by Bruce Catton
It might have worked; it is hard to dispute the measured judgment of Robert E Lee. But no one will ever know about this particular might-have-been; because as the army left Frederick, bound for the sheltering rampart of South Mountain, one of Lee’s officers lost the order which set forth all of the movements which Lee’s army was going to make, and on the evening of September 13 that order was presented to General McClellan. Now McClellan had the game in his hands.
4: A Town Called Sharpsburg
What it came down to was that General Lee had taken forty badly worn infantry brigades north of the Potomac to defeat an army twice as large as his. The odds were forbidding, but they had been carefully calculated. They would swing in Lee’s favor if he could get time and space for the maneuvers which would deceive his foes and set them up for the kill. The concealing screen of South Mountain offered an opportunity. West of this long ridge Lee was out of sight, with unlimited room to move and fast-marching men to move in it, and invisibility ought to buy the time he needed. It was true that the Federal infantry could break the screen whenever it really tried—the mountain gaps were held only by Stuart’s cavalry, backed by D. H. Hill’s infantry—but if past performance meant anything the Army of the Potomac would not move fast against an enemy which it could not even see.
Risky as they seemed, Lee’s plans were justified. It was pure freakish chance that tripped him; the fantastic accident which led a nameless Confederate officer to lose a copy of the campaign orders, which led two Federal infantrymen to find that copy, and which placed it shortly thereafter in front of General McClellan. When McClellan read it (to compound the fantasy, he had at his side an officer who recognized the handwriting and so could assure him that the document was genuine) Lee’s invisibility ceased to be. Now McClellan knew exactly where Lee was, what he was doing and where he was going to be next.
It seemed to McClellan that Lee had made a great mistake, and in a letter to Mr. Lincoln the Federal commander exulted that Lee “will be severely punished for it.” Full of confidence, McClellan explained: “I have all the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency. I now feel that I can count on them as of old.”1
Before the Federal soldiers could show whether they were equal to the emergency their commanding general would have to do his own part. On the evening of September 13 his opportunity was wide open.
Lee himself was near Hagerstown, Maryland, with Longstreet and nine brigades. Five more brigades, under D. H. Hill, were twelve miles south of Hagerstown, at Boonsboro, a few miles west of Turner’s Gap where the National Road crossed South Mountain. All the rest of the army, divided into three separate columns, was off to the south, converging on Harper’s Ferry under the direction of Stonewall Jackson, and two of these three columns were south of the Potomac. Lee’s army of invasion had split into pieces like an exploding shell, and the Army of the Potomac, massed in and near Frederick, Maryland, was ideally situated to exploit this situation. No Civil War general was ever given so fair a chance to destroy the opposing army one piece at a time.
Not only was the invading army dispersed, it was also in a condition of extreme military destitution. Its soldiers had marched out of their shoes, almost out of their uniforms and far away from their rations—thousands of haversacks contained nothing but green corn and ripe apples gathered from Maryland’s fields and orchards—and straggling had been almost ruinous. A New York Times correspondent, observing Stonewall Jackson at Harper’s Ferry, wrote loftily that this famous general wore a most seedy uniform and had a hat “which any northern beggar would consider an insult to have offered him,” and found the men in the ranks much seedier: “Ireland in her worst straits could present no parallel.” Long afterward a Confederate veteran wryly confessed that he and his fellows were indeed “a set of ragamuffins,” and said that “it seemed as if every cornfield in Maryland had been robbed of its scarecrows.” Digging into his memory, the veteran became specific:
“None had any under-clothing. My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers, a stained, dirty jacket; an old slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn; a begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a cartridge box full, and a musket. I was barefooted and had a stone bruise on each foot.… There was no one there who would not have been ‘run in’ by the police had he appeared on the streets of any populous city.”2
So the Army of Northern Virginia was not much to look at; yet it was something special to meet. Lacking all else, it still had those cartridge boxes and muskets, it knew just how to use them, and extreme hardship had swept away everybody except the men who could stand anything. If McClellan meant to round up and destroy these soldiers he would have to work at it.
He tried, and the inspiration born of a look at his opponent’s cards lifted him up briefly. He sent his army forward on September 14, and in due time it broke through the South Mountain rampart in two places, at Turner’s Gap and at Crampton’s Gap six miles to the south, and if he had been just a little more aggressive he would have saved Harper’s Ferry, mashed the fragments of Lee’s army and won the war before September died. But there were always a few hours to spare. The Federal columns that were to break through the mountain screen were to move tomorrow morning as early as possible—instead of this minute, tonight, before the sun goes down, and if everybody isn’t ready march with the ones that are and let the Devil take the hindmost … When the Army of the Potomac advanced to seize the South Mountain passes, Lee started to call everything off and get his men back to Virginia while they were still alive; then he found that he would be given half a day or so of grace. On September 15 Jackson captured Harper’s Ferry and 11,000 Union prisoners, along with heaped-up supplies, and D. H. Hill’s men held Turner’s Gap just long enough to make all the difference, and so instead of retreating to Virginia Lee ordered what there was of his army to concentrate at a town called Sharpsburg, down behind the high ground that overlooked Antietam Creek, close to the Potomac, in western Maryland.
Antietam Creek is not much of a stream and Sharpsburg was not much of a town, and the army that Lee planted behind the creek on September 15 was not just then much of an army; Longstreet and D. H. Hill, mostly, with some guns, perhaps 18,000 men in all, with the rest of the army due to come up after a while from Harper’s Ferry; and McClellan got the Army of the Potomac there a few hours later, looked at the guns and the bayonets on the high ground beyond the creek, and concluded that he ought to study the situation. The only way to beat Robert E. Lee was to come and get him, and Lee had his guns ranked on the hills with the leathery, hardcase soldiers in rags lined up with them, and it seemed that this was no time to be hasty. So McClellan’s engineers laid out the lines the men were to occupy, and the men filed into them, and the day ended and night came down, and next morning it was September 16, and for a time there was a fog which made it hard to see what the Rebels were up to; and all through September 16 the Army of the Potomac waited, posting artillery on the heights east of the creek, and more and more of Lee’s army came up (including Stonewall Jackson in person) and at sundown there was a brief, meaningless clash between McClellan’s right wing and Lee’s left wing, and the long day in which the Federal Army had a three-to-one advantage in numbers came to an end. There was a drizzling rain that night, and a queer silence lay over the field, and in the morning there would at last be a fight. And still more of Lee’s army reached the scene.
For more than a century men have been trying to understand Lee’s willingness to stand and fight at Sharpsburg. His army was fearfully overmatched. Even when the last troops came up from Harper’s Ferry he would have hardly more than 40,000 men, and McClellan had 87,000 with more coming up.3 The position overlooking Antietam Creek was strong but it was not invulnerable, and it had one dangerous weakness; fighting there, the Army of Northern Virginia stood with its back to the Potomac and there was only one ford for a crossing. If the Federals ever broke the line a
nd made a really quick Confederate retreat necessary, Lee’s army would simply be destroyed. On the face of it there was every reason for a quiet departure without a fight and hardly any reason for remaining and defying the Army of the Potomac to do its worst. And yet …
And yet Lee stayed when he did not have to stay and fought when he did not have to fight, and since he was not out of his mind the only conceivable answer is that he believed that he could win.
He had believed this all along. He would not have entered Maryland otherwise; if to fight at Sharpsburg was to risk the loss of his entire army, to go north of the Potomac at all was to take the same risk. Lee wanted an absolute victory, and to get the kind of fight that could bring such a victory he had to run the risk of absolute defeat. To leave Maryland now without putting the matter to the test would be to confess that there could not be the kind of victory that could mean Confederate independence. Perhaps the assignment was just too big. Perhaps the one real chance to sweep the board clean had vanished when McClellan’s army got away from the Chickahominy and took refuge in its camp at Harrison’s Landing, and perhaps the Confederacy’s only course now was to hang on and make the war so expensive that the Yankees would finally get tired of it and quit trying. This might be the case, but Lee would not accept it until he was sure of it. Sharpsburg was where he would find out.
This war saw many terrible battles, and to try to make a ranking of them is just to compare horrors, but it may be that the battle of Antietam was the worst of all. It had, at any rate, the fearful distinction of killing and wounding more Americans in one day than any other fight in the war. If there was any essential difference in the fighting qualities of Northern and Southern soldiers Antietam fails to show it. It was a headlong combat, unrelieved by any tactical brilliance, a slugging match in cornfields and woodlots and on the open slopes of the low hills that came up from the brown creek. Neither commanding general did what he wanted to do; actually, once the fighting got under way neither commander had a great deal to do with it except to stand firm and refuse to call retreat, and in the end it was about as close to a draw as so large a battle could be … except that it became the great turning point of the war, meaning more than either general or either army intended, a grim and fateful landmark in American history. American soldiers never fought harder than they did when they fought each other on September 17 on the outskirts of Sharpsburg.
It began in the earliest dawn, with a misty drizzle to obscure the half-light, when Federal skirmishers went prowling southward astride the turnpike that came down to Sharpsburg from Hagerstown. On the left was a big cornfield, with stalks taller than a man’s head, and on the right there were open pastures rolling off to hills where Jeb Stuart had planted his horse artillery; and straight ahead, about a mile away, the turnpike went over a bit of rising ground and passed a whitewashed Dunker church, picturesquely framed by an open grove of trees. If the Federals could occupy this ground around the church they would break the left end of Lee’s battle line, and McClellan had called for a big attack: one army corps to make the first drive and two more to come in beside and behind to make it a crusher.
The skirmishers were feeling the way for Joe Hooker’s corps, on the extreme right of McClellan’s line. These troops had been led until recently by McDowell, and in the general reshuffle following Pope’s retirement McDowell had been put on the shelf and his command had been given to Hooker, a more dashing general and a far luckier one; florid, handsome, self-centered, coarse of fibre, always ready to fight. Now Hooker had his men moving south toward the Dunker church in a gray rainy daybreak.
Stonewall Jackson was waiting for him, with artillery massed around the Dunker church and solid ranks of infantry in the cornfield and west of the turnpike. The skirmishers probed at the front and found it strong, and the advance drifted to a halt; then Hooker put three dozen fieldpieces in line on a low ridge and had the guns blast the cornfield with a methodical, murderous bombardment that flattened the tasseled corn and the defenders who had been posted in it, and after a while the guns stopped firing and the Federal infantry went forward. It had to fight its way, but the line in the cornfield had been almost blown to bits and the Rebel units to the west were overpowered, and Hooker’s corps kept moving; and at last it swept the last of Jackson’s infantry out of the way and came up toward the Dunker church.
This was almost it, but not quite. Out of the woods behind the church came a new Confederate battle line—John B. Hood’s shock troops, the men angry because they had been sent forward just when they were cooking what would have been their first really good breakfast in a week. (During the night a meat ration had been issued.) This line formed in the clearing and suddenly it was all ablaze with deadly musketry, firing volleys that broke the Federal column apart; then it charged, yelling after the manner of the Rebels, greatly aided by some brigades of D. H. Hill which came in through a fringe of woods and farmlots off to the east. Hooker’s men were driven into retreat, some of them going slowly, fighting as they went, others going headlong for any refuge they could find. They went north along the turnpike, whose rail fences were grotesquely festooned with corpses, or back across the cornfield whose torn ground held an unutterable litter of dead and wounded. (Hooker said later that of all the dismal battlefields he ever saw nothing was quite as bad as that wretched cornfield.4) At last the Federals got back to their original starting point, Hooker disabled with a bullet in one foot, and the powerful Federal artillery beat the Confederate advance to a halt.
Then McClellan sent in a fresh army corps, the one formerly led by General Banks, commanded now by a white-whiskered old Regular named Joseph Mansfield; and these men drove the Confederates out of the cornfield. Mansfield himself was mortally wounded, but his men kept going, put half of Hood’s division out of action, cleared out a plot of woods just east of the cornfield, got one tentacle up to touch the Dunker church—and then came to a sullen halt, bruised and spent and winded.
There was a brief lull, partly because the two corps commanders had become casualties, partly because these two Federal corps had been virtually wrecked. Then a third Federal corps came into action—Army of the Potomac veterans, three big divisions under crusty old Edwin V. Sumner, coming up to break the Rebel line; coming up, by unhappy chance, one division at a time, hitting three moderate blows instead of one crusher … and suddenly the pattern for the whole business becomes clear, and the tactical details no longer have much meaning.
The thing really was just about over now, except for the killing, which would go on all day without really changing anything; for the pattern by which the Federals fought on this day made decisive victory impossible.
The Army of the Potomac was fighting the whole battle the way Sumner fought his part of it: that is, it was fighting a series of separate engagements rather than one co-ordinated battle, and so it could never get the proper advantage out of its overwhelming superiority in numbers. Lee’s army was never quite stretched past the breaking point.
Thus: Hooker’s corps attacked, was used up, and retired. Then came Mansfield’s, which did just about the same. Then came Sumner’s, one division at a time. The first division, John Sedgwick’s, was flanked, routed, and driven from the field (by a Confederate division that had just come up from Harper’s Ferry) before the second began to fight. This second division broke its back trying to storm a sunken lane which went zigzag across the Confederate center: a strong position, held by D. H. Hill’s people. Then the third division came up, and it flanked and carried this sunken lane and came up against the Confederates’ last line of defense—which was so desperately thin by now that Longstreet had his own staff helping to work the guns in a half-wrecked battery, and D. H. Hill had picked up a musket and was trying to rally stragglers. Precisely then and there Lee’s army could have been broken.
Sumner’s third division was fagged by this time, but it probably would have kept going if its commander, Brigadier General Israel Richardson, had not been mortally wounded. Right be
hind it, however, there was a fresh army corps, Franklin’s, ready to be used; but at this point the Federal high command concluded that its entire right wing was on the verge of disaster and that Lee might at any moment make a big counterattack. Franklin’s corps was put on the defensive, and the threadbare Confederate center felt no more pressure. Instead, the Federals attacked on their own extreme left, a mile and a half from the breakthrough point along the sunken road.
This attack was like the others, late and utterly unco-ordinated. It was made by Burnside’s corps, which contained four divisions, and these characteristically were sent into action one at a time. This offensive began after all the other offensives had ended, and although it was the weakest of them all it nearly succeeded, and if it had succeeded Lee would have lost his grip on the ford across the Potomac and his army would have been done for. But McClellan was late in ordering the attack, Burnside was slow to execute the order, and co-ordination was enforced by no one; and finally, well on in the afternoon, A. P. Hill’s division came up after a hard seventeen-mile march from Harper’s Ferry, and it drove Burnside’s advance back almost to Antietam Creek and stabilized the situation. Hill’s arrival highlighted one of the strange features of the battle. From the moment the two armies first confronted each other here, Lee had been given forty-eight hours to reassemble his scattered forces, and this last piece slipped into place just when it was most needed.
