by Bruce Catton
"It seemed as if an intermission had been declared in order that a reception might be tendered to the general-in-chief. A great crowd continually surrounded him, and the most extravagant demonstrations were indulged in. Hundreds even hugged the horse's legs and caressed his head and mane. While the troops were thus surging by, the general continually pointed with his finger to the gap in the mountain through which our path lay. It was like a great scene in a play, with the roar of the guns for an accompaniment."1
It had taken time to build up this impressive scene, however. McClellan mounted amid the troops, pointing dramatically to the rising slope where the battle smoke was drifting up through the mountain laurel, is the center of an unforgettable picture, but the picture had been some hours taking shape. There had been nothing dramatic about the first two thirds of this day—which, since the stage was all set for drama, simply means that the army had been very leisurely about coming up for the assault. Indeed, during the entire morning a few regiments of cavalry plus General Cox's division of Ohio infantry had had the place pretty much to themselves, except for the Rebels on South Mountain.
Even so, this day—the fourteenth of September, the same day Franklin's men were coming up to Crampton's Gap, off to the south —began bravely enough. Union cavalry went across the valley at dawn, and as the foot soldiers became visible behind them the Confederate cavalry trotted back and went up the winding mountain roads. The sun had not been up very long before Cox started his men after them. The Ohio soldiers left the National Road a mile or two before it began to climb the irregular valley which constitutes Turner's Gap, and followed a country road which goes through another depression a mile or more to the south; two brigades of Western infantry, six regiments in all, perhaps a total of three thousand men. There was a brief delay after the troops took the side road. Cox and General Pleasonton, who had the cavalry, trotted on half a mile along the main highway to arrange a couple of batteries on a little knoll—a dozen twenty-pounder rifled Parrotts, long-ranged guns for those days. The guns began to shell the top of the mountain, and Confederate gunners on top answered them, while the infantry stacked arms and waited in a little field. As they waited a sergeant on horseback, with a big bundle back of the saddle, came rocketing up to the 11th Ohio—mail from home, just arrived. The boys clustered round, and while the guns searched the wood with shell to prepare the way for them they sat on the ground and read their letters—each letter, no doubt, expressing the pathetic hope that the man who received it would survive whatever lay ahead of him, would "take care of himself" and, in the fullness of time, would get back home safe and sound.
Just about the time the letters were finished the orders came, and the men took up their rifles, formed a line of battle, and started up the mountainside. The slope was not too steep, but in most places it was abominably tangled with laurel and other scrubby growth, and the going was tough. At times the men found themselves struggling ahead single file, and regimental formations were badly mixed. As they got near the summit the growth became less dense and the ground was more nearly level, and they came out at last in a more open region of small farm clearings and pastures and found Rebels behind a stone fence. Long volleys of musketry rolled back and forth along the mountain ridge, while a Rebel battery near the gap to the north threw case shot into the Ohioans' ranks. D. H. Hill had sent in one of his best men, Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr., to hold this place, with a brigade of North Carolina troops and a few squadrons of dismounted cavalry. Garland stayed up where the fire was hottest, to encourage his men—they were outnumbered and they knew it, and they were a little nervous—and presently a Yankee bullet found him and killed him, and one of the Carolina regiments gave way. The 30th Ohio got through the wall and hung on, and in a couple of places there the Carolina and Ohio boys slugged one another with musket butts and jabbed with bayonets. Cox decided that if he could get some men up on a little rise of ground to the left all of the Rebels would have to go away, so he sent the 11th Ohio off to tend to it.
Accompanied by its regimental dog, Curly—a frisky pooch who enjoyed going out on the skirmish lines—the 11th went forward cautiously, the exact Confederate position along the knoll not being known, and pretty soon the 11th found itself in a nasty pocket, with Confederates shooting at them from three directions, so they got back out in a hurry.2 Then the 23rd Ohio came up to help, and the two regiments went storming up the hill, firing as they went. The lieutenant colonel of the 23rd, a promising chap named Rutherford B. Hayes, was shot down, wounded; William McKinley, sergeant in the same regiment, was unhurt. The regiments kept on going, struggling through dense thickets that seemed to be alive and humming with bullets, and the Carolina brigade gave way at last and drew off down the western slope of the mountain, most of the men out of action for the rest of the day. This part of the mountaintop now belonged to the Army of the Potomac.
Actually, the whole mountaintop did, had the Army of the Potomac just been on hand to take possession. Of the five brigades in his command, Hill had had only two on South Mountain when the day began: one posted in the center at Turner's Gap, where the National Road came through, and the other one off here a mile to the south, where Cox and his Ohioans made their attack. The other three were hot-footing it up from Boonsboro, but they wouldn't be on hand for quite a while, and until they got there Hill had nothing left but the thin brigade on the National Road, some artillery, a few game remnants of the North Carolina brigade, and such dismounted cavalry as Stuart had been able to leave with him. It was at this time, when he reflected that he was standing there with something like a thousand muskets to stave off the greater part of McClellan's army, that General Hill experienced that great feeling of loneliness.
But the wind is tempered sometimes to the shorn lamb, and so it was here. Thus far the Army of the Potomac was represented only by the division of General Cox—some three thousand men when the battle began. These men did their best, and Cox had the right idea: he turned their faces toward the north, once the Carolinians had been driven off, and prepared to advance along the crest to Turner's Gap. The ground was broken and uneven, and it took time to get the men formed up. The Confederates had a number of guns at the gap, with a good line on the little clearings where the Ohioans were. Somehow they got the guns far enough forward to fire canister, the charges ripping up the sod, as Cox wrote later, "with a noise like the cutting of a melon rind." Cox sent back to his corps commander, Reno, for help, and Reno sent more men forward. By the time they got there and found their way up the difficult slopes it was a couple of hours past noon, and by this time some of Hill's other brigades were coming up. Hill had made a good showing, meanwhile, with the men he did have, and although the heads of McClellan's long columns were coming over the Catoctin ridge, Hill had not yet had to fight anything very much worse than equal numbers. He was in an extremely bad spot, but he had already been given eight hours' leeway.
As more of Reno's men came up the mountain, with Reno himself spurring up after them, Cox made ready to renew the attack. General Orlando Willcox got his division into line somewhere off to the right of Cox's Ohioans, and pretty soon the men went struggling forward. In Willcox's outfit there were two untried regiments going in side by side—the 17th Michigan and the 45th Pennsylvania. The Michigan boys were so painfully new that they could hardly get from marching column into fighting formation. They had been mustered in only a month ago, had been rushed down to Washington in feverish haste when Stanton got panicky over Pope's defeat, and barely a week before this day on the mountaintop one member of the regiment had written sadly that they did not know even "the rudiments of military maneuvering," adding that "there is not a company officer who can put his men through company drill without making one or more ludicrous blunders." For some reason this regiment was made up largely of men nearing middle age—except for Company E, which had been enlisted from students at the State Normal School at Ypsilanti—and they were desperately self-conscious and anxious to do the right thing in
this first engagement. They had their best clothes on-dress coats buttoned neatly up to the throat, high-crowned black hats, each with a feather stuck jauntily in the band. One veteran remembered that they even had their dress-parade white gloves carefully folded and stuffed in their pockets; looking back with a rueful smile, he wrote that it was "a wonder we did not put them on, so little know we of the etiquette of war." Anyway, here they were, clumsily forming line of battle in the underbrush, the sweating officers irritably horsing the men into place by hand. They went stumbling forward, their dress uniforms getting sadly torn by thorns and broken branches; and D. H. Hill's veteran artillerists were getting the exact range of the ground they would have to traverse.3
The Pennsylvanians who went in with them were not nearly so new, but they were equally ignorant of what battle was like. They had been in service nearly a year and had been sent down to South Carolina on the Port Royal expedition. That had been mere "Sunday soldiering," one of their number wrote afterward; they had occasionally seen isolated Rebels on other islands several miles distant, but their only fighting had been against gnats and mosquitoes, and they had lived high, eating oranges and sweet potatoes, green corn and watermelon, with fresh fish out of the ocean. Now they were in line beside the Michigan boys, forcing their way through a wood where their major, to his shame, found his horse suddenly turned balky, so that he had to dismount and proceed on foot, leaving the faithless beast behind. The regiments came out at last behind a rail fence all grown up with long grass and briars, with a pasture beyond and another of those ominous stone walls eighty yards off on the far side. As usual, the stone wall was held by Rebels, who squatted on their heels, rested their rifles atop the wall, and blazed away with deadly aim.*
The Pennsylvania and Michigan men knelt behind their own fence and fired back, discovering immediately that an open rail fence is not nearly as good protection as a solid stone wall. Somewhere beyond the Confederate firing line there were Rebel batteries, which opened with shell and solid shot, sending the fence rails flying. The greenhorns looked around nervously, saw General Willcox calmly sitting his horse right up by the fence, took heart, and kept peppering away at what they could see of the enemy across the field. Reno got some more troops up, and at last the outnumbered Confederates backed away, firing as they went, and disappeared in the forest. Reno sent fresher troops on after them while the two new regiments caught their breath and took stock of the situation. The Michigan men found that they had lost thirty men killed and about a hundred wounded—fairly heavy losses, considering that they took some five hundred men into action (they had been a thousand strong a month earlier, but nearly half the regiment was sick and had been left behind). The Pennsylvania regiment had had almost exactly equal losses. They had had their baptism of fire, and the Michigan men proudly recorded that the veterans who saw them in action told it around that they "fought like tigers." Also, they noticed that there were a good many dead Rebels behind that stone wall.
It was getting late in the afternoon by now, and General Reno— who was up on the mountaintop taking personal charge of the fighting —began to believe that the Confederates had retreated. Riding up to the front, he took as good a look as he could at the checkerboard pattern of clearings, woods, and laurel patches. There was nobody in sight on this side of Turner's Gap, as far as he could make out, and he got ready to march straight north along the crest to cinch matters.
Beside him was the 51st Pennsylvania, which had been fighting hard. He directed it into an open field and told the colonel to have the men stack arms and to let them boil coffee if they wanted to: it would be a few minutes before he had his marching column formed. He turned his horse, to ride back along the line—and just then a body of Confederates, darkly concealed in the woodland ahead, let fly with an unexpected volley that splintered the Pennsylvanians' stacked muskets, broke up the coffee-fire groups, and knocked General Reno out of his saddle, dead. The 51st hurried to grab its muskets and got into a horrible cross fire. There was still another of those green regiments, the 35th Massachusetts, lined up behind the 51st, and the 35th began wildly returning the Rebel fire without waiting to let the Pennsylvania boys get out of the way. There was an infernal mix-up for a while in that tree-fringed clearing, with a prodigious racket of small-arms fire, reeking smoke clouds hanging in the air, bullets zipping by from all directions, men getting hit, and a great shouting and cursing going up; but it finally got straightened out, and the Federals drove in hard on the Confederates in the wood and scattered them.5
It was now close to four in the afternoon, and all of the fighting so far had been done here south of the National Road by Reno's men. The Confederates were in the immediate, visible presence of seventy thousand Yankee soldiers, but they had not had to fight more than a tenth of that number. In a sense, McClellan's finding of Special Orders No. 191 was working to his disadvantage this afternoon. According to that document, Boonsboro—which was only a couple of miles or so beyond the summit of the mountain—was held by both Long-street and Hill, and as a result McClellan, still clinging to the old, old idea of Lee's overpowering numbers, believed that South Mountain was occupied by at least thirty thousand men. Therefore, he played his cards cautiously, refusing to make a direct stab at the gap until he had plenty of men in line.6
Joe Hooker had been elevated to the command of the I Corps-McDowell had been relieved, a man unlucky beyond all other generals, taking his demotion in manful silence, without recrimination— and Hooker brought the I Corps down from the Catoctin ridge. McClellan had him spread it out for an advance up South Mountain to the north of the slopes where Reno's men had been fighting so long. Hooker had three divisions in his corps—Meade's, Ricketts's, and Hatch's—and he sent Meade's, Ricketts's, and most of Hatch's around on a big swing a mile or more to the right of the National Road, to go swarming up the heights that overlook Turner's Gap from the north. It took a long time to move an entire army corps into position in those wooded hollows, and it was getting along toward evening before they were ready to advance. Hooker kept Gibbon's brigade back, and he had it form right on the highway, with orders to start for the top as soon as the lines on the right began to move.
Gibbon had his Black Hat boys all keyed up, which was a good thing, since they had the toughest assignment of the lot. Turner's Gap is a long, curving valley in the mountain, the road following the narrow floor as it climbs to the summit; the soldiers who went up here would have no chance for any fancy maneuvering but would have to go straight ahead in the teeth of whatever direct fire the Confederates might arrange for them. Since Hill was now being reinforced by Long-street—whom Lee had started back from Hagerstown in a hurry, first thing that morning, when he learned that McClellan was moving— this frontal fire was apt to be heavy. But Gibbon had told his boys, before they left Frederick, how McClellan wanted two days of good marching and how he had assured the general that this brigade could outmarch and outfight anything in the army, and the men were on their toes. McClellan himself was not far behind, on top of a little hill from which he could see the highway all the way to the summit; whatever they did would be done right under his eye.
Gibbon got his boys astride the road, 7th Wisconsin on one side and 19th Indiana on the other, formed "by the right of companies" —which meant that each regiment was made up of ten parallel columns, each column representing one company marching two men abreast. They couldn't fight in that formation, but they could get over rough ground easily and could be brought up into line of battle without delay. The 2nd and 6th Wisconsin fell in behind. The brigade was thin, with hardly more than eleven hundred men altogether, the four regiments averaging a little under three hundred men apiece. Two twelve-pounder smoothbores from reliable old Battery B were moved up into the roadway, and the command set out.
They came under rifle fire before long, and when they reached the Rebel skirmish line the two guns were wheeled around to blast the Rebels with canister. The skirmishers withdrew, and Gibbon swung his men into lin
e of battle, bringing the two rear regiments up abreast of the two in front—pridefully noting that the men did it as smoothly as if they were on the parade ground, while McClellan watched through his field glasses from the hilltop far below. Confederate artillery was posted at the summit and it had the range: it put a shell into the middle of the 2nd Wisconsin just as those ten company columns were wheeling into regimental front, dropping a dozen men with that one burst. The two guns of Battery B did what they could to quiet the Rebel guns, and the battle line went scrambling up the mountainside.
Up near the summit they found the Rebel line—a formidable affair behind another of those stone walls, with the enemy tucked snugly away where he could shoot downhill. The Rebels were in high spirits, and when the Westerners came within handy range they yelled taunts in the dusk: "Oh, you damn Yanks! We gave you hell again at Bull Run!" Some of the Wisconsin boys called back: "Watch out, Johnny, this isn't McDowell after you now—this is McClellan!" Then both sides gave up the catcalling and began using their rifles, and the fight became hot and heavy, with the Black Hat Brigade unable to advance an inch, and with Gibbon wondering, presently, whether they could even stay where they were. Ammunition ran low, and details were formed to collect cartridges from the dead and wounded. The sun went down and it was pitch-dark, and back on his little hilltop McClellan could follow the fight by watching the pin points of stabbing flame from the muzzles of the muskets. Along toward nine o'clock the fighting died out from sheer exhaustion, and the Black Hat Brigade prepared to spend the night on the firing line. Since it started uphill it had lost some 280 men, about a quarter of its total number.7