by S. C. Gwynne
After his retreat from South Mountain, Lee had chosen the best defensive position he could find on short notice, on the flanks of the twelve-block rural town of Sharpsburg, about eight rolling country miles west of Turner’s Gap. He placed his men on a long, undulating ridge that ran from three miles north of the village to a mile and a half southeast of it. This was all high ground. Behind him, at a distance of roughly a mile at its nearest point, was the Potomac River. From the ridge the land sloped gently down and eastward in a swelling plateau of open pastures, cultivated fields, and woodlots to Antietam Creek, which ran generally about a mile west of the ridge. At its northernmost point, the line of ridges touched the Potomac; on the far south it met the westward-looping creek. Lee’s position behind Antietam Creek was in most ways a risky proposition. Its main advantages were the natural elevation of the ridge and the limited creek crossings available to the Union troops—four arched stone bridges—which could be swept by Lee’s batteries.
The disadvantages were striking, even to a casual observer. The most obvious weakness was that Lee had backed his army up against a major river, as Colonel Edward Porter Alexander of Lee’s staff pointed out, “with no bridge & only one ford, & that the worst one on the whole river.”1 He had in effect done exactly what John Pope had done—before the latter realized the egregiousness of his mistake and corrected it—in placing his army between the Rapidan and the Rappahannock a month before, except that Pope at least had access to a bridge. There was, moreover, only one road to Boteler’s Ford—the only nearby crossing—which ran along high bluffs for much of the two miles south from Sharpsburg and was so narrow at points that, as Alexander observed, “a horseman could not easily pass a wagon.”2 The ford itself was deep and rocky. “No army,” Alexander said, only a bit hyperbolically, “could retreat over such a road as that under fire.”3 Lee, an astute student of terrain who would have understood this as well as anyone, had presumably decided, with considerable contempt for his opponent’s abilities, that there was little chance that his army would be retreating across the Potomac under fire. Then there was the length of Lee’s line itself—more than four miles. Even with his full army—or what was left of it—he did not have enough manpower to adequately defend all of the ground from the Potomac to the Antietam. He thus had a built-in weakness from the start: his lines were stretched thin in places and his left was not really anchored on the Potomac at all. It was “in the air,” and in spite of the artillery Lee mounted on a northern hill, it would remain that way.4
For now the charade was all that mattered. Lee spread his paper-thin lines across a wide front and fired his guns at whatever Federals showed themselves on the other side of the creek, or at nothing in particular. He was openly and defiantly offering battle to McClellan, which, in view of McClellan’s intimate knowledge of Confederate plans, must have puzzled him. Jackson, McLaws, and Walker couldn’t possibly have arrived yet, could they? But a perplexed McClellan was a cautious and fearful McClellan, and that was precisely what Lee wanted. September 15 passed, and with it one of the truly spectacular military opportunities of the war. McClellan had told William Franklin earlier that he wanted to “cut the enemy in two and beat him in detail.” Here was that opportunity, or half of it, anyway, and he passed on it. He was again the victim of his own inflated estimate of Lee’s troop strength. He later testified that the rebels had about 100,000 men, instead of somewhat fewer than 40,000. His lieutenants were in rough agreement. His loyal friend and principal adviser Fitz John Porter pegged the number at 100,000 to 130,000, Edwin Sumner at 80,000.5 McClellan’s dithering wasn’t entirely without its advantages: it did give him more time to concentrate his available forces, including Franklin’s 6th Corps, for an attack.6
September 16 came, and with it yet another opportunity to crush Lee, and still the Union forces stayed put. McClellan busied himself with the things he loved best: reconnaissance, placing batteries, assigning bivouacs, checking on his supplies of food and ordnance. The pause allowed Jackson, who had taken his men on a “severe” forced march overnight, to join Lee’s battle line at midday, a mirror image of Lee’s dramatic arrival near Manassas. It must have given both men pleasure, in a purely tactical sense, to be able to again unite their forces in such a dramatic way under the noses of the enemy. In spite of their rough seventeen-mile journey, Jackson’s men were still flushed with victory when they arrived at Sharpsburg. For such a ragged, underfed lot, they were astoundingly cheerful. Bands played “Dixie,” while thousands of Confederate soldiers sang its words. “Such inspiring, soul-stirring music I never heard as the volume of harmony rolled and thundered through that little vale in the forest,” wrote William T. Poague, a gunner with Jackson’s Rockbridge Artillery. “It seemed to put new life into both men and animals . . . as we followed ‘Old Jack’ through the village. . . . We felt ready for anything our beloved General might undertake.”7 One wonders what the Yankee pickets, who had been told that the Confederate army was reeling from its defeat at South Mountain, in a panic and on the run, its generals wounded or dead, made of such high spirits.
Jackson seemed to be in a good mood, too, though as usual that did not mean a sudden burst of warm feeling toward his colleagues in the upper ranks. He had been feuding again with his general officers. On September 4, after he had personally countermanded A. P. Hill’s orders to his troops, which appeared to contradict his own, Hill had approached him in a fury, pulled his sword from its scabbard, turned the hilt toward Jackson, and said, “I submit my resignation, sir!” Jackson ignored the proffered sword and said quietly, “General Hill, consider yourself under arrest for disobedience of orders.” For the next several days Hill repeatedly asked Jackson to give him a written copy of the charges against him. Jackson refused. He informed Hill through an aide that should his case come before a court-martial, the charges would be furnished to him. This made Hill even madder. It was only on September 10—six days later—that Hill received permission to return to the command of his division. Still, Jackson would not drop the charges. His fight with Hill may not have been entirely the result of Jackson’s quirky style of command. Henry Kyd Douglas, for one, believed that the feisty, independent Hill, who hadn’t liked Jackson since their earliest days at West Point, had it coming to him.8 While in Frederick, Jackson placed another general, William E. Starke, in arrest for allowing his Louisiana troops to take goods from local shops without paying for them. When it turned out that the guilty parties were actually from the Stonewall Brigade, Jackson released Starke from arrest. But he never apologized or even noted his mistake.
In spite of his harsh treatment of his generals, Jackson could as usual be surprisingly kind, and even funny, in his own peculiar way, even under the immense pressure of the march from Harpers Ferry. When he arrived in Sharpsburg a local citizen invited him to breakfast. He declined, but the daughter of the house sent food to him anyway. Jackson, who was glad to get it, asked his aide Henry Kyd Douglas who the sender was.
“I dunno, General, but it was the fair one.”
“Well, as she has sent me my breakfast to the field, I will call her Miss Fairfield.”
Amused at this conceit, Jackson then took a pencil and wrote:
Sharpsburg, Sept. 16, 1862
Miss Fairfield:
I have received the nice breakfast, for which I am indebted to your kindness. Please accept my grateful appreciation of your hospitality.
Very Sincerely Yours,
T. J. Jackson 9
At 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of September 16, McClellan finally made his first, very tentative, move. Major General Joseph Hooker crossed Antietam Creek with his three-division, fourteen-thousand-man 1st Corps, swept around to the north end of Lee’s line, and advanced in what amounted to a reconnaissance in force. His batteries opened, and his infantry drove in the rebel skirmishers until the resistance stiffened, revealing the rough contours of the main Confederate line of resistance astride the north-to-south-running Hagerstown Pike. Hooker now knew more o
r less where the rebel line was, and there he stopped.10 Less happily, from a tactical standpoint, he had also revealed to Lee the position and direction of the opening attack of the Battle of Antietam the next morning.
• • •
Joe Hooker was the sort of general Abraham Lincoln was looking for. He was tall, good-looking, clean-shaven in a sea of military beards, forthright, transparently ambitious, and conspicuously brave. Though there were rumors of hard drinking and womanizing, his personal habits did not seem to interfere with his martial talents. He liked to lead from the front and had thus earned the moniker Fighting Joe. He had indeed fought hard and well in the peninsula campaign, which had earned him promotion. He had chafed under McClellan’s cautious leadership. At about dawn on September 17, mounted on a muscular, milk-white charger, he ordered the first attack of the Battle of Antietam. His objective: a slightly raised piece of open ground just east of the Hagerstown Pike, where, on the flank of a plain, foursquare German Baptist church—their habit of baptism by total immersion had led to their nickname, Dunkers—stood thick ranks of Confederate cannons. This was the heart of the Confederate left, the wing of Lee’s army that was under the command of Stonewall Jackson.
Hooker attacked after daybreak. His troops came straight at Jackson’s two divisions under Generals Alexander Lawton (taking the wounded Ewell’s place) and John R. Jones in a north-to-south assault across a half-mile-wide front. One Union division under Abner Doubleday moved along the axis of the turnpike near the West Woods; another, under James Ricketts, moved from the East Woods across a prim thirty-acre cornfield. With Doubleday were “those damned black hat fellers,” as the Stonewall Brigade called the men who would earn the name Iron Brigade on this battlefield.11 On they came, as big Union twenty-pounders detonated east of Antietam Creek, and Hooker’s guns fired first solid shot and exploding shell (shrapnel), then case (exploding spheres that shot a hundred bullets forward on detonation), and finally double-shotted canister from the front.12 From Nicodemus Hill on the west near the Potomac, artillery under Jeb Stuart poured in destructive fire from the Union flank, ripping holes in the Iron Brigade and others. Jackson’s battle line stood mostly on open ground, starting just north of the Dunker church and stretching half a mile from the West Woods through the southern part of the cornfield.
As the lines engaged, it seemed to the combatants as though the world had exploded into a storm of buzzing iron and lead. The bluecoats came ahead anyway with breathtaking resolve, striding forward in line, stopping, peering through the moving wall of white smoke, tearing cartridges with their teeth, loading, ramming, firing, and as often as not falling screaming to the ground. When the first of them emerged from the cornrows, a line of rebel infantry rose and dropped much of the line where it stood, as a scythe moves through wheat. A Confederate shell, landing in the midst of the 6th Wisconsin Regiment, exploding as it struck, took out as many as thirty men.13 The battle was as intimate as it was violent, fought at close range by men who could see each other clearly, a free-for-all in the choking fog and smoke and heat, with attacks and counterattacks coming from seemingly every direction. There was something fearless and primitive and elemental in the combat that morning, a kind of madness or possession, as soldiers left their humanity behind and became mere feral killing machines.
By 7:00 a.m., an hour into the fight, Jackson had fought Hooker to a horrific standstill. The losses sustained by both sides—measured as the percentage of a regiment that had fallen—were already unprecedented in the war. But the Confederates were starting to wobble. Division commander Lawton could feel it, and told Jackson as much. In response Jackson summoned John Bell Hood’s 2,300-man division of troops from Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas, generally considered the toughest fighters in Lee’s army. They had been in a reserve position behind the lines, where they had just been given their first rations in three days and were sitting down to enjoy them. Infuriated at the interruption, they marched to the front, and with the predominantly Texas Brigade in the lead and the weirdly barking, yipping, whirring noise of the rebel yell echoing across the killing ground, smashed into the Federals and drove them sharply back. The effect of Hood’s counterattack was stunning and immediate: the Federals reeled, turned, then split right and left for the cover of the woods, with Hood’s men in hot pursuit.
The fight raged in the cornfield and along the turnpike. It spilled into the East Woods and the West Woods, where men faced fire from several directions and there was more of that wild, fierce, close-range combat between men who, obeying some instinct that transcended all reason, would not run away. But Hood could not beat the Union army by himself. As his men rolled triumphantly into the northern end of the cornfield, resistance stiffened, and once again they were in that tornado of canister and minié balls, hearing the sickening dull thuds of lead and iron hitting flesh. The entire field by this time was shrouded in opaque, greasy smoke, in places so thick that the only things visible were the waving battle flags. At one point a Pennsylvania regiment took aim at the oncoming 1st Texas, resting their muskets on the lower rails of a fence and shooting at the Texans’ legs, which were all they could see.14 The Texans soon broke and retreated through the incessant and deafening musket fire, leaving an appalling 80 percent of their comrades lying on the ground.
Thus the prototype of surge and countersurge that defined the fighting that morning. The advances would start strong, out of musket range, with the full support of their main artillery. But as the men moved forward into the fray, several factors came into play. There was the inevitable loss of men to enemy fire; at Antietam this could be upward of half of a fighting unit. The advancing companies and regiments also became disorganized as terrain separated men or they became disoriented in the swirling smoke or, even more critically, lost their field commanders. As they approached the enemy, of course, they moved farther and farther away from their own artillery—which at some point could no longer fire without hitting them—and closer to the enemy’s shotgun-like canisters. And finally they actually hit the enemy’s defensive line itself, often stocked with fresh reserves. And then the momentum changed, and the enemy came on.15
After an hour of frenzied fighting on a field now washed in blood, Hooker’s and Jackson’s corps seemed less coherent fighting units than assemblages of human wreckage. Half of the Confederates in Lawton’s three brigades had been killed or wounded. Lawton himself had been wounded, one of his brigade commanders was dead, and eleven of fifteen regimental commanders were killed or wounded. A third of the men in Jackson’s old division were lying on the field. Their commander, Brigadier General John R. Jones, was wounded, and his replacement, William E. Starke, was dead. Hood lost 60 percent of his men. When he was asked where his command was, he replied, “Dead on the field.” On the Union side, Hooker’s 1st Corps lost 2,600 men, or a third of its strength. Hooker himself was wounded. One of his division commanders, Brigadier General James Ricketts, who had 3,150 men at his disposal at the beginning of the fight, could muster only 300, a combined result of casualties, straggling, and battlefield dislocations.16 Hooker’s own description of the fighting in the corn captures the effects of its animal violence:
In the time I am writing, every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few minutes before. It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battlefield.17
The 1st Corps was, for the moment, fought out. But the fight on the Confederate left was far from over. While Jackson had already used up his main reserve—Hood’s division—McClellan still had enormous firepower waiting to enter the battle. Onto the field now marched Major General Joseph Mansfield’s 12th Corps, which had been biding its time just north and east of the cornfield. Mansfield was a white-haired army lifer, an engineer by training who had never had a combat command and had lobbied incessantly for this one in the preceding months. He was commanding a corps that cons
isted mostly of the men who had fought with Nathaniel Banks in the valley. He should have been ordered to attack with Hooker; two full Federal corps might have turned the rebel left. But McClellan gave no such orders. This was to be the pattern of the day’s Union attacks: piecemeal and without coordination, thus failing to capitalize on the enormous Federal advantage in numbers.
As Hood’s attack lost steam, Mansfield’s 12th Corps advanced, driving the bloodied, exhausted rebels back, 7,200 fresh troops sweeping south over the same ground that had been fought over all morning. This was at about 7:30 a.m., half an hour after Hood’s slashing counterattack, and ninety minutes into the fighting. From his command post in the West Woods, Jackson worked furiously in the rising pandemonium to hold off disaster. He reformed scattered units, repositioned artillery, moved Stuart’s guns nearer to his main force, sent batteries to the rear to be refurbished, and brought up new supplies of ammunition.18 He replaced part of Lawton’s broken division with a brigade borrowed from D. H. Hill in the Confederate center, and deployed it across the cornfield. He brought Jubal Early’s brigade up from the flank and positioned it in the West Woods. He brought what was left of Hood’s division and set it up as a reserve on his right.
But the momentum had already swung hard in the Union’s favor. The 12th Corps seemed to move at will, driving not only the remnants of Jones, Lawton, and Hood, but also the borrowed brigades from D. H. Hill near the East Woods. Even worse, Jackson had no more troops to bring into the battle.19 He had foreseen this when he had first sent Hood forward, and had asked Lee for reinforcements as early as 7:00 a.m. Lee had answered that he would send him the divisions of McLaws and Walker. Those reinforcements had not yet arrived. The 12th Corps was now in possession of the battlefield, and most of the ground from the East Woods to the West Woods. Disaster suddenly loomed on the Confederate left. All that remained, it seemed, was for Colonel Andrew Grigsby’s Stonewall Brigade and Jubal Early’s brigade—maybe 1,400 men—to mount the rebels’ last stand. The only good news, had they been aware of it, was that both Union corps commanders, Mansfield and Hooker, were wounded, Hooker severely in the foot, and Mansfield mortally in the chest.