“A great deal of confusion and delay was the consequence, which greatly embarrassed the Medical Department; and this embarrassment was increased by the fact that cars loaded with supplies were, on some occasions,‘switched off ’ and left for some time (when their arrival was all-important) on the side of the road, to make way for other stores. Some of the articles ordered, I have been informed, never left the railroad depot in Baltimore; they certainly never reached Frederick,” wrote Letterman.5 The scarcity of supplies reaching Letterman alarmed Sanitary Commission agents. One estimated Letterman had less than one-tenth the amount of supplies he judged necessary for battle.6
To the west of McClellan’s force, South Mountain separated the two armies. More a ridgeline running north and south than a single mountain, it was largely barren. The trees had been stripped to feed nearby foundries. Scattered “wood lots” remained, relatively small stands of trees that farmers carefully harvested for fuel, fencing, and building material. Few trees were more than ten inches in diameter (the ideal size for fencerail splitting), and most of the undergrowth had been eaten by grazing livestock. A dry summer that year had produced brittle vegetation and many of the seasonal creeks had little water flowing in them.
The Army of the Potomac had to cross South Mountain at several points, principally through Turner’s, Fox’s, and Crampton’s Gaps, about seven miles apart. The army then would drop down into Pleasant Valley, cross Antietam Creek, and attack Lee at Sharpsburg. Lee’s first line of defense stood at the gaps in South Mountain. Behind it Lee had positioned 15,000 troops in the Sharpsburg area, and commanded another 15,000 attacking a Union garrison at Harpers Ferry on the Potomac River, about a day’s march from Sharpsburg.
On September 14, twelve days after McClellan and Letterman had resumed their commands, three corps of the Army of the Potomac attacked Confederate positions on South Mountain. Battles in the three gaps stretched into the night as Union troops fought up a 300-foot barren and rocky slope toward Confederate positions on high ground. Confederate troops, hunkered down behind roadside and property-line stone walls, could see and hear the Union troops approach across farm fields and up the slopes long before they were within range. One assault wave followed another as Union soldiers fell dead or wounded until sunset. As Union forces finally neared the crest, their casualties mounted. Each side totaled nearly 2,000 casualties after a single day’s fighting that stretched into one of the few night battles of the Civil War.
Letterman had ordered the medical directors of the three engaged corps to secure hospitals in Middletown, a small town four miles from the battle. As he often demonstrated, he remained mindful of war’s impact on civilians, noting “churches and other buildings were taken as far as was necessary, and as little inconvenience as possible to the citizens.”7 He particularly favored the large barns that proliferated in the region, noting greater ventilation had a direct effect on patient health. Straw and water supplies also were critical.
Letterman monitored South Mountain battle reports from his surgeons at Middletown, Crampton’s Gap, and from Burkittsville where many patients had been taken after first being treated in barns and buildings closer to the battlefield. As darkness fell, he met with McClellan and received a battlefield status report in what became his first full day of combat after thirteen years in the army.
It was the first day of a new life for Jonathan Letterman. He no longer had direct control over the wounded in his charge. The vast scale of the Army of the Potomac required dependence on a long chain of medical officers, beginning with each corps’s medical director, extending through surgeons in field hospitals, and reaching the stretcher bearer who first made contact with a wounded man. He became dependent on reports from line officers on the battlefield and surgeons in field hospitals that sometimes required instant reassessment and new orders as the enemy continued firing. The test of every officer came when the strength or surprise of the enemy forced unexpected changes to battle plans carefully crafted before the first shot was fired.
By midnight, the Union army had taken control of Turner’s Gap to the north and stood poised to overrun Crampton’s Gap at dawn. Letterman had watched some of the fighting from a hospital. Although responsible for dozens of aid stations and makeshift hospitals treating hundreds of wounded men with more probably not yet found on the mountain, he found beauty in what he saw. “And when the sun went down, the continual flashing of musketry from General Gibbon’s brigade (as it pushed up the valley leading to the pass from which we wished to dislodge the enemy), making darkness visible, adding greatly to the beauty of the scene.”8
If Letterman was inspired by night fighting, General Lee had to be disappointed. His troops had lost control of Turner’s Gap. Retreat from Maryland might be necessary. Then he learned Crampton’s Gap in the south appeared ready to fall. If that happened, advancing Union troops would be in a position to threaten his 15,000 men at Harpers Ferry a few miles further south as well. But when General Stonewall Jackson informed Lee that he believed he could take Harpers Ferry the next day, Lee decided to remain in Sharpsburg, await Jackson’s reinforcements from Harpers Ferry, and confront the Army of the Potomac. With Potomac River nearby, Lee was narrowing his limited retreat options by deciding to stay in Sharpsburg. If McClellan attacked in earnest the morning of September 15, his troops might not be able to hold long enough for Jackson’s reinforcements to arrive.
The next morning, Union forces poured through the mountain gaps and into Pleasant Valley. They reached the east side of Antietam Creek and stopped. Across the river, Lee had deployed his 10,000 men in three concentrations on the eastern edge of Sharpsburg. One concentration was in the north near a droughtstunted cornfield surrounded by small woodlots. Another was positioned near the Dunker Church in the center. A third was directly opposite a bridge that crossed Antietam Creek slightly south of Sharpsburg. Union troops were positioned to the east, on the far side of farm fields, rolling hills, small groves, and thickets. By late afternoon both armies had settled on either side of Antietam Creek, across a six-mile front.
The afternoon breeze carried the smell of imminent battle. The trees whispered as leaves lost their grip on summer and rode the warm, late-summer wind to the ground. Confederate troops were located in stands of trees, behind five- and six-rail farmers’ fences, along sunken roads that separated farm fields, and among the trees that snaked atop seasonal creek beds. They could hear tens of thousands of unseen Union soldiers preparing for battle, less than a mile away.
A few miles to the east, Letterman stood on the crest of a hill that overlooked Antietam Creek and the battlefield further to the west. He finally knew where men would fall wounded. He could finally calculate how they would have to be evacuated from the battlefield and where hospitals would have to be established in nearby hamlets and on farms. Surgeons and personnel had to be assigned, ambulance units had to be dispersed along anticipated routes of travel, and supplies had to be brought forward to the churches, farmhouses, mills, and barns that were being converted into aid stations and hospitals. All this had to be accomplished within the day and in a region Letterman had never seen before.
Letterman passed through Boonsboro in the morning and Keedysville in the afternoon, two small towns at or near farmcountry crossroads. Both were less than five miles from the likely battlefield. He identified hospital sites, reliable supplies of water, and assigned personnel for their establishment. He ordered them to “choose barns well provided with hay and straw, as preferable to houses, since they were better ventilated, and enabled Medical officers to attend a greater number of wounded—to place the wounded in the open air near the barns, rather than in badly constructed houses—and to have the medical supplies taken to the points indicated. These directions were generally carried into effect, but the hospitals were not always beyond the reach of the enemy’s guns.”9 He was short of tents but wasn’t overly worried due to the warm weather. Mid-September weather in Maryland typically reached the upper seventies during the
day and often settled in the fifties at night.
In search of additional intelligence, McClellan dallied a second day on September 16, as early morning fog blanketed the area, allowing the lead elements of Lee’s force from Harpers Ferry to arrive in Sharpsburg. Although McClellan had lost the initiative his men had earned by crossing South Mountain, his forces still outnumbered Lee’s by a factor of two to one. McClellan’s battle plan called for committing approximately 50,000 men and holding 30,000 in reserve. Letterman spent the day riding throughout Pleasant Valley in search of additional hospital sites. He skirted wheat fields nearly ready for harvest, orchards, and herds of grazing cattle. Hilltop farmhouses offered sweeping views and improved ventilation but also were inviting targets for the enemy’s artillery corps. Rolling hills afforded convenient aid station locations on the lee side, close to the fighting. Deeply rutted roads made patient transport to hospital barns painful but possible.
Late in the day, Letterman returned to McClellan’s headquarters at the Pry House, a two-story brick farmhouse built in 1844 on a large farm east of Antietam Creek. Owned by Phillip and Elizabeth Pry, the redbrick hilltop farmhouse was a tall, narrow landmark. Staircases at both ends of the narrow, two-room-wide home creaked under every user. Ten windows on the west and east sides provided panoramic views and access to afternoon breezes.
A few paces west from the house to the western edge of the hill provided a distant, nearly level view of the elevated farming landscape between Antietam Creek’s west bank and Sharpsburg. Letterman and McClellan could see Dunker Church, which would become the center of the battlefield, but could not see Lee’s troops deployed on the far side of ridges. They would have to rely on couriers and the signal corps with reports of fighting in the cornfield to the north and what became known as Burnside Bridge to the south.
Letterman established an operating room on the ground floor for officers and recovery rooms upstairs. His staff converted a massive barn slightly down the hill into the position’s main hospital for enlisted men. If its 3,200 square feet proved inadequate, Letterman’s staff could erect tents on the farm’s 140 sloping acres.
The ambulance system Letterman had first organized two months earlier had effectively evacuated the wounded out of Turner’s, Fox’s, and Crampton’s Gaps on September 14. With the Army of the Potomac set for the attack on Sharpsburg, Letterman deployed his resources accordingly. With 300 medical department wagons available as ambulances and for supplies (one per 200 men) he was relatively well supplied. He had overcome a lack of hospital organization by decentralizing his medical command and relying on professional military doctors he trusted. “We were practically quite free from control, in the sense of direction,” assistant surgeon Alfred Woodhull later wrote of Antietam. “At first it depended upon the lack of organization . . . later it followed because we were regulars . . . I do think it was assumed that, as we were intelligent men who had been carefully selected and were living in an atmosphere of discipline, we could be depended on to look out for the services in a matterof-fact way; while the volunteers, even after a year’s life under canvas, required supervision and direction.”10
Letterman had used McClellan’s delay to organize a vast network of nearly 100 hospitals in barns, farmhouses, stands of trees, churches, and large public buildings that supported the three commands that McClellan had positioned for attack. General Joseph Hooker commanded approximately 8,000 men in the north and would attack through the woods and cornfield. He had hospitals at White House, the Middlekauf house, the Joseph Poffenberger house, and other farms to the rear. General Edwin Sumner in the center had approximately 15,000 men on the front line in his command. He would launch an attack toward Dunker Church on the east side of Sharpsburg and had hospitals at Keedysville, Letterman’s Pry House, and in other farmhouses in support. In the South, General Ambrose Burnside engaged approximately 9,000 soldiers. Burnside had the only command east of Antietam Creek, so he faced the prospect of taking a heavily defended, narrow bridge. Hospitals in nearby farmhouses and at Locust Springs in the hills to the rear would handle the inevitable casualties.11
Drizzle dampened the Pry House as Letterman prepared for battle at dawn on September 17. As the sky lightened, it faded to a steady mist. At 5:00 a.m. the Confederates heard General Hooker’s men moving south through the North Woods toward a thirty-acre cornfield, where many of General Stonewall Jackson’s 7,000 men waited on the far side. The cornfield, sunken roads between farm fields, and farmers’ woodlots gave the Rebels secure cover. The cornfield provided illusionary safety to advancing Union troops. Although the undulating ground and sparse rock outcrops provided some shelter, when Hooker’s men entered the field enemy musket and artillery fire erupted. Approximately 15,000 soldiers blended into a chaotic mosaic of gunfire, explosions, and screams.
Artillery fire, called “death missiles” by some, rained down on the Union troops from Confederate artillery positions on Nicodemus Heights, less than half a mile to the west. The savagery shredded cornstalks, tree trunks, and soldiers. Confederate and Union soldiers fell by the hundreds, sometimes a few yards apart, while the cacophony of gunfire swallowed the cries of the wounded. In one hour, more than half of General Jackson’s command was killed or wounded.12 Both sides reinforced units that had been decimated in a few hours’ fighting. At about 8:00 a.m. Hooker suffered a severe foot wound. His command’s losses mounted by the thousands with each passing hour. Many lay stranded in the cornfield and nearby woods. After three hours’ fighting, Letterman faced 8,700 casualties on the battlefield.
At 9:00 a.m. one of the deadliest few minutes in American history unfolded. The cornfield changed hands several times as Union soldiers pushed south and then were repulsed by advancing Confederates as bodies fell upon each other. When Major General John Sedgwick led his men into a deadly trap, the “West Woods Massacre” bloodied the soil. In twenty minutes’ time, 2,000 men fell dead or wounded. After four hours’ fighting, Jonathan Letterman had become responsible for more than 10,000 casualties.
The intensely private Letterman never revealed his personal reaction to knowing 10,000 bleeding men depended upon how and when he might make his next decision—a decision that could determine whether a soldier had a chance at survival. A surgeon might be hoping that the next shipment of medical supplies would be sent to his hospital. A wounded soldier might be wondering whether enough stretcher bearers would be sent into his stand of trees so that he would be found in his nest of rocks before he bled to death. A stretcher bearer might wonder if he’d have to search for wounded through the night, his lantern making him an easy target for enemy sharpshooters. Nearly all of them depended on a medical director they had never met and who had never endured the heat of battle command.
By 10:00 a.m. spotters at Pry House and couriers from the battlefield reported the massive losses to Letterman. Assistant Surgeon Benjamin Howard rode from one field hospital to the next, assessing the damage and giving messages to McClellan’s couriers as they rode back to the Pry House. Letterman faced thousands of wounded, some being treated at aid stations in gullies and in stands of trees, with hundreds more screaming for help while lying on barren ground and alongside farm roads. As the battlefield became a mile wide, Letterman knew some of the medical reports he received were at least an hour old. Regardless, he ordered some of the ambulances he had assembled at Pry House down the hill, across Antietam Creek, and north toward the field hospitals that were already filled with wounded from the cornfield. He had to get hundreds of wounded men out of frontline aid stations and hospitals if the stations were to be able to receive thousands more patients later in the day. Soon fighting would erupt in the center of the front line, near Dunker Church and along Sunken Road.
Confederate generals James Longstreet and D. H. Hill had positioned troops along one of the area’s many farm roads that sometimes were up to eight feet below the farm fields on either side. The equivalent of a broad, flat-bottom trench, they provided ideal protection for Confederate tr
oops as exposed Union soldiers advanced toward them over the crest of barren farm fields. Unfettered Confederate fields of crossfire would make it nearly impossible to miss the vulnerable attackers who would be tightly bunched with both flanks exposed. Thousands of attackers and defenders would collide along a 1,000-yard stretch of what became known as the Sunken Road in the center of the Antietam battlefield.
Second corps division commander William French led more than 5,000 men onto a slaughter field. Several waves of attacks proved futile, producing 1,700 battlefield casualties. In twenty minutes of wicked crossfire, the 15th Massachusetts Volunteers lost 330 men, more than half of its fighting force. In less than half an hour, Letterman’s aid stations nearby faced another 298 wounded soldiers, most of whom had to be evacuated off the battlefield under enemy fire. By the time the attacks and counterattacks ebbed, McClellan had lost 3,000 more men in the area surrounding Sunken Road, a blood-soaked path that became known as Bloody Lane.
At midday, the Confederate forces were running low on ammunition. Union army units that had attacked Sunken Road from an elevated position had achieved a minimal advance after losing thousands of men to deafening volleys of enemy fire. Smoke hung in the morning air. Shortly after noon, the Confederates withdrew from Sunken Road, now a stretch of barren dirt covered with dead and twitching bodies. The retreat created a gap in the center of the Confederate defense. But again McClellan failed to take advantage of an opportunity that had come at the cost of thousands of lives. He ordered his exhausted and shell-shocked men to hold their position.
By 1:00 p.m.fighting between 13,000 troops in the cornfield’s vicinity had produced 2,900 dead and wounded Union soldiers. The pressure on Letterman’s ambulance system and network of aid stations had become relentless after a half-day’s fighting. Meanwhile, the Union and Confederate positions along Sunken Road tactically remained unchanged.
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