by Bruce Catton
Off to the north Hooker's corps had been making progress, although the progress had been slow. Meade had his division of Pennsylvanians in front, and they went clambering up a high, steep-sided spur of the mountain ridge on top of which Confederate Robert Rodes had his fine brigade of Alabama troops. The Alabamians were badly outnumbered, but they had all the advantage of position and were rated as shock troops, under a general who was one of the best brigadiers in the Confederate Army, and before night came down they gave the Pennsylvanians a bad time of it. Coming up through the wood, the Bucktails caught it from a slim Confederate skirmish line hidden behind trees. The Rebels here were expert marksmen, and woods fighting was their specialty. They went dodging back from tree to tree, reloading under cover and drawing a good bead before they fired. But the Bucktails came from mountain country and were pretty good riflemen themselves. They got the wood clear at last, and then Meade's men had nothing but open fields in front of them and the Rebels had to give ground.
There was a delay along toward twilight, when Meade thought he was about to be outflanked, but Hooker sent more troops in and the supposed danger evaporated. The Rebels just did not have enough men on the mountain to make a serious counterattack, and once McClellan got his available strength into action, there could be only one outcome to the battle. By the time it was dark the Pennsylvanians had got to the top and Rodes's brigade took some very rough treatment, with a couple of hundred men shot down and an equal number captured. The firing flickered out in the darkness finally all along the crest, and the exhausted Federals prepared for a cheerless bivouac on the mountaintop. During the night there was a good deal of firing by nervous pickets, and some of the Union commanders feared a counterattack, but actually the field had been won: Union troops were on the heights, where they had full command of the pass, and the Rebels were grateful for the dark and a chance to get away.
The Black Hat Brigade had a little tale to tell around the camp-fires. Late in the evening the brigade found that it had some prisoners to send back to army headquarters. A corporal and squad were detailed, and the corporal led the way back to a country house which McClellan had taken over. He was misdirected, somehow, when he went inside, and when he opened what he thought was the door of the provost marshal's office he unexpectedly found himself facing McClellan. McClellan, busy with some papers, looked up, frowning at the intrusion, and said somewhat curtly: "What do you want?"
The corporal gulped and explained: he had some prisoners to turn in and he had opened the wrong door by mistake. Softening a bit McClellan asked the boy for his name and regiment. When he was told his eyes brightened.
"Oh, you belong to Gibbon's brigade. You had some heavy fighting up there tonight."
"Yes, sir," said the boy. "But I think we gave them as good as they sent."
"Indeed you did. You made a splendid fight."
The corporal hesitated. Then, greatly daring, he said:
"Well, General, that's the way we boys calculate to fight under a general like you."
McClellan got up, came around the table, and gripped the corporal by the hand.
"If I can get that kind of feeling amongst the men of this army," said McClellan, "I can whip Lee without any trouble at all."
So the corporal went back to his regiment, and the Black Hat Brigade had a story which went through the whole army: General McClellan had shaken hands with an enlisted man and complimented him on his brigade's fighting qualities.8
At dawn there was a heavy mist on the mountaintop, as if the battle smoke of the previous day's fighting had lingered under the leaves. The commands there cautiously sent out patrols, which presently brought back word: no Rebels in sight. Pleasonton's cavalry came up the National Road and went down the western slope into Boonsboro as the mist evaporated, driving out Fitz Lee's Confederate troopers and provoking a series of running fights across the fields and down the country roads. A double handful of Rebel stragglers were combed out of the town, and McClellan ordered Sumner to push his corps through and take up the pursuit. Sumner put Richardson in front, and the 5th New Hampshire had the advance, sweeping along the road past dead cavalry horses, occasional wrecked caissons, and various other signs of a hasty retreat. The New Hampshire boys legged it so fast that they later remembered with pride that other commands had dubbed them "Richardson's cavalry." In French's division, which followed Richardson's, was the brand-new 130th Pennsylvania, whose untried soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, as they saw their first live Rebels—a band of prisoners being escorted to the rear. In this band was a dapper young Confederate officer, trim in a new gray uniform; one of the Pennsylvania rookies called out to him: "Are there any more Rebels left?" The officer replied grimly that they would see lots of Rebels very shortly—a prophecy, said the 130th's historian, which was amply fulfilled.9
Back on the mountaintop the brigades that had done the fighting the day before pulled themselves together, took stock of their losses —altogether, eighteen hundred Union soldiers had fallen—and sent out parties to bury the dead and pick up discarded equipment. Young Captain Noyes grew thoughtful as he watched one party laying dead Confederates in a trench, and noted in his diary: "How all feeling of enmity disappears in presence of these white faces, these eyes gazing upward so fixedly in the gray of the morning hour." And a soldier of the 9th New York, viewing a similar scene, remarked that "there was no 'secession' in those rigid forms, nor in those fixed eyes staring blankly at the sky." Less melancholy, a private in the 51st Pennsylvania recorded that he and his buddies looted the haversacks of dead
Rebels and found them full of good food—better rations, he remarked, than the Union men were carrying. On the way down the mountain the 12th Massachusetts saw Joe Hooker, well pleased with the work of his new corps, "in the saddle taking his brandy and water, looking as clean and trim as though he had just made his morning toilet at Willard's."10
Piece by piece the army reassembled and took to the road, following Sumner. Without ceremony the XII Corps, which had been under the luckless Nathaniel P. Banks, found that it had a new commander —a white-haired, wintry-faced old regular named Joseph K. F. Mansfield, who had been graduated from West Point away back in 1822, before most of the soldiers in this corps had been born, and who showed up this morning in a fine new blue uniform, an improvised staff trotting at his heels. He took hold strong, while his corps was in the act of getting on the road, and one of the soldiers noted with approval that while he appeared to be "a calm and dignified old gentleman" he quickly showed that he "was the personification of vigor, dash and enthusiasm." Another recorded that he rode "with a proud, martial air and was full of military ardor."11 Several new regiments, fresh from training camps at home, came plowing up through Frederick and joined the army—or tried to, anyway. There was a great traffic jam on the road between Frederick and Boonsboro, with ambulances and details of prisoners going back against the tide and with long wagon trains clogging the road as they tried to slip in between the marching divisions, and the recruits had to stand by in the cornfields to wait their turn.
The army was feeling good. It was enjoying an experience which, from one end of the war to the other, the Army of the Potomac did not have very often—chasing a Confederate army which was in full retreat, after a battle which had been a clear-cut Union victory—and it was like a tonic. The men had been told a day or so earlier that they were going to relieve Harper's Ferry and had not yet been informed that that place had already surrendered; and as the long miles passed underfoot the men in the ranks made good-natured gibes about it, asking one another: "Who in hell is this Harper, and where's his ferry?" Early in the afternoon the 5th New Hampshire passed through a little hamlet and came out on a chain of low heights overlooking a pleasant, winding little creek, with rising ground beyond and the steeples and housetops of a town showing over the hills. They were halted there, since the Confederates had guns posted on the opposite hills and seemed disposed to contest any further advance, and the rest of the army slowly came up a
nd poured off into fields and farmyards on either side of the road. Pretty soon McClellan and his staff cantered up amid a long wave of cheers, and the general rode to a hilltop and spent a long time examining the lovely, rolling countryside with his field glasses, while a Confederate battery tossed so many shells at him that he sent his staff back into a hollow for protection.
The little town that he could just see beyond the hills was the town of Sharpsburg. The stream that wound through the open valley was Antietam Creek, gleaming brown in the afternoon sun and looking like a promising place to fish in the cool of a summer evening. A couple of miles away, in front and to the general's right, there was a little white church with a wood behind it: a church of the Dunker sect, whose members believed church steeples a vanity and held that war was sinful. Flags and guns and moving men were to be seen on the slopes between the church and the town. Lee and his army had stopped retreating and had turned to fight.
The sporadic cannonading died away and the afternoon became peaceful again. McClellan was in no mood to hurry things. Most of his army was still spraddled back over a long stretch of road, and it would take a good many hours to assemble all of it. Franklin was some miles away, near Crampton's Gap, and it might not be wise to call him in until it was certain that the Rebels who had seized Harper's Ferry were up to no more mischief in that area. So McClellan established headquarters on the lawn of a pleasant house on a hill overlooking the valley. That morning he had sent his wife a hasty telegram, saying that the army had "gained a glorious victory"; this he had followed with a note saying that he was pursuing the enemy "with the greatest rapidity, and expect to gain great results." The air had been full of jubilant talk that morning, and McClellan had written: "If I can believe one-tenth of what is reported, God has seldom given an army a greater victory than this." He had also reported the victory to the President, incautiously telling him that "General Lee admits they are badly whipped"—a statement which caused Secretary Welles to wonder tartly to whom Lee made this statement that it should be so promptly brought to McClellan's ears. In another message home McClellan proudly asserted that the victory had "no doubt delivered Pennsylvania and Maryland."
No doubt. And yet the sky was slowly but steadily darkening. The finding of Lee's lost order had put the game in McClellan's hands; forty-eight hours had passed since then, and two chances had been missed. The Harper's Ferry garrison had not been relieved, and the separate pieces of Lee's army had not been destroyed before they could unite. Two states might well have been "delivered," but the war had not been won—and it was final, shattering victory which McClellan had originally been thinking about. D. H. Hill had had some terribly lonely hours on top of South Mountain, but not until late afternoon had he been compelled to meet more of an attack than his slim numbers could handle, and it was dark before the Federals had brought up men enough to seize the crest by sheer force. The fight had been a Union victory beyond question, and yet, as Hill himself remarked, "if it was fought to save Lee's trains and artillery, and to reunite his scattered forces, it was a Confederate success." And it was precisely that kind of success which McClellan could not afford to let the Confederates win just then.
If this point was obvious to the Confederate soldier, it was also dimly visible to Lincoln back in Washington, watching and waiting in almost unbearable suspense as the war came to its greatest moment of climax. Receiving McClellan's triumphant announcement that the mountain passes had been forced, Lincoln sent him this reply:
"God bless you and all with you. Destroy the Rebel army if possible."
3. Tenting Tonight
The country around Sharpsburg is surpassingly lovely, with low hills rolling lazily down to the Potomac on the west, and little patches of trees breaking up the green-and-brown pattern of the farmers' fields. The river comes down unhurried, going to the south in wide loops and then swinging to the east; and just before it turns again to go south the copper-colored Antietam comes down and joins it—another unhurried stream that makes little loops and bends of its own as it follows a north-and-south line to enter the river. Between the creek and the river is the town of Sharpsburg, lying on the western slope of a gentle ridge that slants off, east and west, to the two streams.
This ridge is not sharply defined; just a stretch of higher ground, tapering off to the south in the blunt angle where the creek meets the river, and merging imperceptibly with the hills of the Maryland countryside a mile or two north of town. It is full of minor heights and hollows, with easy spurs and valleys running east toward the creek, dotted here and there with little open groves. The main road from Sharpsburg to Hagerstown runs north from the town along the broad crest of this ridge. The other principal road goes east from the town, gets over the height, and goes down a long slope to cross Antietam Creek on an arched stone bridge, after which it runs off northeast to Boonsboro. Half a dozen miles to the east the blue mass of South Mountain lies upon the land.
All of this is good farming country, with a look of quiet and uneventful prosperity. There are many cornfields and pastures, orchards and gardens surround the farmhouses, and there are huge barns. Little country roads zigzag in between the fields, worn down by many generations of use until, in some places, they are below the level of the ground they cross. They are bordered by fences—mostly barbed wire, nowadays; weathered rail, two generations ago. Here and there the ground is broken by an outcropping of rock.
Now this country town, together with the streams and the principal roads, had names before the armies came together there, because men have to have names for such places in the daily routine of living. But most of the landscape lay nameless, except for purely local, informal titles like Piper's cornfield, or Poffenberger's wood, and it serenely and happily lacked history and tradition. Nothing had ever happened there except the quiet, undramatic, unrecorded round of births and deaths, christenings and weddings, cornhuskings and barn-raisings, the plowing of the ground in the spring and the harvesting of fat crops in the fall. Life moved like the great tide of the Potomac a mile or so to the west—slowly, steadily, without making a fuss, patiently molding the land to its own liking.
As one comes up the hill on the road from Boonsboro, after crossing the creek and just before entering the town, there is the National Cemetery, green and well kept, white headstones marking the places where many dead men he in orderly military formations, with pleasant trees casting broken shadows on the lawn. It is a large cemetery, and it was not there at all on the morning of September 16, 1862; there was nothing there then but the broad crest and the peaceful grove, with the spires and roofs of Sharpsburg half hidden beyond. If a man stood in this grove and looked to the north he could see the white block of the little Dunker church, a mile away, beside the Hagerstown pike. And on that September morning in 1862, anyone who looked at the church would have seen two bits of woodland lying near it—one west of the Hagerstown road, surrounding the church on three sides and stretching northward for half a mile or more, and the other east of the road, separated from it by open fields several hundred yards wide. Two quieter bits of woodland could not have been found in North America, and no one outside the immediate neighborhood had ever heard of them; no one had ever taken human life in either of them. But ever since then, because of what was about to take place there, those two wood lots have had a grim, specialized fame and have been known in innumerable books and official records as the West Wood and the East Wood—as if, in all that countryside, there were no other bits of wood that lay just east and west of a country road. In the same way, there was a forty-acre cornfield lying on the east side of the road, between the two plots of trees, which ever since has simply been the cornfield, as if there had never been any other.
The woods have been cut down since then, and where the cornfield used to be there is a macadamized roadway flanked by gleaming, archaic-looking monuments and statues, with little markers here and there unobtrusively beckoning for attention. But in the fall of 1862 no one was dreaming of statues, and beca
use they had had good growing weather the corn was in fine shape—more than head-high, strong, richly green, the tall stalks waving slowly in the last winds of summer.
And over and above all of this perfection of peace and quiet, on the sixteenth of September, there was a silent running out of time and a gathering together of the fates, as issues that reached to the ends of the earth and the farthest borders of national history drew in here for decision. The peace and quiet had already been destroyed. In the grove where it would soon be necessary to lay out a cemetery
(grass waving in the summer breeze beside the tiny faded flags: it's all right now, it's all right) men in trim gray uniforms sat on their horses and looked to the east through field glasses. Many other men, much less neatly dressed in gray and tattered brown and every imaginable shade between, were filling the zigzag country lanes and trampling down the grain in the farmers' fields all along the ridge. Dust hung in the air as long columns of six-horse teams labored up the roads, swung off into the fields at higher places on the ridge, and sent polished guns into battery to the tune of crackling bugle calls. Now and then a set of these guns would shoot out quick jets of bright flame and rolling clouds of soiled smoke, the guns jarring backward with each discharge, scarring the ground beneath their trails and breaking the air with heavy sound.
On the eastern side of the Antietam, a mile away, the scene was much the same, except that here the men wore blue—very dusty, worn, and dirty, much of it—and there were many more of them. They brought guns up to the low heights bordering the east side of the creek: iron rifles, mostly, many of them bearing at the breech the heavy band that marked the long-range Parrott. From time to time they fired at the Confederate guns to the west, battery and section commanders standing a little apart, peering under the smoke to spot the shots. Behind the guns, safely under cover in valleys and hollows, were dense masses of infantry, the men glancing incuriously up at the guns as they moved into their places, each youthful face a tanned, expressionless mask. Now and then the crash of the rival batteries rose to a great tumult that sent long echoes rolling cross-country to the mountains off to the east; then the noise died down and the country seemed quiet, and the unending thump-shuffle of feet and the creaking of wagon wheels could be heard. When the guns were being fired it seemed as if a great battle were being waged, yet this was not really a battle at all; this was merely the preliminary feinting and sparring, most of it due to nothing but the overeagerness of the battery commanders and none of it doing very much harm.