Mr Lincoln's Army

by Bruce Catton

  On the right-hand side of the road from Boonsboro, nearly a mile before the road crosses Antietam Creek, there is a little rise of ground running out in a low spur overlooking the valley, and here a man named Pry had built a fine big two-story house of brick, with broad lawns and tidy outbuildings, and a grand view opening off to the west and south. In his yard, on the crest of the western slope, General McClellan had pitched his headquarters tents. Orderlies had driven tall stakes into the ground in front of the tents, and telescopes were strapped to the tops of these stakes, ready for use by any military eye that cared to search the Rebels' side of the Antietam. Camp chairs from the headquarters wagons had been set up, and a few regular armchairs had been brought out from Mr. Pry's house, and the commanding general had taken his post here, surrounded by his staff, their orderlies, the headquarters guard, and all the rest, with the headquarters flag flying from a tall pole in the center. The morning wore away and McClellan studied the long ridge to the west, and the generals came in to report and to receive their orders. What was going to be the battle of the Antietam was beginning to take shape, piece by piece, in the general's mind.

  It was hot, that morning, with a blazing sun, and no air was stirring in the protected hollows where the troops took shelter. All through the morning the army kept coming up, the men filing into place to right and left of the Boonsboro road, headquarters officers cantering up and down the dusty road with papers in their hands to see that each unit got to the proper location. Now and then groups of soldiers would leave their places and walk to the top of some hill to see what the prospect might be. They never stayed long because the Confederate gunners were watchful and sprayed shell at any hillock where one of these groups appeared. When that happened the Union batteries would strike at the guns that had fired the shells, and the roar of the cannonade would rise to a brief crescendo, only to die away again as the men took cover. Toward noon the sky became overcast and a little breeze sprang up, and it was a bit cooler. McClellan stayed close to headquarters, conferring with his officers and studying the Rebel position through telescopes. Except for the guns and an occasional glimpse of moving men, there was not a great deal to see. Undulations in the ground kept most of the Confederate Army out of sight.

  But the general felt that he was getting a tolerably good idea of its position, and as the day lengthened, his battle plan was formed. As far as McClellan could make out, the Confederate line ran north and south along the ridge, its southern end anchored among the hills south of the Boonsboro road, the other end going into the woods somewhere beyond the white Dunker church. The position was strong, and it was not going to be too easy for the Federals to reach it, because before they could get at it they would have to cross the Antietam, and good crossings seemed to be few. The bridge by which the Boonsboro road crossed the creek offered nothing but a direct frontal assault on the center of the Confederate line, where many batteries were clustered. A mile downstream there was another bridge, built of stone and arched like the first, from which a road followed a little ravine to cross the ridge and get into Sharpsburg from the southeast. This gave an approach to the southern end of the Confederate line, but the ground was bad. Steep hills looked down on the bridge from the Confederate side of the creek, and those hills appeared to be full of armed Rebels, and the guns in front of Sharpsburg commanded both the bridge and the road that led from it up the ravine. Forcing a passage over that bridge and up onto those hills would be just plain murder, unless Lee's attention could first be directed elsewhere.

  North of the Boonsboro road the situation was more promising. In front of the Pry house, a mile upstream from the place where the Boonsboro road crossed the stream, there was a third bridge, sheltered in the valley so that the Rebel guns could not reach it, with a winding road that went off through the farmlands to the north and west; and still farther upstream there were a couple of shallow places where men could wade the creek well out of sight of the enemy's artillery.

  It looked, therefore, as if the sensible course was to cross the Antietam at these protected upstream crossings, get troops over to the Hagerstown road well north of the Confederate position, and send them sweeping down on top of the ridge, rolling up the Rebel line as they went. At the same time, in spite of the obstacles, it would be well to make a secondary attack at the bridge farthest downstream. That might be costly, but it would keep Lee busy at both ends of his line and prevent him from sending troops from his right, below the town, to support his left, up by the Dunker church. Then, as a final touch: when these two attacks were under way, watch the situation closely, and if all seemed to be going well make a third smash right through the middle—Lee would probably have weakened his center to support his two ends, and this third attack ought to break his line and finish him off.

  Thus McClellan figured it out, while the troops waited in the valleys and the guns boomed heavily, fell silent, and broke into action again, and the hot day slowly passed. The whole Union Army was on hand except for Franklin, who was still watching the Rebel detachments over near Harper's Ferry. Franklin must be called in. Presumably he would be able to get his men up to the Antietam sometime next day. McClellan studied the landscape again, talked with corps commanders, and waited, while the sweating gunners brought more and more guns up to the low bluffs that overlook the Antietam from the east. He was going to have everything ready before he opened the fight, and nothing was going to be lost through overhasty action.

  Or gained, either. He still had all the advantage, but time was continuing to run out on him, and the bright opportunity that had been handed to him by grace of the Indiana non-coms three days ago was getting dimmer and dimmer. Crampton's Gap: one chance missed. South Mountain: a second chance missed. His luck was still in, a third chance was offering, but there might be such a thing as stretching good luck too far. For it was not by any means the whole of Lee's army that faced him, this sweltering sixteenth of September. The afternoon before, when the weary Confederates planted themselves on the Sharpsburg heights and turned at bay, only the commands of Longstreet and D. H. Hill had been present. This morning Jackson and Walker had brought their men in—very tired and footsore men who had made an exhausting seventeen-mile night march from Harper's Ferry. (Night marches were feasible, after all, if the man who wore general's stars demanded them.) Three full Confederate divisions were still at Harper's Ferry and could not reach Sharpsburg until the next day. Lee had barely twenty-five thousand men on the field, while McClellan pondered his battle plan and weighed his chances and decided not to attack until everything was ready. The higher officers of the Army of Northern Virginia were frankly amazed as they saw Lee serenely awaiting attack with this slender force, while the blue columns were visibly building up overpowering strength on the far side of the creek. General Longstreet, who was a hard man to impress, wrote later that this day-long, ostentatious assembling of Federal legions was "an awe-inspiring spectacle." Yet it remained a spectacle and nothing more, all through the day, while the slow minutes ticked away.

  For McClellan was facing an imaginary army rather than the real one which was spread so thin on the Sharpsburg ridge: an army that drew upon fabulous numbers and transcended all of the limitations which poor transportation and insufficient supplies always imposed on Confederate commanders. Whether the fault lay with the Pinkerton reports, with McClellan himself, or somewhere else, the incredible fact remains that McClellan was preparing to fight an army that simply did not exist. He believed Lee to have a hundred thousand men at his command that day. The Federal army was outnumbered; that offensive thrust which he must presently make, to drive the invader back below the Potomac, was an enormously risky venture which could not be undertaken at all except for the great valor of the troops and the undying love which they had for their commander.

  Between this imaginary Rebel army and the flesh-and-blood army that was awaiting his attack there was an enormous difference. In his invasion of the North, Lee had taken a gamble even more desperately daring than
the one he had taken on the Chickahominy, when he divided his army and wagered the Confederacy's independence that McClellan would never find out how thin was the screen that stood between him and Richmond. Lee crossed the Potomac with an army that was on the verge of complete exhaustion. Shoeless men who could tramp the dirt roads of Virginia without too much discomfort just could not march on the hard roads of Maryland; they had fallen out by the thousands, along with other thousands who felt that they had enlisted to defend Virginia's soil, not to invade the North, and who in their unsophisticated way had turned back when they got to the Potomac, planning to join up again once the army returned to Virginia where it belonged. Altogether, from ten to twenty thousand Southerners had left the ranks between Pope's defeat at Bull Run and the arrival at Sharpsburg. Even when the troops at Harper's Ferry came up, Lee would have barely forty thousand men to throw into action.

  In a way this was almost an advantage. Every faintheart, every weakling, every man whose spirit and body were not of the stoutest, had been winnowed out. The ones who were left were the hard-rock men who would be a long time dying. But even so, the odds were fantastic. It is hard to find in all of Lee's career any act more completely bold than his calm decision to stand and fight on the Antietam.

  When Franklin came up McClellan would have, by his own estimate, eighty-seven thousand men—with abundant reinforcements not far off. His advantage, actually, was not as great as the figures seem to show, because Confederates and Federals reckoned their numbers differently. The Rebels counted only the men who would actually be carrying muskets, and the Federals counted all who were "present for duty"—which meant that they included all the cooks, orderlies, train guards, ambulance details, and others who had non-combat assignments. Such details were particularly wasteful just then; a Northern general who fought at Antietam said that it was necessary to knock fully 20 per cent off the "present for duty" total to get the actual combat strength. But even with that reduction, McClellan had every advantage. Never before and never afterward, until the last gray days between Petersburg and Appomattox, were the two armies to collide with the Rebel strength so greatly reduced. In addition, Lee must fight with his back to the Potomac, so that any blow which really crumpled his line would mean nothing less than absolute disaster. Retreat would be out of the question if the Yankees ever broke through.1

  But McClellan saw the imaginary situation, not the real one. And he had, by any reckoning, abundant reason for caution. He might have been the man who could win the war in an afternoon; what he could not for a moment forget was that he was also the man who could lose it in an afternoon. Defeat north of the Potomac would mean the end of everything. The army had just been reorganized, and it had many raw troops; from a military point of view it was hardly an army so much as a collection of soldiers, fit to be taken into battle only in a great emergency.

  And on top of everything else the old poison of distrust and hatred was still working. McClellan's own position was unstable, not to say downright irregular. He had been restored to command by President Lincoln personally, over the violent objection of the War Department, the Republican majority in Congress, and most of the Cabinet. Nobody had actually ordered him to take the army up here and fight the Confederates. All that showed on paper was that he had been put in command of troops "for the defense of Washington," and if anything went wrong here on the Antietam it was quite likely that Secretary Stanton would proceed against him for lawlessly exceeding his authority. McClellan wrote later that he fought the battles of South Mountain and the Antietam with a noose around his neck— which is to say that he fought, believing he would be executed for treason if he were beaten—a consideration hardly designed to make a bold, dashing fighter out of a man of McClellan's temperament.

  So he bided his time: studying, calculating, attending to details. Noon came and went. Clouds formed in the sky and there was a little breeze to make the day cooler, and the guns on the hills fell silent. One of McClellan's staff officers wrote that "nobody seemed to be in a hurry. . . . Corps and divisions moved as languidly to the places assigned them as if they were getting ready for a grand review instead of a decisive battle."2 McClellan rode from end to end of his lines, moving a detachment here and there into better position, endlessly watching the opposing heights. Once he detected a change in the position of a couple of Rebel batteries and conceived that Lee was regrouping his forces; that called for further delay, while additional surveys were made. Ammunition trains were coming up, and McClellan, always the good administrator, personally supervised the arrangements for supplying troops and batteries.

  As he perfected his plans he let himself create a mix-up in the chain of army command—unimportant enough, on the surface, but due to have far-reaching effects on the way the battle was fought.

  Somewhat informally, McClellan had recently grouped his army into three principal sub-commands, or wings. General Sumner, commander of the II Corps, had been given command over General Mansfield's XII Corps as well. Franklin had his own VI Corps and Porter's V Corps; and General Ambrose E. Burnside, who had joined on the march up from Washington, had the direction of Reno's old IX Corps and of Hooker's I Corps. In planning his attack, however, McClellan scrambled this grouping—partly, his staff whispered, at the urging of Joe Hooker, who considered that he could make a better fight and win more glory if he were out from under Burnside's control. At any rate, the attack on the extreme right had been entrusted to Hooker, who was to have Mansfield's corps in immediate support, with Sumner standing by to lend a hand if necessary. In Franklin's absence Porter was to hold the center and act as army reserve, and when Franklin came up he would be put in wherever he seemed to be needed most. Burnside was on the extreme left, facing the downstream bridge, where he would attack as soon as Hooker's drive was rolling well.

  Thus the new wing commands had completely fallen apart, and nobody in particular had general charge of anything. Hooker, theoretically under Burnside, was off on his own at the other end of the line. Mansfield, technically under Sumner, seemed to be temporarily attached to Hooker. Sumner, supposedly commanding a third of the army, had only his own corps and was to help Hooker, although Hooker was not empowered to give him any orders. And Burnside, who was new to the Army of the Potomac, was left to play a lone hand on the hardest front of all, attacking the bridge that crossed the Antietam under the overhanging hills to the south. All of the lines of responsibility had been cut, and if the next day's fighting was going to be co-ordinated in any way, the co-ordination would have to be provided by McClellan himself—and McClellan was a general who, like Lee, much preferred to leave the actual conduct of the fighting to his subordinates once a battle was begun.

  The arrangement promised to make Hooker the hero of the next day's fight, and so that general, always eager for distinction, was very happy about it. It didn't sit at all well with Burnside, however, and it unquestionably had a grave effect on the fighting his men were to do.

  There was to be a time when the Army of the Potomac would dislike and distrust Burnside intensely—not because he was personally objectionable, but because he presently developed an almost unfailing knack for bringing on defeat whenever he went into action. That time had not yet come, however, and in September 1862 he was immensely popular with the IX Corps, which knew him, and was generally respected by the rest of the army. Neither he nor the corps had been with the army very long, but both the general and the men brought a first-rate record in with them. Judging strictly by past performance, Burnside was a good man with the habit of success.

  In 1861 he had been a Rhode Island businessman of some prominence, a West Pointer who had resigned from the army because garrison life in peacetime seemed unbearably dull. He got back in quickly enough when Fort Sumter was fired on, and raised the first of Rhode Island's troops. Late in that first summer of the war he proposed that an amphibious expedition be fitted out to descend on the North Carolina sounds, taking possession of seacoast cities and forts, giving Jefferson Davis
a new front to defend, and closing the ports of entry for blockade runners. The suggestion was a good one and the administration accepted it, appointing Burnside to organize and lead the expedition. He got it under way early in January 1862, sailing from Hampton Roads with a heterogeneous fleet of transports and strong navy support.

  Everything worked out fine, and the expedition was a brilliant success. Burnside made a good impression even before the fleet sailed. In the job lot of transports that had been collected so hurriedly there were some remarkably unseaworthy old tubs, and the soldiers protested strongly about having to go to sea in them: they had signed up to face Rebel bullets, but they didn't want to be drowned. Burnside promptly ended all grumbling by moving himself and his headquarters staff off the fine new steamer that had been set aside for him and embarking the smallest and most rickety little vessel of the lot—and almost paid for it with his life when the fleet ran into a gale off Cape Hatteras and the little steamer came within an inch of foundering.3

  He seems to have been a very likable person, this Burnside. McClellan was very fond of him (until after the Antietam had been fought, anyhow) and used to write informal, chatty letters to him beginning "Dear Burn." Lincoln appears always to have retained a good deal of faith in him, even after Burnside had repeatedly demonstrated that it had been a military tragedy to give him a rank higher than colonel. One reason might have been that, with all his deficiencies, Burnside never had any angles of his own to play; he was a simple, honest, loyal soldier, doing his best even if that best was not very good, never scheming or conniving or backbiting. Also, he was modest; in an army many of whose generals were insufferable prima donnas, Burnside never mistook himself for Napoleon. Physically, he was impressive: tall, just a little stout, wearing what was probably the most artistic and awe-inspiring set of whiskers in all that be-whiskered army. He customarily wore a high, bell-crowned felt hat with the brim turned down and a double-breasted, knee-length frock coat, belted at the waist—a costume which, unfortunately, is apt to strike the modern eye as being very much like that of a beefy city cop of the 1880s.