by Bruce Catton
Innumerable rumors had been coming in, but they were next to useless. Peaceful civilians who saw a scouting detachment were apt to magnify it into an army corps when they reported it, and the nervous alarms they sent back were sure to be garbled in transmission. The news McClellan had been getting from beyond the mountain proved nothing except that there were a lot of Rebels over there somewhere and that the Union folk in the area were almighty worried. He had his cavalry forward trying to locate the enemy, but every road they took led them straight up against Jeb Stuart's patrols. Rebel cavalry had the gaps in the mountain well covered, and it would take more than Yankee cavalry to open those gaps. A forward lunge by the army itself would of course send Stuart's cavalry flying, but in the absence of any knowledge about Lee's position and intentions it seemed to McClellan that it would be dangerous to make such a lunge. The blow might take the army into the wrong place and enable Lee to go rampaging off unopposed, doing fatal damage among the rich and nearly defenseless cities of the North. Up to this moment Lee had all the advantage.
Now, in a twinkling, this advantage had passed from Lee to McClellan. Lee's Special Orders No. 191, which had been issued just four days ago, told precisely what the Confederate Army was doing and where it was situated. Right now it was in the act of gobbling up that isolated garrison at Harper's Ferry. Stonewall Jackson and his command had been detached from the army and sent back into Virginia, roundabout, to come up on Harper's Ferry from the south. The division of General A. P. Hill was with him. General John G. Walker, commanding another Rebel division, had also gone below the Potomac to approach the town from the east—he was to make for Loudoun Heights, a little mountain that rises on the eastern bank of the Shenandoah, where it joins the Potomac, and overlooks the little town where John Brown once raised the flag of slave revolt. Two more Confederate divisions under General Lafayette McLaws were descending on Harper's Ferry from the north and were to occupy the lofty ridge of Maryland Heights, on the north side of the Potomac, whence they could look right down the throats of the Union garrison. The rest of the Confederate Army—Longstreet's command, plus the division of D. H. Hill, together with the reserve artillery and the supply trains—was to wait at Boonsboro, a little town on the National Road just beyond South Mountain. When Harper's Ferry had been duly captured everybody was to head north and join up with Lee and Longstreet, either at Boonsboro or at Hagerstown, a dozen miles up the road.
There it was, all spelled out, and McClellan had it right on his desk. He was the beneficiary of the greatest security leak in American military history—the only one that ever finally affected the outcome of a great war.
Harper's Ferry, of course, was doomed. It was in the bottom of a soup bowl, and once the Rebels got up on the rim, there would be no stopping them. The place had always been indefensible, and Halleck's refusal to order the garrison out when there was time looked sillier than ever now. But quite unintentionally Halleck had baited a trap, and Lee was stepping right into it. His pause to capture this outpost (he banked heavily on McClellan's extreme caution) was giving McClellan the most dazzling opportunity any Northern general was to have throughout the whole length of the war.
For Lee's army was at this moment completely scattered, and McClellan, his own army united, was closer to the scattered pieces than those pieces were to each other. Lee was entirely at his mercy. There was nothing to keep the Army of the Potomac from breaking through the mountain wall and stamping out those separated segments of Lee's army one at a time. The Army of Northern Virginia could be destroyed, which would win the war overnight, and it could be done by a man whom the radicals in Washington were proclaiming a disloyalist who did not want to win!
There was just one catch in it. McClellan would have to move fast. Those orders would be out of date before long. They were four days old already, and the Rebel army could do a power of marching in four days, as sundry Northern generals had found out. The door was wide open, but it was likely to swing shut quickly. If McClellan was to take advantage of his opportunity he had no time to spare. Every minute might count.
And yet, actually, the situation was even better than McClellan supposed. Having given him this break, the fates were providing him with a little extra bulge to allow for contingencies. Lee's logistics were a trifle off, and the snatch at Harper's Ferry was taking longer than expected. Special Orders No. 191 did not give the time schedule, but Lee had anticipated that the job would be finished by now. The various elements had begun their march on September 10; by the twelfth, it had been believed, Jackson would be taking possession of Bolivar Heights, the long ridge that dominates Harper's Ferry from the south, Walker would be in position across the Shenandoah, and McLaws would be on top of Maryland Heights. On September 13, therefore, according to Lee's plan, the garrison would be held by the throat and would have to surrender, prisoners and captured supplies could be started south, and the victors could be on their way north again.
But nobody had moved as fast as that. Only now, while McClellan was reading the order, was the head of Jackson's column coming within sight of the Federal troops on Bolivar Heights, and it would take another day for Jackson to get fully into position. Only now was McLaws fighting his way up the steep ridge to take possession of the peak north of the Potomac; only now was Walker getting his men in place on the crest of Loudoun Heights. McClellan was getting from one to two full days more than he had any reason to hope for. In addition, the rest of Lee's army was no longer concentrated at Boons-boro, close to the gap through which the National Road crossed South Mountain. Since writing the order Lee had heard a rumor (later proved false) that Federal troops were coming down from Pennsylvania in some strength, and he and Longstreet had moved up to Hagerstown to head them off. Nobody but D. H. Hill was anywhere near the all-important gateway, and Hill's division was so worn by hard fighting and straggling that it numbered barely more than five thousand muskets. Lee's army was even more scattered than the order showed, in other words, and it would take it longer to get reassembled. When the fates finally gave McClellan this break they went out of their way to make it a good one.
General John Gibbon happened to visit army headquarters early that afternoon. His Black Hat Brigade was getting thin and he wanted to have it strengthened if he could. He and McClellan were on friendly terms, having known each other back in the old army days, and he was admitted to McClellan's tent without delay. When he got in he could see that a good deal seemed to be happening. McClellan asked him to sit tight for a minute and went on dictating orders, receiving reports, sending staff officers hurrying off here and there, everybody energetic and active. Finally there came a lull. McClellan turned to him, taking a folded paper out of his pocket and displaying it jubilantly, his eyes sparkling.
"Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home," McClellan said. "I will not show you the document now, but"—he turned down one fold to show the writing— "here is the signature, and it gives the movement of every division of Lee's army. Tomorrow we will pitch into his center, and if you people will only do two good, hard days' marching I will put Lee in a position he will find it hard to get out of."
Gibbon, of course, was delighted; also, this gave him his opening, and he took it without delay as a good soldier should. He had a brigade, he said, that would do all the marching and fighting the general could ask for—four crack Western regiments that were as good as any in the army, if not a little bit better. But they had been worn down by hard service and the brigade was a little skimpy, when new troops came in could the general assign a good Western regiment to Gibbon's brigade? McClellan listened attentively. He always liked to hear his troops praised, and he glowed as Gibbon talked. When Gibbon finished McClellan promised that he would have the first Western regiment that came to camp. Gibbon left, feeling highly encouraged, and McClellan returned to the task of getting the ponderous army in motion.2
Basically his problem was fairly simple—to get across South Mountain while Le
e's army was still in pieces, to overwhelm the separate fragments, and, if possible, to rescue the Harper's Ferry garrison so that those twelve thousand soldiers could be added to the Army of the Potomac.
Of the many roads that crossed South Mountain in various places there were only two that mattered now: the National Road, leading through Turner's Gap to Boonsboro and thence to Hagerstown, and a road that forked off in a more southerly direction west of Frederick, crossed the mountain at Crampton's Gap, six miles south of Turner's Gap, and came out on the far side just five miles north and east of Harper's Ferry. A quick drive through Turner's Gap would bring the army down on what looked like Lee's main body—Longstreet's and D. H. Hill's commands. A simultaneous smash through Crampton's Gap would crush the two divisions led by McLaws, would open the door so that the men at Harper's Ferry could come out, and would leave Jackson and the others completely isolated on the south side of the Potomac. When all of that had been done, Jackson and A. P. Hill and Walker could be hunted down at leisure and there would be nobody of any consequence left in the entire state of Virginia to oppose an irresistible descent on the Confederate capital.
As McClellan faced the mountain range he would be striking at Turner's Gap with his right hand and at Crampton's Gap with his left. Conveniently placed to act as his left hand were some eighteen thousand good men under General William B. Franklin, a solid, highly respected soldier who commanded the VI Corps and who had with him his own two divisions and a third one temporarily attached. They would be a force ample to open the gap, crush Lafayette McLaws, and rescue the Harper's Ferry people. Franklin was ordered to get going—to do a lot of banging away with his artillery, even if he didn't have anything to shoot at, so that the commander at the Ferry would hear and know that help was on the way. Meanwhile the rest of the army, some seventy thousand men, would be the right hand and would go straight through Turner's Gap.
While all of this was going on, McClellan reflected, it would be helpful if somebody could come down on Lee from the north. Governor Curtin was frantically assembling Pennsylvania state troops, and General Reynolds had been detached from the army to help him; and while they probably had nothing that could stand up to Lee's veterans in an open fight, Lee might be bothered and delayed a good deal if a sufficient swarm of these home guards and militia could come edging in on him. So McClellan, having inspected the map, sent off a wire to "the commander of U.S. forces at Chambersburg" to concentrate all available troops and obstruct Lee's march until the Army of the Potomac could come up and make a real fight out of it. He didn't know who was commanding at Chambers-burg, but it seemed likely that somebody was there, and the card looked like a good, inexpensive one to play.
As it turned out, this had no effect on the campaign, but it did give a bad forty-eight hours to that eminent Pennsylvania editor-politician, Alexander K. McClure. McClure had been in Washington when Lee marched north, and when Governor Curtin began building up the home guards it seemed wise to have a few of the state's leading citizens on hand to help, so McClure had been hastily given a major's commission and sent north to lend a hand. When McClellan's wire came in, McClure, uncomfortable but game in his new role as army officer, and accompanied by no troops whatever, was posted at Chambersburg. He gulped when he got the wire; combed the town and managed to round up about twenty home-guard cavalry, which were all the "U.S. forces" within reach. With these McClure began patrolling the roads valiantly, preparing to ward off the Army of Northern Virginia if by chance it came his way. Tough old Thad Stevens happened to be in Governor Curtin's office at Harrisburg when the wire came through. The thought of the unmilitary McClure and his twenty men standing between Pennsylvania and invasion tickled the grim abolitionist, and he chuckled. "Well, McClure will do something. If he can't do better he'll instruct the toll-gate keeper not to permit Lee's army to pass through." Then, reflectively: "But as to McClellan, God only knows what he'll do."3
McClellan rode through Frederick to make sure that the advance guard of the army was put in motion properly. A little outside of town he overtook the head of General Jesse Reno's IX Corps, which had the advance. Reno's leading division, two brigades of Ohio troops, under General Cox, was moving along, and McClellan stopped to talk a moment with Cox, who had been one of his assistants back in the springtime of the war, when McClellan was out in Columbus trying to get Ohio's first troops housed, uniformed, and drilled. Cox's men had done practically all of their fighting in western Virginia, having come east just within the last month, and they were happy to be with the Army of the Potomac. They had heard that it was far ahead of all other Union armies in drill, discipline, and marching ability, and its record seemed to make their own service in the mountains look commonplace, and they were anxious to make a good impression. There was a subtle difference between them and the rest of the army. They were more informal in bearing and discipline, and it was noticed that they marched with a longer, freer stride; the Army of the Potomac had been rigorously drilled to the regulation pace of twenty-eight inches, while the Westerners had been allowed to set their own gait. Incidentally, the Ohioans were already remarking that the men in these crack Eastern regiments straggled much more than did the mountain brigades. . . . McClellan gave Cox some last-minute instructions and went back to headquarters.
Pretty soon Reno himself came along. He was feeling good just now; had gone south on the Roanoke Island expedition as a brigadier under Burnside, had done well, and now held a corps command, and things seemed to be opening up for him in fine style. While the army was in Frederick, Reno had heard the Barbara Frietchie story, which seems to have been circulating freely among the Federals long before Whittier made a propaganda poem out of it, and he had gone around to the old lady's house to see her. As nearly as can be learned, at this distance, Barbara Frietchie had indeed waved a flag from her window, but she had waved it in welcome to the Union troops, not in defiance to Jackson's "Rebel horde." Some other woman in Frederick did wave a United States flag at Jackson, but he never saw it or her, and there was no blast of rifle fire to rip that or any other Union banner. The stories got all mixed up and added to, and old Barbara became the center and heroine of a garbled blend. Anyway, Reno had gone to her house that morning and offered to buy the famous flag. She wouldn't sell it to him—couldn't, very well, since the flag he wanted to buy didn't really exist—but she did give him a flag she had around the house, and the general had ridden off, well content.4
By dark Reno had pushed Cox's division across the Catoctin range, a low ridge that runs north and south halfway between Frederick and South Mountain; and the Ohioans went into bivouac near the tiny village of Middletown, while Rebel outposts on South Mountain saw the ridge to the east blossom out with campfires as darkness came down, and sent word back to D. H. Hill in Boonsboro that quite a lot of Yankees seemed to be coming up to Turner's Gap. Yankee cavalry skirmished with Confederate patrols in the valley and on the lower slopes of South Mountain and sent back their own reports: as far as they could find out, there was nothing in front of Turner's Gap except cavalry.
McClellan, meanwhile, was working on the orders for the rest of the army. The most important was the order for Franklin, and McClellan got it off a little after six that evening. Franklin was down at a place called Buckeystown, six miles south of Frederick and about twelve miles due east of the summit at Crampton's Gap, and McClellan gave him the picture in detail, telling him about the finding of Special Orders No. 191 and explaining the positions of Lee's troops. Cox was at Middletown, he said, and would be off first thing next morning, followed by the rest of the army, to get through Turner's Gap and land on Lee at Boonsboro. Franklin was to move "at daybreak in the morning" for Crampton's Gap. Once through the gap, his first duty was "to cut off, destroy or capture McLaws' command" and relieve the Union troops at Harper's Ferry, after which, depending on events, he would either rejoin the main army at Boonsboro or move west to Sharpsburg to cut off Lee's retreat. In order that it might be perfectly clear to him, McClel
lan added: "My general idea is to cut the enemy in two and beat him in detail."
All fine, so far. But as the courier galloped south with that order the first thin mist of what would soon be a serious cloud was beginning to rise across the gleaming face of McClellan's good fortune. McClellan's order was clear and precise, and it gave Franklin a perfect picture of the situation, but it was defective in just one respect: nowhere in it was there any hint of the extreme urgency of the moment.
For it was no ordinary strategic advantage McClellan was reaching for; he had it within his power to destroy Lee's army and end the war within the next few days, and every minute might count. South Mountain was still a screen, and there was no way to know how far or how fast Lee's troops might be moving, off on the other side. Franklin's troops were rested, they had not fought since the battles on the peninsula back in June, and presumably they were quite capable of a little extra exertion now, with the outcome of the whole war hanging in the balance.
Reflecting on this order, which lays out a job of work and breathes the very spirit of unhurried calm, one is conscious of that queer feeling of exasperation which, even at this distance, McClellan's acts occasionally inspire. With everything in the world at stake, both for the country and for McClellan personally, why couldn't the man have taken fire just once? To have Franklin march "at daybreak in the morning" was good—but to have him march that same evening, driving for that door through the mountains without giving the enemy an extra minute to repair his faulty dispositions, would have been infinitely better. The roads were good and the weather was clear, and a night march was perfectly feasible; making it, Franklin would be able to go through the gap first thing in the morning. In a great many ways the history of the country (to say nothing of McClellan's own place in it) could have been a good deal different if Franklin's eighteen thousand men had been put on the road that night under the stars.