by Bruce Catton
Slowly the Rebel line of defense faded away—brigades up front all cracked, Sharpsburg filled with demoralized stragglers looking for shelter, the last desperate hour of the Confederate Army visibly at hand. On the northern side General Willcox found his men out of ammunition and called a brief halt so that he could dress his lines and get more cartridges; then he would go on, take Sharpsburg, and get squarely across Lee's only line of retreat.
While all of this had been happening General Rodman had been having his troubles downstream. His orders were to find that ford, get his men across, and flank the Rebels who were defending the bridge, and he had started out just as Sturgis got his first orders from Burn-side. He had a guide picked up on some farm thereabouts, but the guide couldn't seem to find the ford—one suspects that he had "sesesch" sympathies and was laughing up his sleeve at the misguided Yankees—and the division did a power of more or less haphazard marching around and the whole morning was wasted. Finally, about the time Ferrero was sending in his valiant 51st's to storm the bridge, one of Rodman's brigadiers had the 8th Connecticut deploy two companies as skirmishers and moved them down to the stream to look for the ford. Quickly enough they found it—or at least found that they could wade the creek, which came to the same thing—and with this climactic revelation Rodman got his men over and prepared to join in the final assault on Lee's right.
Rodman's division was not too strong. He had seven regiments in all, and one of these had been detached earlier to support a battery on the east bank; altogether he might have taken close to three thousand men across the little creek. The ground he had to fight on was a bit perplexing. The hills came down to the creek steeply, where he was, all cut up by ravines and gullies and long hollows, with the upper slopes planted in corn. It took a little time to get the two brigades lined up abreast on the western side, with the right wing of the right brigade extended in order to get in touch with Willcox's men upstream. The Rebels were waiting in the various cornfields and they put a stinging rifle fire down on the slopes. Rodman's regiments drifted apart a little while they were forming. When the advance began the left wing somehow didn't get the order; it got off to a late start, and there was a gap between it and the other brigade.
There were three New York regiments in the brigade on the right, and they went plodding up a long hill, with Rebels behind a stone wall at the top and a Rebel battery off at one side plowing the slope with accurate shell fire. All of this fire seemed too much to buck, and the brigade commander had the men lie down halfway up the hill; but the Confederate gunners in here were marksmen and they shaved the ground with solid shot that mashed prostrate men and kicked up great clods of earth. Lying there was worse than charging; one veteran recalled that the Federal line broke out with "the most vehement, terrible swearing I have ever heard"; it became quite unendurable, and at last the men scrambled to their feet and made for their tormentors. Muskets blazed all along the stone wall, the artillerists fired double-shotted charges of canister, and the New Yorkers bent low and ran hard in the loose dirt, struggling for the hilltop. One well-read member of the 9th New York wrote long afterward: "The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion—the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red." And finally they got to the fence and drove the Confederates away, one regiment overran and captured a battery, and the brigade dressed its ranks for a new advance.4
The other brigade had gone off at a divergent angle, and the two were now out of touch. Much to his surprise, Rodman was finding Rebel infantry on his left, far south of Sharpsburg, and the brigade swung over to face it. It was hard to make things out very clearly, with the smoke and the irregular hills and the tall corn, and the brigade came to a halt, strung out on a long hillside, plenty of bullets coming in but most of the men unable to see just where they were coming from. The extreme left of Rodman's line—extreme left of the whole army—was held by the 16th Connecticut, most pathetically unlucky of all the Federal units in the battle. This was a brand-new regiment which had been mustered in just three weeks ago. It was nine hundred strong, but it was totally unready for battle: had loaded its muskets for the very first time only the evening before, and today it was maneuvering as a regiment for the first time, and doing it under fire. The boys were willing enough, but they were completely bewildered; they were lying down in a cornfield now, very frightened, trying hard not to show it, well aware that they had no business being on the firing line, discovering that battle was not at all as they had imagined it. The grand and picturesque business of charging a Rebel line, which had sounded so impressive and inspiring back home, had come down to this—hiding in a cornfield and being shot by people who were completely out of sight.
Rodman came up, a quiet, conscientious man with a little pointed beard, worried now because the Rebels were still overreaching his left. He peered off over the corn tops, and from what he could see he gathered that a strong flank attack was about to hit him, and he told the Connecticut colonel to swing his regiment around so that it faced to the south. The colonel barked out the order—"Change front forward on the tenth company!"—and the three-week soldiers got to their feet and tried it. This was one of those maneuvers that made long weeks on the drill ground essential in the Civil War soldier's battle training: company at the left end of the regimental line does a ninety-degree wheel to the left, each succeeding company tramps through a forty-five-degree turn and then marches straight ahead until its left reaches the new line, whereupon it does another forty-five-degree turn and then comes to a halt. Simple enough, in a way, but the sort of thing that called for a lot of practice, which the Connecticut boys had not had. Even on the parade ground they would have had trouble with it; here they were trying it from a bent line, with the corn and smoke making it impossible to see anything, and with a brisk Rebel fire knocking men out at every step. Inevitably they fell into a confused, trampling huddle, with different companies getting in each other's way and everybody tangled up; and while they tried to sort themselves out a tremendous volley swept the field, breaking what formation they had all to pieces.
Then, while the rookies were still trying to get collected, a hostile battle line came shouldering through the cornstalks, firing as it came, and it was too much—the 16th just fell apart and the men turned to run. Rodman was bringing up the 4th Rhode Island to help, and for a moment that made things even worse. The Confederates on this part of the field were wearing blue uniforms (part of the loot from captured Harper's Ferry, the Rebels being necessitous men) and between an advancing blue line in front and another advancing blue tine in the rear, the confusion became absolute. The Connecticut boys could not make head or tail out of any of it, and the Rhode Islanders were all mixed up too—saw men in blue running away from other men in blue, held their fire just too long, and became involved in the rout, the oncoming Confederates being the only men on the field who knew just what was going on. Rodman was killed, and the two regiments together went streaking for the rear. A couple of Cox's Ohio regiments were brought over, but the advancing Rebels suddenly seemed to have become very numerous, and their charging line overlapped the reinforcements. Some of the Ohioans were puzzled by those blue uniforms and waited too long before they opened fire, and in the end the whole line gave way and the Federals all the way up to Sharpsburg had to withdraw. At the last possible minute Lee's army had been saved from defeat.5
What had saved it was the arrival from Harper's Ferry of A. P. Hill and the leading brigades of his division, which was one of the most famous organizations in the whole Confederate Army. These soldiers came upon the field at precisely the right time and place, after a terrible seventeen-mile forced march from Harper's Ferry, in which exhausted men fell out of ranks by the score and Hill himself urged laggards on with the point of his sword. A more careful and methodical general (any one of the Federal corps commanders, for instance) would have set a slower pace, keeping his men together, mindful of the c
ertainty of excessive straggling on too strenuous a march—and would have arrived, with all his men present or accounted for, a couple of hours too late to do any good. Hill drove his men so cruelly that he left fully half of his division panting along the roadside—but he got up those who were left in time to stave off disaster and keep the war going for two and one half more years.
This A. P. Hill was probably as well known and deeply respected in the Union Army as any general in the Confederacy, just then. He was always a driver and his men were valiant fighters, and the Federals had the impression that whenever they were prodded especially hard the prod was being applied by A. P. Hill. They were so convinced of this that they had evolved a legend to account for it. Back before the war, they said, Hill and McClellan had been rivals for the hand of beautiful Ellen Marcy, daughter of an army officer. She chose McClellan at last, and (so the soldiers believed) Hill carried a great anger against the successful suitor, which accounted for the violence of his attacks. And one morning, when a rattle of firing aroused the army and told it that Hill's men were attacking again, one veteran raised his head and growled disgustedly: "God's sake, Nelly—why didn't you marry him?"B
It was late in the afternoon now, and Burnside had been beaten— Burnside and his generals, strictly speaking, rather than Burnside's army corps. The rout of his left had been disastrous, but after all it had involved only about a fourth of the men under his command. Even after Hill's men came in there were still twice as many Federals as Confederates in this part of the field. Willcox's division, waiting on the outskirts of Sharpsburg, was hardly under fire at all now and was about ready to walk in and take possession, and Sturgis's division was still under shelter in the Antietam Valley, resting and refilling its cartridge boxes, the men so far out of the fight that they were wandering about examining the haversacks and knapsacks of dead Rebels. The Ohio division was closer to the front—some of its regiments had gone over to help when Rodman's line collapsed—but as a division it was not in serious action. There were more than enough men present to check Hill's charging ranks, hold the ground around Sharpsburg, and stage a new attack. The trouble was that it did not occur to anyone to try it. The Union commanders just took it for granted that they were beaten, and they were quite right: they had been whipped, even if their men had not been.7
So Willcox was told to bring his troops back, a new line was formed on the brow of the hills overlooking the creek, and Burnside sent word to headquarters that he thought he could hold his ground all right, although it would help if he could be strongly reinforced. Altogether he had lost twenty-three hundred men, nearly half of them from Rodman's luckless division—the 16th Connecticut alone had lost more than four hundred, and when it called the roll that evening only three hundred men were present, although a couple of hundred more came wandering in during the night. For the rest, Burnside's worst losses had been incurred in the attacks on the bridge.
McClellan had stayed at the Pry house all day except for one brief excursion to the right to talk with Sumner, after Franklin's attack had been called off. The battle swung and surged back and forth in front of him, and he was like a bemused spectator; he accepted the decisions made by his subordinates but went no farther. Once or twice, it seems, something struck a spark in his mind, and he was on the verge of demanding a new offensive all along the line. But that old, crippling belief in Lee's overwhelming numbers was still working. Every time the fighting reached the stage where one more hard drive would finish matters McClellan thought of the terrible fix he would be in if the Rebels should make a great counterattack and find him without reserves, and so one more hard drive was never ordered.
There is a story—probably garbled, but nevertheless perfectly in character—of McClellan at the end of the afternoon, sitting his horse beside Porter and Sykes near where the Boonsboro road crosses the creek. Up ahead, near Sharpsburg, some of Sykes's regulars had been sharpshooting on the outskirts of the town, their skirmish line a link connecting the troops who had assaulted Bloody Lane with the advanced elements of Burnside's command. An infantry captain in the skirmish line had seen for himself how thin the Rebel defenses in front of him really were, and he sent back word of it, begging that an attack might be made—the attack was bound to win, he said, and it would break Lee's army in half. Sykes liked the idea, it is said, and urged that his division be sent in, followed by the rest of Porter's corps and everybody else who was available. (Here, for the last time, were those ten thousand fresh Federals of Longstreet's.) For a moment McClellan seemed ready to approve. And then Porter said: "Remember, General—I command the last reserve of the last army of the Republic"—and the attack was not made.8
It is only fair to point out that Porter, a perfectly reliable witness on other matters, said that no such conversation ever took place, and the story undoubtedly was much embellished in the telling. Nevertheless, it is the tip-off. Lee's army could have been broken then and there, and it was not broken because the men who might have done it had to be saved as the vital last reserve. The Northern fighting men had done their best, but they had not been able to shake their general's belief that his real responsibility was defensive. Whatever might have been the relative merits of the two armies, there is not a shadow of doubt that the Southern commanders that day had an unbeatable moral ascendancy over the commanders of the North.
Another story: In midmorning, young Lieutenant Wilson of McClellan's staff finished a ride through the battered brigades of Hooker's and Mansfield's corps. He had seen the tired men forming new ranks behind the massed artillery which was anchoring McClellan's right, and he reflected that although these boys were deeply dejected—they had given their best and it hadn't been quite good enough —there were still enough of them to go sweeping in over the Rebel flank if proper inspiration were given them. He remembered, too, that next to McClellan Joe Hooker was the most popular general in the army, and while Hooker had been wounded he knew that Hooker's wound was comparatively slight. Lieutenants, of course, do not tell major generals what to do, but sometimes there are ways to work things. At headquarters just then was George Smalley, war correspondent for the New York Tribune, who was a good friend of Hooker; and Smalley told Wilson that Hooker, his injured foot bandaged, was lying in a farmhouse a mile or so from the place where his troops were.
"Smalley!" cried Wilson, excited. "Ride rapidly to Hooker and tell him to rally his corps and lead it back to the field, for by doing so he may not only save the day but save the Union also!"
Smalley's horse had been wounded, and he himself was weary and covered with dust from riding about the field, but he was game; he pointed out, however, that Hooker's wound would probably make it impossible for him to mount a horse.
"That makes no difference," said Wilson. "Let him get into an ambulance and drive back to the field. Or, what is still better, put him on a stretcher and with his bugles blowing and his corps flag flying over him let his men carry him back to the fighting line while his staff take the news to the division and brigade commanders."
Smalley took fire. "Hooker will go back—I'll answer for it!" he said, and he galloped away—to return crestfallen half an hour later with the report that Hooker said his wound was too painful to let him make the attempt. Wilson, always a caustic critic of Federal generals, wrote of Hooker: "From that day forth I regarded him as possessing but little real merit."9
Just what, if anything, would have been accomplished if this flamboyant project had gone through is, of course, an open question; but the young lieutenant's suggestion does stand out as the one proposal made at any time during the day to make use of the great reserve of enthusiasm and ardor which was possessed by that youthful army. Here were soldiers not yet grown battle-weary and army-cynical: young men still romantic enough to respond to the waving flag and the blaring bugle, foolish enough to try the impossible, and to do it, too, if the right man asked them to. McClellan had that force at his disposal as no other commander of this army ever had it—and he could never qu
ite bring himself to the point of using it. As one of his veterans wrote long after the war: "It always seemed to me that McClellan, though no commander ever had the love of his soldiers more, or tried more to spare their lives, never realized the metal that was in his grand Army of the Potomac. ... He never appreciated until too late what manner of people he had with him."10
And it seems that McClellan's great love for his soldiers actually worked to prevent him from making full use of them. He knew that his men had fought harder that day than they had ever fought before; believed, in fact, that they were completely fought out, that they had done all that any man could ask them to do. He dreaded to see their bloodshed and suffering, and he had been seeing nothing else all day. From one end of the war to the other the Army of the Potomac never lost so many men in one day's fighting as it lost here on the Antietam: not at Gettysburg, not in the Wilderness, not anywhere.
McClellan's capacity for sending his men in to be hurt had simply been exhausted. So they were hurt no more that day—and were to go on fighting until 1865.
And the long day ended at last, and the long battle ended, and both sides were about where they had been at dawn. The sun went down over the western hills, blood-red in the smoky air: an observer at headquarters saw it, just as it was setting, with the gunners of one isolated battery silhouetted black against its enormous disk as they loaded for a final shot, seeming to stand in the sun. As the land grew dark, fires were visible; shells had ignited innumerable haystacks on the fields, and these glowed in the twilight. On Burnside's front, boys from the 21st Massachusetts carried their wounded into a farmhouse where an energetic young woman named Clara Barton had set up a dressing station. The sound of the guns died down, and a more dreadful noise rose from the battle lines—the steady, unceasing, unanswerable crying and moaning of thousands upon thousands of wounded boys who lay in the open where the stretcher-bearers could not reach them; a crying that continued throughout the night. A survivor of the mangled 16th Connecticut wrote afterward: "Of all gloomy nights, this was the saddest we ever experienced."