by Bruce Catton
But Franklin didn't move. McClellan didn't tell him to, and Franklin was no man to exceed the letter of his instructions. To be sure, McClellan had closed his letter by saying that he now asked of Franklin "all your intellect and the utmost activity that a general can exercise," which might have given him the hint; but McClellan was a courtly man who used that kind of language as the small change of polite correspondence, and Franklin was one more of those Union generals who were loyal and capable and conscientious but who utterly lacked that priceless little extra spark. He could drive his men just as hard as he himself was driven, but no harder: a first-rate soldier, in the ordinary way, but lacking the power to be first-rate in an extraordinary way.
So McClellan and Franklin and Franklin's eighteen thousand men got (one supposes) a good sleep that night, and any clock that headquarters might have possessed ticked on, unhurried but inexorable. On the morning of September 14 Franklin's corps broke camp and got off to a good early start, precisely as ordered, and set out on the twelve-mile hike to Crampton's Gap, with the cavalry trotting on ahead and stirring up hedge-hopping fights with Stuart's outposts.
Beyond South Mountain, where Crampton's Gap cuts through, there is an open space two or three miles wide bearing the neatly descriptive name of Pleasant Valley; and on the far side of Pleasant Valley is the humpbacked ridge of Elk Mountain, whose southern end is named Maryland Heights and looks down on the town of Harper's Ferry. Lafayette McLaws, a Confederate general who was almost exactly like the Union's General Franklin—solid, capable, unimaginative-had been dutifully industrious. He had chased the last Yankees off Maryland Heights, and he was putting in the morning getting his artillery up on top so that he could bombard the Yankee garrison in Harper's Ferry. It wasn't easy, the sides of Elk Mountain being very steep and the roads being sketchy, and in the end he had to put two hundred men on each gun and wrestle the ponderous weapons up by sheer muscle. Stuart warned him sometime during the morning that the Federals were coming up to Crampton's Gap, in his rear, and McLaws eventually sent a few regiments back to hold the pass. They didn't get there until midday had gone, and until then the little road over the mountain was guarded by nothing but Stuart's cavalry; but they arrived well ahead of Franklin and they found a good position at the eastern base of the ridge, behind a long stone fence. There they lined up, with dismounted cavalry on either flank.
Those Southerners were good men, but there were not nearly enough of them to keep the Federals out of the pass, and Franklin did not have to put half of his men into action. He planted a row of guns on the left, sent the 27th New York and the 96th Pennsylvania ahead as a heavy skirmish line, and backed them up with the 5th Maine and the 16th New York. The Rebels were well protected behind their stone wall, and there was a brisk fight for a while. McLaws was warned that a real push was on, and some more Southern regiments came up to extend the line, but Franklin sent a brigade of New Jersey troops in on a charge, and the Confederates were driven away from the stone wall and went scrambling back up the mountainside, firing as they went. For a couple of hours after that it was an
Indian fight, the Rebels too few to make a stand but giving ground slowly, Rebels and Yankees shooting at each other from behind trees, the Northerners coming on doggedly.
A private from a Vermont regiment, scrambling up the mountainside, slipped and fell, and went sliding off downhill to land, all in a heap, in a little hollow among the rocks, face to face with a Confederate private who somehow hadn't retreated when the others had. The two soldiers glared at each other for a moment, gripping their rifles; then they agreed that it would be foolish for them to carry on a personal, two-man extension of the war there in the hollow. They would wait where they were, suspending hostilities while everybody else fought, and at the end of the day they would see how the battle had gone. If the Federals got licked and retreated, then the Vermonter was a prisoner, but if the Confederates retreated, then the Reb was a prisoner. So they laid their rifles down and shared tobacco, leaning back among the rocks, and waited for the two armies to settle their fate for them.
Their comrades were having hot work for a while there on the wooded slopes. Firing down from above, the Confederates were shooting just a little high—not high enough to miss, the Northern boys complained afterward, but just high enough to inflict a dreadful number of head wounds, nearly all of which were fatal. Mindful of his orders, Franklin kept banging away with his artillery and made a prodigious racket, and down in Harper's Ferry the Union garrison—which knew perfectly well by this time that it was thoroughly trapped—heard the noise and began to feel hopeful again.
Late in the afternoon the last Confederate resistance dissolved, and the Federal assault waves cleared the crest of the ridge and halted, while the main body of Franklin's troops went marching through the gap and swarmed down into Pleasant Valley. McLaws awoke at last to the realization that he was in desperate trouble as the broken remnants of his rear guard came streaming back down the valley, and he and Stuart took fresh troops and hastened up to repair the dike, while the long shadow of Elk Mountain filled the valley with evening dusk and began to creep up the side of South Mountain to the east. A Confederate brigadier came pelting up to them, crying that all was lost, but McLaws and Stuart didn't think so. They formed a line of battle across the valley and got ready to
make the best fight they could, while the fugitives were rallied and formed up to help the fresh troops.
Franklin rode through the gap, surveyed the line of Rebel soldiers a mile or more to the south, and considered that this was no time to be hasty. He had carried out the letter of his instructions, which is to say that he had forced his way through the gap. It still remained to "cut off, destroy or capture McLaws' command," but it seemed to Franklin that he was outnumbered and that the Rebel line was too strong to break, what with darkness coming on and his own troops winded. Also, additional Confederate forces might well be coming down on him from Turner's Gap, for all he knew, and if he was fighting McLaws when they came he would be taken in the rear. So, in the end, he did nothing, deferring his next move to the morrow.
On top of the mountain that night the Federals who had carried the crest slept on the field of battle, gleaning it carefully for discarded valuables. The 4th New Jersey, which had been carrying the old smoothbore muskets, claimed to have re-equipped itself completely with rifled Springfields dropped by wounded or fugitive Rebels. The slopes were covered with the wounded men of both armies, and late at night the soldiers went clambering over the rocks, bringing casualties to the field hospital. They picked up their own wounded first and then brought in Confederates, until at midnight the exhausted surgeons, their linen coveralls streaked and smeared with blood, told them not to bring in any more because no more could be handled that night. So the 16th New York laid out a little camping place on the mountaintop, built fires, and made the wounded Southerners as comfortable as they could, with food and water at hand. They had taken a number of unwounded prisoners, and they detailed two of these to keep the fires going and look after the wounded men, and then they made their own bivouac. In the morning they found that the unwounded men had fled and half a dozen of the wounded had died during the night, and they carried the rest off to the hospital. Then they went down into Pleasant Valley and joined the main body.
Now it happened that night that there was one officer, in all the Union Army, who didn't believe in waiting until tomorrow. He was only a cavalry colonel, and he was inside Harper's Ferry, completely surrounded by Rebels, and there wasn't a great deal he could do about it, but what little he could do he proposed doing. Oddly enough, he was a Mississippian by birth—one of two Mississippians in the regular army, it was said, who had stuck with the Union when the war came. He was Colonel Benjamin F. Davis, called Grimes Davis at West Point and in the old army, and he was roosting in Harper's Ferry as commander of the 8th New York Cavalry. On the night of September 14 he knew as well as anybody else that the place would have to be surrendered next morning:
the Confederates finally had all the heights lined with artillery, and the town couldn't be held an hour once those guns opened up, which they would unquestionably do as soon as it was light. What made Davis unique that night was that he didn't intend to fold his hands and wait for the inevitable.
Like its colonel, his regiment was feeling frustrated. The 8th New York had been raised in the country around Rochester in the summer of 1861, and the government had been slow about the matter of providing horses: for a solid year the 8th had worn sabers and talked cavalry lingo but had gone about on foot, not having a horse to its name. The regiment had footed it up and down the Shenandoah Valley with Banks in the spring of 1862, sharing in the humiliations which befell that officer's command and feeling them more keenly because of its utter inability to ride as cavalry should. Finally, about the time Pope was getting licked at Bull Run, the 8th New York got its horses, and it had ridden brightly up the Potomac just in time to get penned up here at Harper's Ferry, where there was nothing whatever for cavalry to do and, currently, no prospect of anything better than a ride off to Libby Prison in Richmond. So when Colonel Davis finished a stormy conference that evening with the post commander and then came outside and whistled up his cavalry, the boys were ready for action—any kind of action, just so it got them out of that hole in the mountains to some place where they could ride.
What Davis proposed was that, since the post was going to be captured, anybody who could get out ahead of time should do so. He had finally won permission to take the cavalry and try it, the cavalry on hand consisting of his own 8th New York, the 12th Illinois, and a mixed handful from the 1st Maryland and 7th Rhode Island. A Unionist who lived in the region and knew all the mountain roads was going to act as his guide; in addition, Davis had one of his own scouts who had just slipped in through the Confederate screen and had a pretty good idea where all the Rebel commands were posted.
As soon as the town got dark, then, Davis lined up his troopers, some thirteen hundred in all. The regimental sutler, knowing that he couldn't get his goods out and that he would inevitably be looted of all he owned next day by needy Rebels, passed down the ranks, giving away tobacco: an act of generosity that almost floored the soldiers, sutlers being men who never gave anything away.
Davis took his post at the head of the column, with his guide and his scout and a picked patrol of twenty-five troopers. The 12th Illinois and the Marylanders and Rhode Islanders came next, and the 8 th New York was formed at the rear. In single file, moving at a walk, the little band crossed the Potomac on a pontoon bridge and headed off to the northwest on a narrow, winding road through the mountains —an obscure little road that ran right under the overhanging cliffs of Maryland Heights, the one road out that McLaws had failed to block. (It was the same road, if anybody had stopped to think about it, down which John Brown had moved, with death in his eyes and a monstrous vision of flame and bloodshed in his heart, when he made his descent on the Harper's Ferry enginehouse in 1859.)
The boys had quite a night for themselves. As soon as the head of the column got across the river it moved at a trot, so that the line kept getting longer and longer; Colonel Davis was ten miles up in Maryland by the time the last man left the bridge. The road took them within a few rods of McLaws's camp, but the jingling and the clattering seem to have escaped the notice of McLaws's pickets, and the cavalry got away clean. (Jeb Stuart had warned McLaws earlier to guard that lonely little road, but McLaws had other things on his mind and had paid no attention.) It was pitch-dark there under the trees, and except when they were going uphill—which was a good part of the time—the men rode at a trot. One trooper recalls that "the only way we could tell how far we were from our file leaders was by the horses' shoes striking fire against the stones in the road."
Two miles from the river Davis's advance patrol surprised and scattered a Confederate picket post. Two miles farther the Rebels had erected a road block of fence rails and overturned wagons, the routed pickets having broadcast a warning. Davis anticipated this, however, and led his command cross-lots by some winding woods path his guide knew about, and they left the road block behind. As they got out of the tangled mountain region they moved through cornfields and pastures as much as by road. Altogether it was a tough, grinding ride, and some of the horses gave out. When that happened, the dismounted men were taken up by their comrades; Davis was determined not to leave a man behind.
They swung out to by-pass the town of Sharpsburg, under the starlight, driving off a squad of Confederate cavalry that was patrolling the roads there. A few miles north of town they hit the Hagers-town turnpike and went clattering north in fine style. Then, up ahead in the dark, Davis heard the rumble of wagons. He spurred on past a fork in the road and ran into a big Rebel wagon train, escorted by a small detachment of cavalry, bound for Sharpsburg. It was too dark for anybody to see the color of his uniform, and Davis had a fine Mississippi accent, so he simply posed as a Confederate officer and notified the driver of the leading wagon that he was to turn sharply to the right when he got to the fork in the road; and he told the commander of the Rebel cavalry escort to wait by the roadside and fall in at the rear of the train. Then he galloped back to his own command, formed the 8th New York alongside the fork to take care of the wagons, and got the rest of the men lined up to handle the Confederate troopers.
All unsuspecting, the sleepy wagon drivers took the right-hand fork, starting off on a road that led to Pennsylvania, while the 8th New York, riding single file, fell in beside the train. As the last wagon made the turn and the Rebel cavalry escort came up, Davis sent his Illinois troopers in on the charge with drawn sabers, and the surprised Rebels were broken up and sent scattering down the country roads in the dark. When it began to grow light the wagoners came to a little, noticed the blue uniforms, and asked the troopers what outfit they belonged to. Proudly the soldiers answered; 8th New York Cavalry. The teamsters pulled up in a hurry, swearing and fuming, and some of them jumped down to unhitch their horses, but the New Yorkers drew revolvers and persuaded them to climb back in their seats, and the train went jolting along, drivers very glum, cavalry bubbling over with delight.
At about nine in the morning the whole cavalcade got to Greencastle, Pennsylvania, where Davis called a halt and examined his capture. There he found that he had seized nothing less than General Longstreet's reserve ammunition train—forty-odd wagons, each drawn by six mules, with some two hundred prisoners. He turned the train and prisoners over to the authorities and led his tired command into a field to get a little sleep. News of the capture got through the town, so that by the time the boys had their horses unsaddled and watered and picketed the townsfolk were coming out on foot and in buggies, carrying all sorts of things to eat—fresh bread, hams, baskets of eggs, and so on. The cavalry ate a tremendous breakfast and felt like heroes and stretched out for a good sleep in the shade, and one of their number wrote: "The boys thought that soldiering wasn't so bad, after all."5
It was a bright little exploit, all in all, and looking back on it, in its setting, one feels a twinge of regret that Grimes Davis was only a colonel. A little touch of his spirit, just then, in army headquarters or in the various corps headquarters, would have made the story of the rest of the war very different indeed. For by the time he got to Green-castle with his captured train, the garrison at Harper's Ferry had surrendered; and Franklin, with eighteen thousand men, was sitting by the roadside five miles from the scene of the surrender, reflecting on the perils of his situation and warily doing nothing at all. And Lafayette McLaws was in close touch with Stonewall Jackson and A. P. Hill and was no longer in any danger whatever.
2. Destroy the Rebel Army
From his perch on top of South Mountain, Confederate General Daniel Harvey Hill could look down and see the war coming up to meet him like a tremendous pageant, unspeakably grand. Five miles to the east lay the Catoctin ridge, with three roads coming over to the approach to Turner's Gap. Down each of these roads rolled an endless blu
e column, pouring down the slope and into the open valley as if the weight of unlimited numbers lay behind it, growing longer and longer and spraying out at last, at the foot of South Mountain, into long fighting lines, rank upon rank, starred with battle flags. The general looked, and reflected that the old Hebrew poet who used the phrase, "terrible as an army with banners," must have looked down from a mountain on just such a scene as this. Hill was one of the least timid men in the army, but he confessed afterward that he never in his life felt so lonely as he had that day: all of the soldiers in the world seemed to be marching up against him, and he had only five thousand men to stop them, some of which were still back at Boonsboro.
Over on the Union side there were men who saw the picturesque quality too. It was not very often, even in that day of close-order fighting, that an entire army was massed in the open where everybody could see it. This was one of the times when it happened, and it was enough to take the breath away to look at it. A private in the 9th New York, his regiment pausing for a breather on the Catoctin slope, wrote that it was a "beautiful, impressive picture—each column a monstrous, crawling, blue-black snake, miles long, quilled with the silver slant of muskets at a 'shoulder,' its sluggish tail writhing slowly up over the distant eastern ridge, its bruised head weltering in the roar and smoke upon the crest above." General Abner Doubleday, turning in his saddle to inspect his brigade, cried involuntarily: "What a magnificent view." And McClellan himself, one of the first to come over the ridge, reined up near the village of Middletown to watch his men marching past. As the men came up to him they took fire—the great open amphitheater of war, their own proud strength all on display, and the hero whom they trusted to the death sitting his horse, proud and martial-looking, the one man who could make war seem grand to men who had been in many battles: they broke into wild cheers, yelling until they were too hoarse to yell any more. A Massachusetts veteran described the scene: