by Bruce Catton
Far off to the left, beyond the Antietam, McClellan's long-range rifles came into action, hammering hard at the Rebel guns by the Dunker church and reaching out to plow the cornfield with a terrible cross fire of shell and solid shot; and the waiting Federal infantry hugged the ground, half dazed by the tremendous waves of noise. Hooker exaggerated a little, but only a little, when he wrote afterward that "every stalk in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife"; and he exaggerated not at all when he wrote that in all the war he never looked upon "a more bloody, dismal battlefield." The Confederates in the northern part of the cornfield went down in rows, scores at a time. Then after a while the great thunder of the guns died down a little and the Yankee infantry went forward.
It all looks very simple and orderly on the map, where the advance of the I Corps is represented by a straight line following neat little arrows, three divisions moving snugly abreast and everyone present presumably knowing at all times just what was going on and what the score was. But in reality there was nothing simple or orderly about any part of it. Instead there was an appalling confusion of shattering sound, an unending chaos of violence and heat and intense combat, with fields and thickets wrapped in shifting layers of blinding smoke so that no man could know and understand any more of what was happening than the part he could see immediately around him. There was no solid connected battle line neatly ranked in clear light; there was a whole series of battle lines swaying haphazardly in an infernal choking fog, with brigades and regiments standing by themselves and fighting their enemies where they found them, attack and counterattack taking place in every conceivable direction and in no recognizable time sequence, Northerners and Southerners wrestling back and forth in the cornfield in one tremendous free-for-all. The black powder used in those days left heavy masses of smoke which stayed on the ground or hung at waist level in long tattered sheets until the wind blew it away, and this smoke deposited a black, greasy film on sweaty skins, so that men who had been fighting hard looked grotesque, as if they had been ineptly made up for a minstrel show.
The fighting surged back and forth from the East Wood to the highway and beyond, and the most any general could do was push new troops in from the rear where they seemed to be needed—or, at times, rally soldiers who were coming disorganized out of action and send them back in again: what was happening up front was beyond anyone's control and depended entirely on the men themselves. And a wild, primitive madness seemed to descend on the men who fought in the cornfield: they went beyond the limits of sanity and endurance at times, Northerners and Southerners alike, until it seems that they tore at each other for the sheer sake of fighting. The men who fought there are all dead now, and it may be that we misinterpret the sketchy accounts which they left of the combat; yet from the diaries and the reports and the histories we get glimpses of what might well have been the most savage and consuming fighting American soldiers ever engaged in.
General Ricketts sent his men in through the East Wood—New York regiments, mostly, with a few from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts—and they fought step by step through the thickets and over the rocky ledges and fallen trees in the misty light of early morning, slowly driving the tenacious Confederates out and swinging around unconsciously until they faced toward the west, so that as they came out of the wood they went into the cornfield, with Stuart's cannon hitting them hard from the western hills. They pulled themselves together on the edge of the cornfield, getting an enfilade fire on a Confederate brigade there and sending it flying; then they advanced again, and as they moved the regiments were separated, each one automatically adjusting its lines to face whatever formation of Rebels might be in front of it. When they got deeper into the field the opposition became heavier, until at last whole brigades were shaken by the deadly, racking volleys—the most terrible fire, one veteran wrote, that they ever had to endure. Rifles were splintered and broken in men's hands, canteens and haversacks were riddled, platoons and companies seemed to dissolve. They closed ranks as well as they could amid the cornstalks, sweating officers gesturing with swords and yelling orders no one could hear in the overpowering racket, and they kept pushing on. They attacked and they were counterattacked; they drove certain Rebels and were themselves driven in turn; at times they exchanged stand-up volleys at incredibly close ranges, wrecking their enemies and seeing their own lines wrecked, while the smoke settled thicker and thicker and they fought in utter blindness.
At last they went back, straggling through the East Wood to reform in the rear—a full third of the division shot down and half of the survivors hopelessly scattered. The 12th Massachusetts—the kid-glove boys from Boston who had brought a great song to the war and carried a noble flag of white and blue and gold presented by the ladies of Beacon Hill—took 334 men into action and lost 220 of them, and when it tried to rally behind the wood fewer than three dozen men were still with the colors. Duryee's brigade of four regiments found hardly a hundred men to form a line when it finished its retreat. For the time being, except for a few valiant fragments which hung on at the edge of the wood, the entire division was out of the fight.
Meade's Pennsylvanians had gone into the cornfield at the center of the line, and their story is just about the same: advance and retreat, charge and countercharge, victory and retreat all blended. Once the center brigade broke under a driving Rebel charge and went streaming toward the rear. Meade came thundering up with the battle fury on him, yanked the 8th Reserve Regiment back into line, hurried it off to a vantage point by Mr. Miller's fence. A Georgia regiment, lying unseen in the corn, let fly with a volley from a distance of thirty feet, knocking out half the regiment at one sweep. The Pennsylvania color-bearer went down with a foot shot off, struggled to his knees, jabbing his flagstaff into the ground, and struck wildly at a comrade who tried to take the colors away from him. A charging Georgian shot him dead and was himself killed by a Pennsylvania lieutenant; and there were wild tumult and heavy smoke and crazy shouting all around, with the entire war narrowed to the focus of this single combat between Pennsylvanians and Georgians. Then the Pennsylvanians broke and ran again—to be stopped, incomprehensibly, a few yards in the rear by a boyish private who stood on a little hillock and kept swinging his hat, shouting: "Rally, boys, rally! Die like men, don't run like dogs!"
Strangely, on that desperate field where men were madly heroic and full of abject panic by turns, this lone private stopped the retreat. What was left of the regiment fell in beside him. Fugitives from other regiments in the shattered brigade fell in with them, and Meade—who had gone galloping away to bring up a battery to plug the gap—came back and got the uncertain line straightened out, while canister from the new battery uprooted green cornstalks and tore the bodies of Rebels who crouched low on the powdery ground. Then presently the brigade went forward again.2
Over by the turnpike the Black Hat Brigade charged around the Miller farm buildings, driving out the Confederate skirmishers but breaking apart somewhat as the men surged past dwelling and outhouses under heavy fire. There is a glimpse of a young Wisconsin officer standing by a gap in a fence, waving his sword and crying: "Company E! On the right, by file, into line!" Then a bullet hit him in his open mouth and he toppled over dead in mid-shout; and the brigade got by the obstructions and went into the cornfield near the highway. Here it seemed to be every man for himself. There was Rebel infantry west of the road, pouring in a tremendous fire; some of the men formed a new line facing west, lying down behind the turnpike fence to fight back. Gibbon sent a couple of regiments across the road to deal with this flank attack, and a moment later Doubleday sent four New York regiments over there to help; part of his division was going south through the cornfield and part of it was struggling desperately in the fields and woods to the west, and shells and bullets were coming in from all directions at once. Men said afterward that the bullets seemed to be as thick as hail in a great storm. Formations were lost, regiments and brigades were jumbl
ed up together, and as the men advanced they bent their heads as if they were walking into a driving rain. And under all the deafening tumult there was a soft, unceasing clip-snip-clip of bullets shearing off the leaves and stalks of corn. Near the highway some officer was yelling the obvious—"This fire is murderous!"—and then, at last, the sweating mob of soldiers came out by a fence at the southern edge of the cornfield, and as they did so a long line of Confederates arose from the plowed ground in front of them and the high sound of rifle fire rose to a new intensity.
A terrible frenzy of battle descended on the fighting line. Men were possessed by a hysterical excitement, shouting furiously, bursting out in shrill insane laughter, crowding up to the fence to fire at the Rebel line. A survivor of this attack, recalling the merciless fire that greeted the men at the line of the fence, wrote: "Men, I cannot say fell—they were knocked out of ranks by the dozen." Cartridges were torn with nervous haste. Muskets became foul from much firing, so that men took stones to hammer their ramrods down. Wanting to fire faster than ever before, they found they could not—a nightmare slowness was upon them as the black powder caked in hot rifle barrels. Some soldiers threw their pieces away and took up the rifles of dead men.
All along the fence the men were jostling together, with soldiers in the rear ranks passing loaded rifles forward to the men in front; battle flags waved in sweeping, smoke-fringed arcs, color-bearers swinging the flag staffs frantically, as if the mere fluttering of the colors would help bring victory. Brigades and regiments were all helter-skelter— Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers were jammed in with men from Wisconsin and Massachusetts, everyone was cheering hoarsely, new elements were coming up from the rear to add to the crush along the fence, the noise of battle was one great unending roar louder than anything the men had ever heard before. And at last, as if by common impulse, the whole crowd swarmed forward over the fence and started up the open field toward the Dunker church—very near now, its whitewashed walls all splotched and patchy from flying bullets. The Confederate line, terribly thinned by rifle fire, broke in wild flight. Some of the Southerners tried to escape over the turnpike fences and were left spread-eagled on the rails as the Federals shot them; others fell back into the wood around the church. The Northerners raised a great new shout and went ahead on the run, with victory in sight.3
Then, dramatically, from the wood around the church a new Confederate battle line emerged, trotting forward with the shrill yip-yip-yip of the Rebel yell—John B. Hood's division, swinging into action with an irresistible counterattack.
Hood's men had been pulled out of the front lines late the night before, after their brush with the Pennsylvanians in the East Wood. They had been on short rations for days, and early this morning the commissary department finally caught up with them, delivering ample supplies of bread and meat. The division had been in the act of cooking the first solid meal in a week when word came back that they were needed up front without a moment's delay—the Yankees had broken the line and would have the battle won unless somebody did something about it. So the Texans and Mississippians left their half-cooked breakfasts, grabbed their rifles, and came storming out into the open, mad clean through: and here, within easy range, were the
Yankees who were the cause of it all, the Yankees on whom the overmastering anger of hungry men could be vented.
Hood's men drew up and delivered a volley which, said a Federal survivor, "was like a scythe ranting through our line." It hit the Federals head-on and stopped them. There was a brief pause, and then the Northern soldiers turned and made for the rear on the run, back over the fence and into the raddled cornfield and down the long slope, Hood's men following them with triumphant, jeering shouts, while three brigades from D. H. Hill's command came in from below the East Wood and added their own weight to the pursuit.
Down in the open ground by the Miller house the flight was checked. General Gibbon had brought up old Battery B, and its six brass smoothbores were drawn up in a barnyard west of the road. The Rebels were advancing on both sides of the pike, converging on the barnyard—the Federals west of the road had had to retire when the cornfield was lost—and the guns became a strong point where the beaten soldiers could make a stand again. Some of the fugitives fell in behind the battery, kneeling and firing out between the guns. Gibbon got two of his regiments drawn up farther west, a little ahead of the guns and facing east; General Patrick brought his four New York regiments up amid the crush; and the charging Confederates came out of the corn from the south and east, smashing straight at the battery, firing as they came.
Battery B was pounding away furiously, but Gibbon, looking on with the eye of a gunner, noticed that in the mad excitement the gun crews had let the elevating screws run down so that the guns were pointing up for extreme long range, blasting their charges into the empty air. He shouted and gestured from the saddle, but no one could hear anything in that unearthly din, so he threw himself to the ground, ran to the nearest gun, shouldered the gun crew aside, and spun the little wheel under the breech so that the muzzle slowly sank until it seemed almost to be pointing at the ground. Gibbon stepped aside, the gunner jerked the lanyard, and the gun smashed a section of rail fence, sending the splintered pieces flying in the faces of Hood's men. The other gunners hastily corrected their elevation and fired double-shotted rounds of canister at the range of fifty feet, while the Northern infantry cracked in with volleys of musket fire. In all its history the battery never fired so fast; its haste was so feverish that a veteran regular-army sergeant forgot to step away from his gun when it was discharged, and as it bounded backward in recoil a wheel knocked him down and crushed him.
The front of the Confederate column was blown away, and the survivors withdrew sullenly into what was left of the cornfield. Some of the Federals west of the road raised a yell and went into the cornfield after them, were struck in the flank by unseen Confederates farther south, and came streaming back across the pike again to take shelter among the rocky ledges west of the guns. The Rebels re-formed behind a low ridge, then came on again. A soldier in the 80th New York, helping to defend the battery, called this assault "one of the finest exhibitions of pluck and manhood ever seen on any battlefield." But the heroism served only to swell the casualty lists. There were too many Yankees there and the guns were firing too fast; the charging Rebel line simply melted away under the fire, the men who were not hit ran back into the cornfield again, and for a moment there was sometriing like a breathing spell, while the rival armies lay, as one soldier wrote, "like burnt-out slag" on the battlefield.4
Two hours of fighting in one forty-acre field, with the drumming guns never silent for a moment; Northerners and Southerners had fought themselves out, and the fields and woods for miles to the rear were filled with fugitives. A steady leakage had been taking place from each army as all but the stoutest found themselves carried beyond the limit of endurance. The skulkers and the unabashed cowards, who always ran in every battle at the first chance they could get —and there was hardly a regiment, North or South, which did not have a few of them—had drifted away at the first shock. Later others had gone: the men who could stand something but not everything, men who had stood fast in all previous fights but found this one too terrible to be borne; the men who helped wounded comrades to the rear and then either honestly got lost (which was easy to do, in that smoking madness) or found that they could not quite make themselves go back into it. All of these had faded out, leaving the fighting lines dreadfully thin, so that the loss of strength on each side was far greater, just then, than the casualty lists would show. Hooker's corps had lost nearly twenty-five hundred men killed and wounded—a fearful loss, considering that he had sent hardly more than nine thousand into action—but for the moment the story was much worse than that.
The number of uninjured men who left the ranks was probably fully as great as the number of casualties. The proud I Corps of the Army of the Potomac was wrecked.5
On the Confederate side the story was a
bout the same. The troops who had held the cornfield and East Wood when the fight began had been splintered and smashed and driven to the rear. Their dazed remnants were painfully trying to regroup themselves far behind the Dunker church, fugitives were trailed out all the way back to the Potomac, and field and wood were held now by the reinforcements, Hood's men and D. H. Hill's. There was still fight left in these men, but they had been ground down unmercifully. At the height of his counterattack Hood had sent back word that unless he could be reinforced he would have to withdraw, but that meanwhile he would go on as far as he could. He had gone to the northern limit of the cornfield, had seen the striking spearhead of his division broken by the Yankee guns and rifles around Miller's barnyard, and he was holding on now in grim expectancy of a new Federal attack. The cornfield itself was a hideous spectacle—broken stalks lying every which way, green leaves spattered with blood, ground all torn and broken, littered everywhere with discarded weapons. Inconceivable numbers of dead and wounded lay in all parts of the field, whole ranks of them at the northern border where Hooker's first blasts of cannon fire had caught them—after the battle Massachusetts soldiers said they had found 146 bodies from one Rebel brigade lying in a neat, soldierly line. Hood wrote afterward that on no other field in the whole war was he so constantly troubled by the fear that his horse would step on some helpless wounded man. The Rebel brigades that were in the field when the fighting began had lost about 50 per cent of their numbers.