by Bruce Catton
The division went west across the cornfield, the lines wavering as the men stepped carefully to avoid the dead and wounded, and it came under artillery fire. Stuart's horse artillery had moved south to a hill behind the West Wood, firing over the treetops, and the division was so wide and solid that the gunners could not miss—a shot that carried over the first battle line was sure to hit the second or the third. (One veteran wrote disgustedly afterward: "We were as easy to hit as the town of Sharpsburg.")2 The men could see the shells coming, but they had learned by now that it was useless to duck and dodge, and they went straight ahead, bending their heads a little as if they were walking into a high wind. From the rear they made a handsome sight —long lines carefully aligned, battle flags fluttering, little white smoke clouds breaking out overhead here and there as shells exploded, green wood ahead of them: very nice to look at, so long as you could look from a distance. Far away, near McClellan's headquarters, staff officers swung their telescopes on the moving lines and remarked to one another that this was going to do it—that division could not be stopped.
Out of the cornfield and over the turnpike they went, past narrow fields and into the West Wood, that long belt of trees which ran north and south from below the Dunker church to a spot opposite Mr. Miller's barnyard. The trees gave protection from the shells, and the only Rebels in sight were skirmishers who faded back and disappeared as the division came on. The wood was open enough so that the brigade lines were maintained without much difficulty, and in a few minutes the leading brigade came out on the far side, facing open fields that rose slowly to an irregular ridge several hundred yards off. Stuart's guns were up there, and a few thin lines of infantry, but nothing very solid. The division was halted, with nobody able to see anything much except the men in the leading brigade. Sumner's idea might be right: he was on the flank, and all he had to do now was get his cumbersome battle lines out into the open, chase the last Rebels off that ridge, perform a left wheel, and march down toward Sharpsburg.
But it wasn't going to be that way. The left of Lee's line had been mangled quite as badly as the right of McClellan's, but in the precise nick of time Lee had sent up strong reinforcements—McLaws's division and Walker's, with Jackson's indomitable lieutenant, Jubal Early, bringing in his own brigade and such other stray elements as he could collect. And all of these, totaling more men than Sumner had with him, were now poised to attack just where it would hurt most—from the left.
The blow came with demoralizing suddenness, and for most of the men it was completely invisible, and there was nothing whatever they could do about it. One minute Sumner was sitting his horse amid the leading brigade, watching the firing that was coming from the Rebels on the ridge, sizing up the situation; the next minute there was a great uproar of musketry and screaming men in the wood to the left, the air was full of bullets, an unexpected host of new Rebels was going into line on the ridge in front, guns were appearing from nowhere and going into battery there, and there was complete and unmerciful hell to pay.
It hit the rear ranks first. One-armed General Howard had four Pennsylvania regiments in the third brigade—all the men came from Philadelphia, and the outfit was known as the "Philadelphia Brigade" —and these men, who had been standing at ease in the wood, abruptly found themselves under a deadly fire from behind. Regiments broke, men scrambled for cover, officers shouted frantically; the enemy was out of sight, dense smoke was seeping in through the trees, the air was alive with bullets, fugitives were running every which way. Howard—never an inspirational leader, but a solid citizen who was never scared, either—went riding along the line trying to get the men realigned, which was hard because nobody knew which way the men ought to be faced in order to fight effectively. Sumner galloped up, shouted something, and galloped off again. In the unceasing racket Howard could not hear a word he said; an aide yelled in his ear that Sumner had been shouting: "My God, Howard! You must get out of here!"—an idea which by now had seized every man in the brigade. The 72nd Pennsylvania, at the far left, gave way completely, its frantic stragglers adding to the confusion. Some detachments were faced by the rear rank and started off, but that didn't seem to work —more often than not the men found themselves marching straight into a consuming fire; and presently the whole brigade simply dissolved and the men ran back out of the wood and into an open field, a disordered mob rather than a brigade of troops. In the field they were caught by artillery, the Rebels having wheeled up guns to sweep the open ground, and the rout of the brigade became complete. In something less than ten minutes the brigade had lost more than five hundred men and had hardly been able to fire a shot in reply.
Up front it was a little better, but not much. A savage Rebel charge came in from the open field, and the 15th Massachusetts took it head-on, exchanging volleys at a scant fifteen yards. One soldier in this regiment later wrote that "the loss of life was fearful; we had never seen anything like it." The 34th New York, which was at the left end of the front line, tried to move over to help and somehow got squarely in between two Confederate lines and took a horrible fire from front and rear at the same time, losing half of its men in a few minutes. General Sedgwick hurried back to his second brigade, trying to get a regiment or two wheeled around for flank protection, but it was simply impossible—there just was no room to maneuver in all that crush even if the Rebel fire had permitted it, which it didn't. Sedgwick got a wound in the arm and an aide urged him to go to the rear. He refused, saying that the wound was a nuisance and nothing more; then another bullet lifted him out of the saddle with a wound that kept him in hospital for five months. (He made a bad patient, it seems. Impatient with hospital routine, he jokingly said that if he ever got hit again he hoped the bullet would finish him off—anything was better than a hospital. Cracks like that are bad luck for soldiers: Uncle John got his wish at Spotsylvania Courthouse in 1864, when a Rebel sharpshooter hit him under the eye and killed him.)
Minutes seemed like hours in the uproar under the smoky trees. The sound of rifle fire rose higher and higher as more Rebel brigades got into action. Over and over, in official reports and in regimental histories, one finds Federals giving the same account of it—the heaviest, deadliest fire they ever saw in the entire war.3 The rear brigade was gone and the second brigade was going. General Dana, commanding the second brigade, managed to get parts of the 42nd New York and the 7th Michigan swung around to meet the fire from the left, but they couldn't hold on. When Howard's brigade went to pieces the Rebels came in from the rear and the two regiments were overwhelmed, with a few platoons managing to keep some sort of formation as they backed off to the north.
The colonel of the 59th New York rode back and forth with a flag, bawling: "Rally on the colors!" His men grouped themselves around him and tried to return a heavy fire that came out of the wood in front; and in the smoke and the confusion they volleyed into the backs of the 15th Massachusetts, and there was a terrible shouting and cursing amid all the din. Then a Confederate regiment worked its way around and fired into the 59th from the rear, and the New Yorkers lost nearly two thirds of their numbers. Young Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes of the 20th Massachusetts went down with his second wound of the war; and somehow, amazingly, that wandering rookie regiment from General Samuel Crawford's brigade, the greenhorn 125th Pennsylvania, showed up and fell into line beside the battered 34th New York, where it fought manfully. (Nobody ever knew quite how it got there; it had been fighting with Greene's boys south of the Dunker church, and in some incomprehensible manner it had got detached and in all the fury of this infighting had managed to get into the middle of Sedgwick's front line. Those rookies seemed to have a genius for wandering into fights, and they were packing a whole year's experience into one desperate morning.)
If the time seemed endless, it was really very short. Just fifteen minutes after the first shot had been fired, the last of the division retreated. From first to last, the division had not had a chance; it was attacked from three sides at once—front, left,
and rear—and the collapse ran from rear rank to front rank. It left more than twenty-one hundred men dead or wounded in the West Wood, and a good half of its units had never been able to fire a shot; some of those that did fought facing by the rear rank. Confederate losses in this fight had been negligible; the sacrifice of Sedgwick's division had accomplished nothing whatever.
A few regiments got out in good order. The 20th Massachusetts proudly recorded that it left the West Wood at a walk, in column of fours, muskets at right shoulder; and the 1st Minnesota, which had been lucky—it had lost only a fourth of its men—went out beside it, similarly formed. These and a few other unbroken units were lined up perpendicular to the Hagerstown pike, a few hundred yards north of the spot where the division had crossed the road on its way in, and they laid down a strong fire when the triumphant Rebels came out of the wood to finish the rout. The Rebel lines swept into the cornfield—one more charge across that cornfield!—where wounded men cursed wearily and pressed their faces against the dirt, hoping that pounding feet and bursting shells and low-flying bullets would not hurt them further as they lay there helpless—and for a few minutes it looked as if this counterattack might destroy the whole right wing of McClellan's army and end the battle then and there. But the remnant of Sedgwick's division gave ground stubbornly and at a price, Gordon's tired brigade from Mansfield's corps came in to help, a good deal of rifle fire was still coming out of the East Wood, and an enormous line of fieldpieces was waiting on the slope north of the cornfield. For the last time that day the cornfield was swept by murderous fire, and the Confederates slowed down, halted, and went back to the shelter of the West Wood, while the beaten Federals withdrew to the ridge in rear of the guns, leaving a fringe of pickets and skirmishers behind.
And while this area north of the Dunker church was smoldering and fitfully exploding all the rest of the day with long-range rifle and artillery fire, there was no more real fighting here. There had been enough, in all conscience. In a square of ground measuring very little more than one thousand yards on a side—cornfield, barnyard, orchard, East and West Woods, and the fields by the turnpike—nearly twelve thousand men were lying on the ground, dead or wounded. It had not taken long to put them there, either. The fighting began with daylight—around five-thirty or six o'clock. It was now nine-thirty; four hours, at the most, from the time Hooker's batteries began to rake the cornfield to the end of the last Rebel countercharge. They fought with muzzle-loaders in those days, the men who got off two shots a minute were doing well, and it took, as one might say, a real effort to kill a man then. But considering their handicaps, they did pretty well.
When the beaten elements of Sedgwick's division crept north to safety, Sumner rode east to see about the rest of his army corps. The old man had done his best, and after that first desperate "My God, Howard! You must get out of here!" he had been as cool in all that fire as if he had been on parade, riding his horse at a walk amid the broken ranks of panicky soldiers, doing the little that could be done to pull fighting lines together, calming men by his stout refusal to recognize personal danger. But his best had been tragically inadequate: good enough to serve in the moment of disaster, but not good enough to keep the disaster from happening. He had been given an entire army corps, the biggest one in the army, eighteen thousand men in all; and he had left two thirds of it behind when he made his big attack. The one division which went astray and the other which was late in starting—these two, banked up beside Sedgwick's men, might well have broken Lee's flank beyond all hope of repair and the war would have been won by noon. The old man thought about them and went back to see about them after his attack had failed.
(Back by the Pry house sat McClellan, getting the messages of triumph and disaster from the wigwagging signal flags, studying the far-off slopes through his telescope, sending his aides here and there, watching the battle that he had planned, but not laying his own hand upon it: climax of the war taking place before his eyes, climax of his own personal fate, life or death for many thousands of young men depending on this day's battle. McClellan, quiet, composed, thoughtful, almost detached, listening with an inner ear for the still voice of caution and doubt, letting the battle go on without him.)
Yet the thing could still be done, and perhaps Old Winkey was the man to do it. Brigadier General William H. French, who had the second of Sumner's divisions, was red-faced and bluff, with a fantastic habit of bringing both eyes tightly shut spasmodically as he talked-thus "Old Winkey" or "Old Blinky" to his men. (One buck private, in the early days of the war, accosted by French about something or other while the division was on the march, had given way to laughter at all of this blinking. Since French was a hot-tempered man, the private had been hung by the thumbs from the nearest tree and left there to reflect on the sober respect that is due a general, until the following division cut him down.) French took his division across the Antietam in the wake of Sedgwick, under the impression that he was to strike for the Rebel line to the south of the Dunker church. As he brought his men up the hills west of the creek he had on his right hand a pillar of flame—the farmhouse of one Mumma, a solid citizen who had given the land where the Dunker church was built, his dwelling set ablaze that morning by D. H. Hill's outposts, who feared it might become a strong point for Yankee sharpshooters.
The division halted briefly to perfect its alignment, and about the time the last of Sedgwick's fugitives got back to the northern hills French had everything ready and the men started up out of the creek valley. The sun came out and the light was bright; ahead was the Roulette farm, a pleasant cluster of buildings on a broad knoll, surrounded by an orchard, shade trees, and a well-kept lawn. As the line reached this high place the officers back at headquarters got another look at the deceitful pageantry of war: broad, orderly lines of infantry going on in the sunlight, tiny puff balls of smoke appearing around the house as the Rebel skirmishers went into action, battle flags making high lights of gay color, officers posturing on their horses with glinting swords, a battery of artillery riding up fast and unlimbering dramatically; all very fine and bloodless-looking, just like the colored lithographs. Then the battle line divided as the men went by the Roulette house, the Federals combing belated Southern skirmishers out of stables and springhouse at bayonet point. Regimental surgeons, following close behind, moved into the big barn under the brow of a hill and prepared their operating tables, while orderlies spread out straw for wounded men to lie on. They would have plenty of work to do presently.
As the lines closed up beyond the farmhouse, with sharper rifle fire coming down from the crest of a rise in front, some of the men went through a yard where there was a long row of beehives; and just then a round shot from some Southern gun smashed through the length of these hives, and the air, which was already full of bullets, was now abuzz and humming with angry bees. The rookie 132nd Pennsylvania got the worst of it, and for a moment the bees almost broke up the battle. The green soldiers were marching into the rifle fire bravely enough, but the bees were more than they could take and the regiment went all to pieces as the men leaped and ran and slapped and swore. It took the united efforts of General Kimball, the brigade commander, his staff and the regimental officers to get the boys out of the yard and back in ranks again. To the end of their days the soldiers of the 132nd remembered the fight with the bees in the Roulette farmyard.
The Confederates who were defending the line in here belonged to D. H. Hill, and he had them cunningly posted at the crest of a hill, lying down almost invisible, firing steadily. As the Northerners came nearer these Rebels found themselves outnumbered and backed off; and when the advancing Yankee fine got to the crest it looked down the reverse slope a hundred yards or more to a sunken road packed full of Rebels who yelled furious defiance. The Northerners' faces were already blackened by powder smoke, and a couple of regiments wore brand-new uniforms of blue darker than ordinary, which looked black in the morning sun, and the Southerners shouted: "Go away, you black devils—go home!" alon
g with much else.
It was a bad layout. An eighth of a mile south of the Dunker church a country lane runs zigzag east and south from the Hagers-town road, going for a quarter of a mile under the lee of a long hill, climbing to a plateau for another quarter mile, and there making a sharp elbow as it turns south. By years of usage and erosion this lane had been worn down several feet below the surface of the ground, and it was bordered on both sides by snake-rail fences. On the northern side the Rebels had taken these rails down and piled them in a low breastwork, and they were lined up strongly in the low road behind this obstruction, as securely entrenched as if they had been digging all night. Lying below the brow of the hill, the lane could not be reached by Federal artillery. The men who defended it were almost wholly protected; the men who tried to take it would have to advance in the open, exposed to a crippling fire. It was as nasty a strong point as the army ever ran up against: the famous sunken road, known forever after (for sufficient reason) as Bloody Lane.
The Yankee line halted on top of the hill, dressing its ranks. In the road below the Rebels held their fire, waiting for them. For a moment this part of the field was almost silent, and the waiting Confederates could hear the shouted commands of the Northern officers as the assaulting lines started forward. Down the slope they came, four ranks deep. A colonel in the sunken road paid his tribute to the brilliance of the spectacle: "Their gleaming bayonets flashed like burnished silver in the sunlight. With the precision of step and perfect alignment of a holiday parade this magnificent array moved to the charge, every step keeping time to the tap of the deep-sounding drum."4