by Bruce Catton
The battle was fought in three separate parts. The first part was the fight around the cornfield, and the second was the fight in the West Wood and along the sunken road; and the third part—tardy, disjointed, and almost totally unco-ordinated, as if it had no relation to the rest of the battle—took place along the banks of the creek and on the hills and high ground beyond those banks, to the southeast of the town of Sharpsburg.
McClellan had planned to have the Union attack down here made at the same time as the attacks at the other end of his line, along the Hagerstown road, and if it had happened that way there can be very little doubt that Lee's army would have been crushed by the middle of the day. But somehow McClellan had very little control over this battle, and it did not work out at all as he had planned. The great assault on his left was hopelessly flubbed: a knockout punch, aimed at an enemy almost helpless on the ropes, which somehow turned into a mere shove. The private soldier fought as well here as he fought elsewhere, but he got no help whatever from the top.
When the day began the IX Corps was lying on the east side of Antietam Creek, south of the Boonsboro road, sprawled out among the low hills and sloping meadows which border that part of the stream. The Antietam runs in slow loops here, with steep high hills on its western bank, and these hills were held that morning by Rebel soldiers who opened fire as soon as they could see anything to shoot at; and as the light grew the Confederate batteries on the high ground in front of Sharpsburg joined in, to be answered promptly by the Federal guns east of the creek. So when the great uproar of the engagement north of the Dunker church filled the morning air there was an answering wave of sound from these hills on the left. For a while this was sound and nothing more (quite a number of men died under the shelling and the sharpshooting, to be sure, but their deaths were incidental, contributing nothing to victory or defeat); but somewhere around nine o'clock McClellan sent word to Burnside to attack the Rebel lines in his front immediately—Hooker and Sumner were hard pressed and a blow over here would greatly relieve them.
The two armies lay close together here with nothing between them but the valley of the Antietam. The valley itself is fairly broad, but the creek is insignificant—fifty feet wide, or thereabouts, and so shallow that a man could wade it in most places without wetting his belt buckle. For some unaccountable reason, however, this modest creek was treated that day as if it were quite impassable: a veritable Rhine River, not to be crossed except dry-shod on a bridge.1 A little country road comes down over the hills on the eastern side, meanders close to the creek through the low meadows for a few hundred yards, and then makes a ninety-degree turn to the left, crossing the stream on a narrow bridge and following a winding ravine up to the high ground near Sharpsburg; and this road and this bridge, fatally, were the only features of this part of the landscape which the high command could think about that morning. When the order came to attack the enemy it was interpreted in terms of the bridge, as if the placid little creek could be passed in no other way. Corps and army command had had more than twenty-four hours to examine the terrain, but it seems to have occurred to no one in all that time to test the depth of this water the way young Lieutenant Custer had tested the Chickahominy
—by going out in it and measuring it personally. There was rumored to be a ford half a mile or more downstream from the bridge, but the search for this ford consisted chiefly in an unavailing hunt for some farmer who knew where it was and could lead the way to it. Meanwhile, orders were to attack; to attack meant to cross the creek; and to cross the creek, in the foggy light that pervaded corps headquarters, meant to cross the bridge—that and nothing else. And the bridge was the worst of all possible places to make an attack: an ideal defensive spot where a few regiments could hold off a whole division.
Orders went bumping down the echelons of command, from corps to division to brigade, and presently Colonel George Crook, who had three regiments of Ohio troops, got the nod. Crook was a good man and made a fine record later in the war—and afterward in the Indian wars out West—but that morning he seems to have been infected by the mental paralysis which beset his superiors. He had his brigade in a little valley an eighth of a mile northeast of the bridge; formed line of battle, went boldly forward over the low hill, and lost his way completely, missing the bridge altogether and coming out on a low plateau in a bend of the creek upstream, with enough Rebel guns trained on him to make the place highly uncomfortable. He got his Ohioans forward to the bank, and they lay down behind fences and underbrush and fired away at some Confederates across the stream, who promptly began to fire back. This brought about the killing of some dozens of boys but contributed nothing whatever to the capture of the bridge. Burnside's first assault was hardly even a fizzle.
Try again: and this time the order went to General Sturgis, he who had sat in Colonel Haupt's office less than a month ago and explained patiently his intense dislike for General Pope. Sturgis had one asset—he at least knew where the bridge was—and he got the 2nd Maryland and the 6th New Hampshire lined up and sent them down the country road and along the riverbank toward the bridge. This was playing into the Rebels' hands. They had the hills on the western side covered with sharpshooters, with a couple of regiments drawn up under good cover in an old quarry overlooking the bridge itself, and they also had a substantial number of fieldpieces trained on the bridge and on the road that led to the bridge. All of these laid down a killing fire, and it was just too much for any troops to stand. The boys from Maryland and New Hampshire tried, but their lines were broken up before they reached the bridge, and presently the survivors went scampering back to the woods for shelter. General Cox got some infantry up to keep the Rebel defenders under rifle fire, and a tremendous bombardment was opened by the Federal artillery; and General Isaac Rodman was ordered to march his division downstream to hunt for that missing ford, which was the last anybody heard of that for some little time. Meanwhile, the morning had gone and the hour was past noon, and the right wing of Lee's army had hardly been annoyed.
About this time McClellan began to realize that although a great deal of noise was being made on Burnside's front nothing very much in the way of an assault was going on. He had already sent several messages urging haste, and now he sent a staff colonel with peremptory orders: get across the stream immediately and open an attack on the high ground. Burnside was sitting his horse beside a battery on a hilltop, surveying the battlefield with impressive calm, and the sharp tone of this latest order jarred him. He told the colonel: "McClellan appears to think I am not trying my best to carry this bridge; you are the third or fourth one who has been to me this morning with similar orders." The colonel agreed that McClellan was getting anxious, and Burnside rode off to see Sturgis about it.
Presently Colonel Edward Ferrero, commanding Sturgis's second brigade, came trotting up to his two pet regiments—51st New York and 51st Pennsylvania, waiting side by side in a protected valley a couple of hundred yards back from the bridge.
"It is General Burnside's especial request that the two 51st's take that bridge," called Ferrero. "Will you do it?"
There was a brief pause while the regiments presumably reflected on the consuming sheet of fire that lay upon the bridge and its approaches and nerved themselves for a desperate deed. Then some corporal in the Pennsylvania regiment sang out:
"Will you give us our whisky, Colonel, if we make it?"
Between the Pennsylvanians and the colonel, whisky was a sore point. Somehow the regiment had earned a reputation as a heavy-drinking crowd: its colonel once remarked that if the regiment were put ashore on some completely uninhabited desert island, the foragers would come back in the evening loaded down with demijohns of the stuff; and for this reason and that Ferrero had recently ordered their whisky ration suspended. (It should be explained that there was no regular issue of whisky to the troops in the Civil War. Regimental commanders were authorized to issue it, however, whenever they thought fit—in bad weather, after a hard march, after a battle, and so
on—and many of them were fairly liberal about it.)
Ferrero—a trim, dapper, black-haired little man, something of a dandy in his dress—blinked for a moment, then laughed.
"Yes, by God!" he cried.
The regiments cheered, and Ferrero got them lined up side by side, each regiment in column of twos. They would dash straight downhill for the bridge instead of going along the road parallel to the Confederate line of fire, and when they got across, one regimental column would turn to the left and the other to the right. When the tail of the column was across, both outfits would face to the west, and they would have a two-regiment battle line ready to charge up the hill. Cox got the 11th Connecticut down to a stone wall by the creek to put a covering fire on the defenders, the 11th losing its colonel and suffering heavily but sticking to it manfully. Upstream a bit, Crook worked a battery down to the bank to blast the Rebels away from the western approaches. The fieldpieces on the bluffs stepped up their fire, throwing shells at every Confederate gun that could bear on the bridge, and the tumult of battle became a great, unbroken roar. Battle flags waving at the head of the column, the two regiments came up over their little hill and ran full-tilt for the bridge, shouting madly, men falling at every step as muskets and cannon slashed the column; and there was a wild chaos of smoke, flame, thunderous noise, and yelling men.
The Rebels across the creek were only twenty-five yards away and they could make every shot count, but they were under a furious fire now and it hurt, and there were not really so very many of them there, anyway, and they began to drift back up the hillsides. The colonel of the Pennsylvania regiment got to the near end of the bridge and stood there, one hand on the stone coping, waving his hat in great circles and yelling words of encouragement. The fighting men surged past him; his voice gave out, and the men could hear him rasping: "Come on, boys, I can't holler any more"—and then suddenly the column was across, fanning out into a line of battle, the handful of Confederates who remained were running, and the bridge had been won. The two regiments made their way to the crest of the hill, saw nothing in front of them but skirmishers—and, far away, Rebel batteries, which were keeping up a heavy fire but which had lost the range: shells were passing just overhead to explode harmlessly over the valley, and a man was safe enough if he stayed close to the ground—and they hugged the crest, waiting for reinforcements and further orders.2
They had been hit hard, those two regiments, and they were winded, and presently they left a chain of pickets up front, slipped back down the hillside where there was shelter, lit little fires, and began to boil coffee. ... A few days later there was a fancy ceremony in front of the brigade, with Colonel Ferrero getting a brigadier's commission as reward for the valor of the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians. Just as he was given the commission—everything very formal, field all aglitter with high brass, Ferrero sitting his horse in front of regiments stiff with military reverence—some irrepressible in the Pennsylvania regiment called out, side-of-mouth fashion: "How about that whisky?" Ferrero heard it, grinned, and turned his head long enough to say: "You'll get it"—and next morning, according to the regimental historian, a keg of the stuff came over from brigade headquarters and the long dry spell was over. . . .
Meanwhile, the army was losing time. Sturgis got the rest of his division across and sent the 21st Massachusetts up front—a battle-wise regiment which had educated its officers under fire and was proud of it. They had gone into action for the first time some months earlier at New Bern, North Carolina, where they had had to cross a shallow stream in a swamp with Rebel bullets whacking in all around them, men getting hit and everybody pretty tense. One of the officers had been a noted fiddler back home, much given to playing for country dances at which, in the custom of the day, he would call out the movements for the dancers while he fiddled; and at this river crossing he became greatly excited, so that pretty soon he was skipping about shouting all sorts of useless orders as fast as he could think of them, jittery himself and making everybody else the same way. So after a while one boy piped up: "All promenade!" and then another called out: "Ladies—grand change!" and the regiment crossed the stream, shouting with laughter. The officer became quiet and, said a veteran, "behaved like a little man" for the rest of the war.3
Anyway, the 21st was out in front, and after a while the rest of the division was massed close behind it, and Sturgis got ready to advance —only to discover that in the wild fusillading of the morning his boys had used up all of their ammunition. No one, somehow, had thought to check on their supply and see that they got more before they crossed. So he sent back word that somebody else would have to make the attack, adding that his boys were all exhausted, anyhow; and finally his troops were ordered aside into reserve while a new division came across the narrow bottieneck of the bridge, and more minutes slipped by. There was a bad traffic jam there, with marching men, ammunition wagons, field guns, and caissons all trying to make the bridge at once. The Confederate gunners up near Sharpsburg were still shelling the place, and altogether two hours passed before everything was in order and the advance could begin.
General Willcox was in charge of the new division and he started his men off astride the little road in the ravine, getting them up to the higher ground with the 79th New York leading—the old Highlanders who had mutinied against Tecumseh Sherman back in the army's gawky adolescence and had made up for it since by hard fighting. They passed the crest and came out on open ground: fields full of haystacks, cut up by stone walls, Confederates shooting at them from under cover, batteries in front and to the left, a scorching fire coming in. The Highlanders came to a halt, the 17th Michigan moved up and charged one of the batteries, sending it flying in hasty retreat, and the fighting line went on and found more Rebels in an orchard and halted to drive them out with musket fire.
Confederate man power here was fantastically thin, even though it didn't seem that way to the Federals in the front line. All morning Lee had pulled men away from this part of the line (Burnside's attack not developing) to reinforce the defense up by the Dunker church and the sunken lane, and when the Federals finally got up on the plateau, about three in the afternoon, there were no more than twenty-five hundred Rebel infantrymen left to stand them off, with no help in sight. Confederate batteries and used-up parts of batteries were clattering up from wherever they could be found, and they had to play the same role here they had played along the Hagerstown road—ignore the Yankee guns and concentrate on the advancing infantry, getting hit without being able to hit back: artillery hell all over again, the Federal gunners having worked out a system of concentrating all their fire on one Rebel battery at a time, wrecking it and then moving on to the next. Some of Fitz-John Porter's regular infantry and some dismounted cavalry had got across the stream by the Boonsboro bridge and were sending sharpshooters forward to pick off the Rebel gunners—and, all in all, the Army of Northern Virginia, hammered almost into a daze, was staggering on the very edge of final defeat.
But the Federal commanders did not know it. McClellan, back at headquarters, was meditating on the fearful slaughter of the morning and wondering if his right wing could hold its ground. Sumner had already forbidden the assault which Franklin and Richardson had prepared and was thinking only of the reserves which must be kept in hand to repulse a possible Rebel counterattack. (Lee had no reserves whatever just then; every unit which could stand up and hold muskets was in there shooting, and parts of the line were being held by pure bluff.) And Burnside—well, it is impossible to figure out just what Burnside was thinking. He was across the creek at last and he had something like twelve thousand fighting men in his command, with barely a fifth of that number opposing them; but he had one of his four divisions completely out of action, resting and replenishing its ammunition, he had another in reserve behind the front, and a third was floundering around looking for that ford half a mile below the bridge. The upshot was that instead of driving into Sharpsburg with twelve thousand men he was making his big attack with th
ree thousand.
The three thousand were making progress, but it was slow going. The tired Rebels who held this part of the line were few in number, but they kept laying down a heavy fire, and by now there were plenty of Confederate fieldpieces in action to help them despite the counter-battery work from across the stream. These stout Southern gunners were covering the open ground with a nasty cross fire, and the Yankees who were actually up in front doing the fighting were getting no benefit whatever from the fact that the defense in here would be completely swamped if Burnside could just get all of his men into action. The roar of battle grew louder and louder, choking smoke blanketed the hilltops and went rolling through the streets of Sharpsburg, and although the Rebels were giving ground they were being very stubborn about it. A sergeant in an advanced Pennsylvania battery, coming up to his guns after delivering a message to some other outfit, was walking across a field of dry standing timothy which seemed to be alive with wriggling, whistling rifle bullets; and he found himself ludicrously stepping high and walking on tiptoe to keep from treading on these venomous creatures whose trails he could see in the waving grass.
Rod by rod, going in little rushes from fence to fence, the Federal battle line got nearer and nearer to Sharpsburg. They had the high ground now, and the men who were farthest forward could see, down the western slope, the Rebels' behind-the-lines tangle of baggage wagons, stragglers, ambulances, and broken batteries. A stone mill on the edge of town was a strong point briefly, but the 45th Pennsylvania finally drove the Southern sharpshooters out of it. The Pennsylvanians insisted that the miller himself was there in his straw hat and overalls, taking pot shots at them from an upper window, and next day they wanted to find him and hang him but were dissuaded, at last, by the argument that the Rebels were a tattered lot and that the man they thought a civilian was probably a soldier who just didn't have a uniform.