by John Waugh
It was now 1:00. Although Sturgis was across the creek, he was spent and out of ammunition. Instead of pushing on, Burnside decided to regroup. He would bring up a fresh division under Orlando Willcox for the push into Sharpsburg. For the next two hours activity seemed to stop all along the line as Burnside made ready. Nothing appeared to be happening; there was no federal follow-up from the bridge and the heights. The Confederates waited, and wondered when the hammer would fall. All of the rebels knew A. P. Hill was coming. If the Union troops waited long enough, he might yet get there in time.
As the moments ticked on and nothing happened on his left, McClellan sent Burnside still another message. Burnside only sent word back that he thought he could hold the bridge.
McClellan exploded: “He should be able to do that with five thousand men; if he can do no more I must take the remainder of his troops and use them elsewhere in the field.”14 McClellan had never spoken so harshly of the friend who was dearer to him than any other on earth.
At 3:00 in the afternoon Burnside was finally ready, and his troops, united now with Rodman and outnumbering Jones’s ragged division nearly five to one, drove toward Sharpsburg. On they drove, across the rolling terrain of cornfields and haystacks, over fences—many of them of stone with rebel riflemen crouched behind nearly every one. Artillery boomed across the littered field from both sides.
Of the oncoming federal tide Henry Douglas said: “The earth seemed to tremble beneath their tread. It was a splendid and fearful sight.… The artillery tore, but did not stay them.”15
A charging Union soldier wrote that “the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot. The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment … the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”16
Neighbor Jones’s ragged rebel line ranged itself behind every cover capable of protecting life. “We had placed our guns through the board fence,” a Confederate soldier wrote, “drawn back the hammers, and stood with fingers on triggers, ready to fire as soon as the enemy emerged from the corn.”17
“Never did I feel … so much solicitude for the safety of our army,” the soldier wrote, “for I knew that no help could be expected from our left, as our troops on that part of the field had been fought to exhaustion.”18 Tom Jackson, always thinking offensively, reconnoitered quickly on the Confederate left to see if he could mount a counterattack and take the pressure off the embattled right. But even this most willing of attackers could see it was no use.
The rebels on the right were now standing up against the heavy Union onslaught on heart alone—“more from a blind dogged obstinacy than anything else,” one soldier said, giving them back “fire for fire, shot for shot, and death for death. But it was a pin’s point against Pelides’ spear.”19
A. P. Hill’s division—what was left of it; nearly half of his five thousand men had dropped out in the hard, hot march—plunged into the cool waters of the Potomac at Boteler’s Ford at about 2:30 in the afternoon. The current in the river was swift and the ledges of rock, jutting out at sharp angles, made the passage difficult and painful. Wading it as rapidly as they could, Hill’s men climbed dripping up the slippery bank on the other side and broke into a trot. Hill galloped ahead, looking for Lee.20
For Lee the afternoon had been anxious and fretful. He knew that everything now depended on A. P. Hill and whether he got there on time. But time was running out.
Suddenly a clump of riders on sweat-lathered horses appeared before him. At its head was the slender, red-bearded general in the red battle shirt. Lee had never seen a more welcome sight. He embraced Hill, in as much a show of emotion as he was ever likely to exhibit, and sent him immediately to confer with Neighbor Jones.21
Hill found Jones, who gave him information that his ignorance of the ground required. The two former classmates agreed on how Hill would place his brigades when they arrived—they were still an hour away. Until then it would be up to Jones and the artillery to hold back the federal wave.22
The federal army was now virtually at the doorsteps of Sharpsburg. A few federal flags appeared on the hill in the rear of the town nearly astraddle Lee’s only avenue of escape. The town was all but enveloped in flames. Flocks of terrified pigeons flapped in confusion through the clouds of smoke, driven from the rooftops by the screaming and bursting shells.23
As Lee stared at the Union line plunging toward him under cover of the smoke, a battery of North Carolina artillery pounded past. It had just been resupplied with ammunition and was galloping again toward the front. Lee, seeing the telescope carried by its commander, Lieutenant John A. Ramsay, called out to him.
Pointing, he asked, “What troops are those?”
Ramsay drew his telescope from its case and offered it to Lee. The general held up two splinted and bandaged hands. The day after Second Manassas he had painfully injured them both in an accident with his horse.24
“Can’t use it,” he said to Ramsay. “What troops are those?”
Ramsay dismounted, adjusted the glass, and looked.
“They are flying the United States flag,” he said.
Lee pointed at another body of troops nearly at right angles from the others and said, “What troops are those?”
Ramsay peered again through his glass and said, “They are flying the Virginia and Confederate flags.”
“It is A. P. Hill, from Harpers Ferry,” said Lee.
Help—perhaps salvation—was at hand.
Lee ordered Ramsay to unlimber his guns on a little knoll on the right of the road and to commence firing at the troops he had first identified.
Ramsay hesitated. “General Lee,” he said, “as soon as we fire we will draw the enemy’s fire.”
“Never mind me,” Lee replied.
Ramsay’s first shell exploded in the middle of the Union line, the next a little to the right of the first, and after five shots the enemy had evaporated.
“Well done!” Lee exclaimed, and rode away with new hope. Hill had come, not a moment too soon.25
The Union signal officers on the summit of Red Hill had the best seat in the house. They could see for miles. The entire Confederate line lay before them in panoramic display from end to end. All afternoon they had been sending down messages about all they saw. They first noticed the heavy dust rising out of the south earlier in the day, and had alerted McClellan. At about 3:00 in the afternoon signal officer J. Gloskioski sent a message to Burnside.
“Look out well on your left,” he warned, “the enemy are moving a strong force in that direction.”26
This cryptic first federal notice of the arrival of A. P. Hill’s division to the Antietam battlefield was sent about the time Burnside was hurling his corps at Neighbor Jones in a final lunge toward Sharpsburg. It was either not received, received but not looked at, or looked at and ignored in the chaos of the moment. At any rate, nobody took it to heart. Down on the battlefield itself a few of Burnside’s troops noticed that there was a force approaching on their left flank. But it had a blue aura to it—our own boys, they thought.27
The blue aura advancing toward them was disaster, wearing captured Harpers Ferry uniforms. It was the resurrection of Lee’s army arriving dead tired but battle-eager from seventeen miles of hard marching in the hot sun at the tip of Hill’s prodding saber. It was another product of Robert E. Lee’s prestidigitation, a rabbit pulled from the hat, arriving “as if summoned by the lamp of Aladdin,”28 seeming to spring, as James Longstreet said, “from the earth.”29
As his brigades stormed onto the battlefield, Hill hurled them into the flank of Burnside’s corps. James Archer, dragging himself from his ambulance, led the assault, his men screaming their eerie rebel yell.
“Just then,” said one of Jones’s grateful soldiers, “we saw another and another Confederate brigade rise to their feet and advance in the same direction.… then there was a grand, a wild Confederate yell and charge along the whole line.”30
What Hill’s men saw as they thre
w themselves at the advancing federal force would have given them pause had they stopped a moment to think about it. In their front, one of them wrote, “we could see the blue lines of the Federals, moving to the attack over the smooth, round hills, marching in perfect order, with banners flying and guns and bayonets glittering in the sun.” It was an awesome sight.31
Henry Douglas, who could at that moment claim some credit for Hill being a free man, watched as three of his brigades slammed into the exposed Union flank, “taking no note of their numbers.” Douglas could hardly contain his awe: “The blue line staggered and hesitated, and hesitating, was lost. At the critical moment A. P. Hill was always at his strongest.… Again … as at Manassas, Harpers Ferry, and elsewhere, [he] had struck with the right hand of Mars.”32 The effect this right hand of Mars had on the left wing of Burnside’s corps was to “roll it up like a scroll.”33
A marvelous transformation took place before their eyes. “One moment,” a Confederate high private wrote, “the lines of blue are steadily advancing everywhere and sweeping everything before them; another moment and all is altered.… Still forward came the wave of gray, still backward receded the billows of blue, heralded by warning hiss of the bullets, the sparkling of the rifle flashes, the purplish vapor settling like a veil over the lines, the mingled hurrahs and wild yells, and the bass accompaniment … of the hoarse cannonading.”34
One Union general was later to call Hill’s march and thunderbolt attack “a brilliant feat of arms.”35 The adjutant of one of the attacking North Carolina regiments was to put it more fundamentally. Burn-side’s corps, he said, “should have swept us off the earth, the mere handful that we were to them in numbers. How Hill’s division stood before them was wonderful, but it had gone there to fight and was too tired to run.”36
As Burnside’s corps stumbled back to the banks of the Antietam, the Confederate pursuit stopped at the bluffs above the bridge that had been such an obstacle to the Union cause all that morning. The two armies were spent.
“Nature has its limits,” said the Carolina adjutant, “and we had reached ours, with fearful sacrifice.”37 On the other end of the Confederate line, where the morning’s fighting had left them exhausted, the sounds coming from the right told the whole story They knew Hill had arrived. General Walker knew it instantly when the sound of musketry, which had almost ceased, roared out again louder than ever. “For thirty minutes,” he wrote, “the sound of firing came steadily from the same direction; then it seemed to recede eastward, and finally to die away almost entirely. We knew then that Hill was up; that the Federals had been driven back, and that the Confederate army had narrowly escaped defeat.”38
Darkness fell mercifully all along the bloody battle line. For the men on both sides who had fought it, the end came as a God-sent relief. “The sun seemed almost to go backwards,” one of them said of the day, “and it appeared as if night would never come.”39 Yet it seemed to have settled nothing. It had been a bloody standoff. The two armies lay basically where they had lain twelve hours earlier, minus more than twenty-three thousand dead, wounded, captured, or missing between them—the bloodiest day of this bloody war.
Neighbor Jones put it this way: “Night had now come on, putting an end to the conflict, and leaving my command in possession of the ground we had held in the morning, with the exception of the mere bridge.”40 That “mere bridge” had been the key to the whole day. But for it, there might have been an altogether different ending. But for it, the man in the red battle shirt might never have come up in time. But for it, Lee might not that night have had an army.
That night, over the cries and moans of the thousands of Federals and Confederates who still lay wounded and dying on the field, some Union soldiers sang a wistful song:
Do they miss me at home? Do they miss me?
’Twould be an assurance most dear
To know that this moment some loved one
Were saying, “I wish he were here,”
To feel that the group at the fireside
Were thinking of me as I roam;
Oh, yes, ’twould be joy beyond measure
To know that they miss me at home.41
David Strother listened as messengers came and went to McClellan’s headquarters through the night. Strother had watched all that day in mounting distress as McClellan threw his divisions at the enemy piecemeal instead of hurling all of his overwhelming might simultaneously on Lee’s cornered army. McClellan had held a good part of his force in reserve on the battlefield. And he had left his classmate, Darius Couch, standing by with an unfought division near Harpers Ferry.
Strother despaired further when he heard McClellan tell an officer sometime between midnight and dawn that they were to hold the ground they occupied, but were not to attack without further orders. The day wore on and no further orders came and the opportunity to destroy Lee’s army, as Lincoln had so ardently hoped, was lost.
“The empty name of victory,” Strother wrote sadly in his diary—and it had hardly been victory—“is not sufficient; we needed a result crushing and conclusive, and have failed to obtain it.”42
All the next day after the battle of Antietam, Lee waited defiantly for McClellan to resume the attack, too spent and wasted and too few in numbers to launch an assault of his own. When the day passed and no attack came, he resolved to wait no longer. McClellan could only get stronger and Lee could look for no increase in strength. All the day before he had fought an army twice his size and the odds were not going to get any better. So under the cover of night he took his army back over the Potomac and out of Maryland. McClellan did not try to stop him.
What McClellan had won was not the decisive victory he might have, but a standoff in which his chief claim to victory was possession of an abandoned field.43
But it satisfied him. He wrote Nelly the day after the fight that “those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly & that it was a masterpiece of art.” The first thing he did on the morning of the nineteenth when he found the field abandoned, was wire her again: “Our victory complete.”44
That same afternoon he wired Halleck: “I have the honor to report that Maryland is entirely freed from the presence of the enemy, who have been driven across the Potomac. No fears need now be entertained for the safety of Pennsylvania.”45
The more he thought about it, the more elated he became. As he explained it to Nelly the next day, “with a beaten and demoralized army” he had “defeated Lee so utterly, & saved the North so completely” that he would now demand that those two fools, Stanton and Halleck, be removed. “No success is possible with them.…” he said. “I have shown that I can fight battles & win them! I think my enemies [the ones behind him] are pretty effectively killed by this time! May they remain so!!”46
For A. P. Hill, some things had been settled satisfactorily and some hadn’t. He had made an unbelievable march—the most dramatic of the war—and a brilliant attack. He had redeemed an old classmate, Neighbor Jones, in his hour of greatest peril. He had frustrated the grand strategy of a roommate he dearly loved, Little Mac, and denied him the clear-cut victory he had so desperately needed. He had ruined the afternoon of another classmate whom he also dearly loved, Burnside, and the $8,000 loan was still unpaid. And he was still technically under arrest by yet another classmate, Old Jack, whom he didn’t love at all.
But as Hill now knew about life, you can’t have everything. It was enough to have saved an army.
The Night
the General
Was Fired
It was that Confederate army, still in front of McClellan, that bothered Lincoln—the fact that it existed at all, that it had not been destroyed.
At Antietam, McClellan seemed content to have driven Lee from northern soil and saved Maryland and Pennsylvania. Lincoln wished his generals would get the idea out of their heads that this constituted victory. The president believed the whole country North and South to be Union soil.1
It was
enough of a victory, however, to persuade Lincoln that he could now issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he had been keeping in his desk awaiting a change of fortune on the battlefield. But he grieved for what might have been.
In the field, David Strother saw yet another opportunity to redeem what might have been. September 22 began in fog, which lifted to reveal a day fine and warm and clear. Lee’s weakened army lay in front of them near Shepherdstown. It was an open invitation to attack, to do the job they had failed to do at Antietam. But alas, Strother had to write in his diary that night that it was not to be: “This magnificent army, thoroughly equipped and supplied, full of courage and confidence, is to stand on the defensive before its half-starved, defeated, and disorganized adversary across the river. Adieu my budding hopes, which like Jonah’s gourd, have withered in a night!”2
By now McClellan had noticed a disturbing fact. Nobody in Washington had praised him for his victory. “Not yet even have I a word from anyone in Washn about the battle of Antietam,” he wrote Nelly on September 29. All he had from them was more faultfinding. It was just another bitter sign. And now there was the president’s Emancipation Proclamation, “an accursed doctrine,” in McClellan’s view. Moreover, Stanton and Halleck were still in office. He was depressed and disgusted.3
He was also not moving. And this depressed and disgusted Lincoln, who looked at the missed opportunity somewhat as Strother looked at it. So on the first day of October the president drove up to Antietam to see the general.
McClellan had written Halleck late in September that he didn’t believe his army was now in condition to undertake another campaign or bring on another battle; that he intended to hold it where it was now; that if Lee’s army was considerably reinforced, and his own wasn’t, “it is possible that I may have too much on my hands in the next battle.”4