reconnoitered, and Lee waited.58

  Jackson had started from Frederick to execute Lee’s plans for Harpers Ferry on September 10, driving his corps, including A. P. Hill’s Light Division, at his accustomed breakneck pace. They recrossed the Potomac into Virginia at Williamsport on the eleventh, less than a week after crossing it for the first time into Maryland. The band struck up, and the soldiers lustily broke into song again. “Carry me back to Ole Virginny, to the old Virginny shore,” they sang as they swept over the river and wheeled toward Martinsburg.59

  The scourge of the Valley was home again where he loved to be and doing what he loved to do—driving Yankees. The federal force at Martinsburg fled eastward in the face of his advance to seek questionable sanctuary at Harpers Ferry. The Compte de Paris, attached to McClellan’s army, called it “a kind of grand hunting-match through the lower valley of Virgina, driving all the federal detachments before him, and forcing them to crowd into the blind alley of Harper’s Ferry.”60

  A. P. Hill’s division pulled within sight of Bolivar Heights above Harpers Ferry on the morning of September 13. That same day John G. Walker occupied Loudoun Heights. Lafayette McLaws, with the tougher job, finally drove the Federals from Maryland Heights and on the fourteenth Harpers Ferry, with its eleven thousand trapped Union soldiers, was surrounded, their fate sealed.

  It was another Sunday, and Hill began to move in. He marched his command along the left bank of the Shenandoah, around the federal flank, and there he deployed and waited. He would strike the Union line early the next morning. At daybreak, he opened a rapid enfilade fire, and in about an hour the federal guns slackened, then fell silent. Hill ordered his batteries to cease and signaled his soldiers to storm the works. Within moments a white flag went up and the Union garrison of eleven thousand surrendered themselves, seventy-three cannon, twelve thousand stand of arms, equipment, and numerous stores to the Confederate invaders.

  Jackson rode into Harpers Ferry one more time, as the curious Union soldiers stared at him. So that was Stonewall Jackson? One of them looked at the faded old uniform and the sunburnt little hat and said, “Boys, he’s not much for looks, but if we’d had him we wouldn’t have been caught in this trap!”61

  Jackson then exchanged messages with Lee. By the grace of Providence Harpers Ferry is ours, Jackson told him. Come immediately to Sharpsburg, ordered a gratified Lee. And Jackson set out that day, the fifteenth, to answer the summons. As he pushed out onto the road leading north along the river, he ordered Walker and McLaws to follow without delay. He left his ex-classmate A. P. Hill to continue processing the federal surrender at Harpers Ferry and to guard the public property.62

  When Lee arrived in Sharpsburg he positioned the force that was with him—Longstreet and D. H. Hill—along the range of hills between the town and Antietam creek. His thin line ran for two miles roughly parallel to the creek, with Longstreet on the right of the Boonsboro road and Hill on the left. When Jackson arrived he would run him into the slot to the left of Hill and to the left of the command of John B. Hood. He would position Stuart’s cavalry on the rise behind Jackson, and Walker on the extreme right to beef up the thin, tattered line held by Major General David Rumph (Neighbor) Jones. He would shift Walker and McLaws up and down the line as the demands of the battle dictated.

  It promised to be an uneven match no matter what he did. All day the fifteenth and most of the sixteenth Lee waited there with but eighteen thousand men. The legions of McClellan’s army were streaming in, eighty-five thousand strong, on the other side of the creek. Even when Jackson and Walker and McLaws arrived—and they were coming as fast as they could—Lee would have no more than forty thousand men to throw against those overwhelming numbers. Before him across the creek he could see rifled guns going into place, bringing into range the entire Confederate line, except for Stuart’s cavalry on the left. Lee had no guns that could reach them. At his back flowed the Potomac with but a single avenue of escape, Boteler’s Ford below Shepherdstown—and it was a bad one, rocky and deep. The best Lee could hope for seemed to be a drawn battle. Against it he risked utter destruction. But he waited calmly for what that day, or the next, would bring.63

  By the evening of the sixteenth McClellan had decided what he must do. He would launch his main assault the next morning against Lee’s left, at the same time striking his right. As soon as one or both of these flanking movements succeeded, he would hit Lee’s center a crushing blow. It was a good plan, and he began late that day putting his army into position. His right wing under Joe Hooker, followed by Joseph Mansfield, crossed the creek and approached the Confederate left. His left wing under Ambrose Burnside filed into the hills overlooking a quiet bridge that spanned the Antietam down creek in front of the Confederate right.64

  As the Union troops began to move, shifting in the night, the Confederates waited around their campfires and heard a faint cheering in their rear. From it gradually grew the unmistakable sound of mounted men, the distant strains of artillery bugles, and the tramp of heavy columns. It was a good sound, a reassuring sound, the sound of approaching reinforcements. The arrival of couriers and the jingle of artillery caissons soon left no doubt. Jackson’s corps was arriving from Harpers Ferry and taking its place in the line. They came in such order, and made such a rustle among the deep layer
of leaves that it seemed to doubly magnify their numbers and strength. Swiftly, as was Jackson’s way, they passed through the woods and took their position on the left, facing Joe Hooker.65

  All through the evening this shifting and placing went on. In the strange half-lights of earth and sky, the moving masses were dimly visible from across the creek. One of Burnside’s soldiers watched and wrote, “There was something weirdly impressive yet unreal in the gradual drawing together of those whispering armies under cover of the night—something of awe and dread, as always in the secret preparation for momentous deeds.”66

  It was the prelude to something brilliant and terrible, and they all knew it.

  In Hagerstown a dozen miles north of Sharpsburg, the townsfolk awoke to the cannonade at first light the next morning. It rolled and thundered through the valley, from cloud to mountain and from mountain to cloud. Charles Carleton Coffin, a newspaper correspondent, listened as it grew into “a continuous roar, like the unbroken roll of a thunder-storm.” Soon he began to hear the puncturing rattle of musketry against the thunder-roar of the cannon—like pattering drops of rain on a roof at first, then “a roll, crash, roar, and rush, like a mighty ocean billow upon the shore … wave on wave.”67

  In Shepherdstown across the Potomac, Mary Bedinger Mitchell and the other women ministering to the Confederate wounded already pouring into the town, heard the clash of battle too. Every now and then they heard the echo of some charging cheer borne to them on the wind over the cannon’s roar. As the human voices pierced the “demoniacal clangor,” the women caught their breaths and tried not to sob.68

  The fighting at Antietam began that morning, the seventeenth. It began, as McClellan had planned, against the Confederate left, against his old classmate, Tom Jackson. The troops of both armies had slept within earshot of one another the night before. Early in the morning Joe Hooker started the fight, hurling his First Corps at Jackson, setting his sights on the white Dunker church house beyond an intervening cornfield. There followed through that early morning a bloody pushing and shoving of two armies, such as the war had not seen. Striking through the cornfield in full cry, Hooker bent Jackson’s line slowly back. But on the brink of a breakthrough, he was hit by Hood’s troops, pouring into the breech. Hooker’s drive slowed, stalled, and was thrown back.

  Mansfield then pushed in with the Union Twelfth Corps, driving Hood. First Walker, who had hurried across the entire Confederate line all the way from the right, struck him. Then Lafayette McLaws, arriving from Maryland Heights, rushed to meet him. Hooker had been shot through the foot and Mansfield lay dying. The Union Second Corps under old Edwin Vose Sumner, still serving after all these years, came up and hurled itself upon the Confederate line. Sumner’s attack, under John Sedgwick, the artillerist and cavalryman from Connecticut, penetrated deeper than any division so far, then also stalled, and was chewed to pieces.

  By midmorning the fight on the Confederate left was over. Jackson’s eight thousand hungry, shoeless, ragged Confederates, with help sent from Lee, had held off nearly thirty thousand fiercely attacking Union troops. The action now shifted to the right center. There, across a bloody sunken road, thousands of Confederate and Union soldiers collided, and under the sheer weight of the attack the Confederate line sagged and nearly snapped. But the Union attackers had suffered horribly and there was no follow-up. It was another standoff, a case of a battle won and the winner not knowing it.

  By early afternoon it had all come down to Burnside on the Confederate right, waiting above the little arched bridge that spanned Antietam creek.

  So far the battle had been fought by divisions, one after another. There had been no unity of action, no hammering all along the line at the same time, no follow-up of heavy concerted blows. It had been different from any fight in the war so far—a pitched battle in an open field. There had been no cover, no breastworks, no abatis, no intervening woodlands, no abrupt hills behind which to hide. There were no impassable streams. The space over which the assaulting federal army hurled itself upon the Confederate lines was a ground of gentle undulations covered by green grass and ripening corn.69

  Walker, who had been from one end of the line to the other, described it as a battle in which more than a hundred thousand men armed with the latest weaponry had engaged in slaughtering one another at close quarters. It was a ghastly scene, “the constant booming of cannon, the ceaseless rattle and roar of musketry, the glimpses of galloping horsemen and marching infantry, now seen, now lost in the smoke, adding weirdness to terror.”70

  The sun had beat down without mercy all morning, as unrelenting as the fighting itself. The suspense had been racking, the anxiety intense. “Mars was striking with iron and fire,” Henry Kyd Douglas thought, “time moving with leaden heel.”71 The artillery on both sides had been bellowing without letup from the start, heard in Hagerstown and Shepherdstown. The unceasing thunder of cannon had turned the peaceful Antietam valley into what Colonel Stephen D. Lee called an “Artillery Hell.” Lee had seen and heard the terrible bombardment at Fort Sumter and this was far worse. He prayed that they might never see another like it.72

  George Gordon of the class of 1846, now with Mansfield’s Twelfth Corps, had also seen and heard it all. He had watched the battle ebb and flow, and the soldiers on both sides grapple with one another in lines of regiments, brigades, and divisions. He had watched whole regiments, brigades, and divisions melt away under a terrible fire, leaving long lines of piled dead to mark where the living had stood but a moment before. He had seen fields of corn trampled underfoot, woods shattered and splintered, huge limbs sent crashing to the earth, battered by shell and round shot. He had heard the hissing scream of shrapnel and canister. He had heard and seen it and called it a “hellish carnival.”73

  All through the battle George McClellan had been standing in a redan of fence rails at his headquarters overlooking the shifting scene. At his side, Major General Fitz John Porter studied the field below through a telescope resting on the top rail, and by nods, signs, or in words so low-toned and brief that few of the surrounding coterie of staff and aides could make them out, passed information to his chief. McClellan and Porter knew one another well; they were best of friends. There hardly had to be more than a nod or a sign between them.

  When not engaged with Porter, McClellan stood in his soldierly, strutting way and intently watched the battle unfold. It was the first time he had ever seen his army fight. He had not personally seen the fighting at Rich Mountain, nor on the Peninsula. A commanding general often has other claims on his time than watching the battle he is masterminding.

  As he watched now, he smoked a cigar and with the utmost apparent calmness, conversed with surrounding officers and issued orders in the most quiet of undertones. Close beside him at all times hovered the one man above all others he could trust without question—Nelly’s father and his chief of staff, Brigadier General Marcy. Marcy was his right hand, and had been from the beginning. Now he was relaying his son-in-law’s orders to waiting aides-de-camp, who galloped away with them to distant parts of the field below. Several officers of the French, Prussian, and Sardinian service clustered about trying to comprehend this bizarre fight between brothers and classmates and friends and enemies.

  “Everything was as quiet and punctilious as a drawing room ceremony,” marveled David Strother, the Virginian who had survived Nathaniel Banks’s disastrous Valley campaign against Jackson and was now an aide to McClellan.

  In the middle of the day the ferocious fighting at the sunken road riveted McClellan’s attention. “By George,” he exclaimed, “this is a magnificent field, and if we win this fight it will cover all our errors and misfortunes forever!”

  Strother, standing near and always ready with advice, offered some now: “General, fortune favors the bold; hurl all our power upon them at once, and we will make a glorious finish of the campaign and the war.”74

  Unlike Banks who followed Strother’s advice at Strasburg and shouldn’t hav
e, McClellan didn’t follow it at Antietam and should have. He would not hurl his full power upon Lee at once. But at 1:45 in the afternoon he would take time out to wire Nelly. “We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the age,” he told her.75

  The Man

  in the

  Red Battle Shirt

  The message from Lee to A. P. Hill arrived at Harpers Ferry at 6:30 in the morning as the battle at Antietam was just beginning. By 7:30, Hill had his Light Division filing out of the town and marching rapidly northward.

  Maxcy Gregg’s brigade left first, followed immediately by James Archer’s, its commander sick and riding in an ambulance. Three more of Hill’s six brigades were soon in motion behind the first two. The sixth would remain at Harpers Ferry.

  The day was already hot; it was going to be a scorcher, with another long, dusty, grueling march ahead of them. Nobody relished it. But Lee had called. “Those people” had the outmanned Army of Northern Virginia in a tight spot at Sharpsburg. The Union assault was already under way; Lee would need every man he could get. Hill must come up. He must get his division there as fast as legs could carry it.

  Getting his Light Division there when it counted was what Hill did. It was his specialty. No division commander in the Confederate army did it better. It was twelve miles to Sharpsburg as the crow flies. But Hill would take his division up the road by the river and across Boteler’s Ford below Shepherdstown. By that route it would be seventeen hard-marching miles.

  Hill’s quondam West Point classmate Darius Couch hovered nearby with a Union division. In better times Hill would have been delighted to see his old friend again. But now Couch was an enemy who must be avoided at all costs. The fight was at Sharpsburg and nothing must be allowed to interfere with getting his division there.