by S. C. Gwynne
But the situation was worse than Jackson had imagined. At about 9:00 a.m., as he waited for the 12th Corps to mount yet another attack, he saw something even more disturbing off in the distance. From the vicinity of the East Woods, across the mangled cornfield, suddenly appeared a massive, fast-moving column of blue. Though he could not identify it, this was the lead division of Major General Edwin Sumner’s 2nd Corps, led by Sumner himself, whose objective was to smash the Confederate left once and for all.
Or at least that is what Sumner intended. His execution of this worthy plan, however, was nothing short of bizarre. Edwin Sumner was the very picture of the old warhorse. At sixty-five he was the oldest of the “old army” officers in McClellan’s force. He was crusty and tough and old-school and famous for his booming voice, which had given him the nickname Bull. He was a stand-up fighter and unquestionably brave, the sort of man you would send to take a heavily defended hill. But he was not terribly smart, and the range of his thought was remarkably narrow. He was coming across the field now, at the head of the 5,500 men under division commander John Sedgwick.
It was at this moment that, while Early and Grigsby prepared to make the Confederate left’s last stand in the West Woods, Jackson’s long-awaited reinforcements began to arrive. Half an hour later he might have been overrun; but Lee, with his knack for inserting soldiers into battles at the right place and at the right time, had come through.20
Sumner, meanwhile, convinced that the rebel flank was vulnerable—and from his reconnaissance it did indeed look that way—proposed to move into and through the West Woods north of the Dunker church, then wheel to the left, and sweep down on the rebel lines from the north.21 To do this he had formed Sedgwick’s division into three classic, two-deep battle lines, each five hundred yards long and separated by thirty to fifty yards. Thus deployed, unsupported by other Union forces, and ignoring the scattered fighting units of the 1st and 12th Corps around them, they came rapidly on. Such a marching formation was appropriate to a parade ground or a military review. On this battlefield it amounted to suicide. “There was absolutely no preparation for facing to the right or left in case either of their exposed flanks should be attacked,” wrote Francis W. Palfrey, then a lieutenant colonel with the 20th Massachusetts. “The total disregard of all ordinary military precaution in their swift and solitary advance was so manifest that it was observed and criticized as the devoted band moved on.”22
Unfortunately for Sedgwick’s men, Jackson had understood immediately how exposed they were. And now, thanks to Lee, he had the reinforcements to do something about it. He moved them quickly into place, both inside and to the west of the West Woods. He began by orchestrating some 4,400 men into both a frontal and a flank assault on the 125th Pennsylvania near the Dunker church. Soon the Pennsylvanians were reeling out of the woods, in full retreat. This was the first move in Jackson’s counterstroke. To prevent Sumner from turning his left, he moved one of McLaws’s brigades to the western side of the woods. He ordered the brigades fighting the 125th Pennsylvania to break off their attack and move north in the woods to intercept the east-to-west-advancing Sumner. Jackson had his battle line in place literally moments before Sumner’s advancing battle lines appeared in the open lot that was inset west of the Hagerstown Road and north of the main woods.23 The Union troops under Sedgwick and Sumner, marching forward in their three textbook battle lines, apparently did not see what was waiting for them in the woods. They kept moving.
And now the woods exploded. Suddenly there was a great roar and tumult of musketry and screaming men, and bullets were everywhere as the Confederate artillery, somehow positioned perfectly to smash the 2nd Corps, boomed from behind the woods. Confederate riflemen, firing from behind uneven ground and limestone ledges, swept the three sets of double Union lines with volley after volley. Rebel batteries opened from the west, adding shell and canister to the melee. Eventually Stuart’s artillery also joined in. Barksdale’s Mississippians and Early’s Virginians emerged into the open space along the pike and slammed into Sumner’s trailing brigades, and soon Sumner’s entire force was engulfed in fire. Sumner, at the head of his troops, finally grasped just how close to annihilation he was. “Back, boys, for God’s sake, move back! You are in a bad fix!”
But it was too late to save them. Union brigade commanders tried vainly to get their troops to change front, but all that ensued was a mass tangle of confused and panicked men as all regimental order vanished and the Federals nearest the woods simply broke and ran. The lines tended to compress, too, which offered a conspicuous mass of blue-clad human flesh for the rebels to shoot at. Things only got worse from there. Regiments collapsed like dominoes. Where the Federals had been hit first on their flank, now they faced fire from front, rear, and flank, trapped in the lethal three-sided box that Jackson had prepared for them. “A terrific fire of musketry opened in the woods in Sumner’s front across the pike,” wrote Black Hat Brigade commander John Gibbon. “Instantly, as it appeared to me, the whole open space between the ‘east’ and ‘west’ woods was filled with a disorganized mass of panic-stricken men going to the rear.”24 Twenty-three hundred Union soldiers fell in fifteen minutes in the fight that would soon be known as the West Woods Massacre. (That is five men every two seconds.) Union division commander John Sedgwick was wounded three times and carried from the field.
Though Jackson’s men tried to follow their success with another attack across the cornfield against the East Woods, they soon found themselves being blasted by canister from fifty Union guns. They stopped and drifted back. A Union attempt to relieve Sumner faltered, too, this time met by troops from Walker’s division, who had also arrived just at the right time to meet the Federal advance. The lone exception to Jackson’s sweeping success was the stubborn 12th Corps brigade commanded by Brigadier General George Sears, which had captured the Dunker church and actually moved two hundred yards beyond it into the West Woods. He somehow managed to keep his precious foothold—it was the original objective of the Union attack that morning—all the while calling for reinforcements and utterly unaware that the Union 2nd Corps had been completely routed. He discovered this unpleasant fact at about noon, and shortly before Jackson’s troops blasted him on both flanks, driving him back.25 Though the guns and muskets continued to roar, the Federals seemed to be more concerned with self-preservation than breaking the rebel line.
At this point the battle had lasted for four hours. Jackson had been assaulted by two full Union corps and the lead division of another in successive waves that cost twelve thousand casualties on both sides. He had initially lost so much ground that he was in danger of being swallowed outright by advancing Federal forces. But by shrewd deployment of the reserves Lee sent him, at the end of the day “my troops held the ground which they had occupied in the morning,” Jackson wrote in his battle report.26 McClellan had not gained an inch of terrain. During all this Jackson, from behind the Dunker church, was a study in motion, watching the battlefield, directing the fire of his batteries, exhorting his men, issuing orders. John S. Mosby, a cavalryman who observed Jackson briefly, was amazed at how he seemed “transfigured with the joy of battle” as he issued orders “in a quiet way.”27 Jackson later told D. H. Hill that he never felt safer than in the firestorm at Antietam. He was convinced that “God would protect him & that no harm would befall him.”28
Jackson’s achievement was all the more remarkable because he had done it in spite of the absence of key generals—A. P. Hill (en route from Harpers Ferry), Richard Ewell (wounded at Second Manassas), Isaac Trimble (wounded at Second Manassas), and Charles S. Winder (killed at Cedar Mountain)—and the fact that eight of his fourteen brigades were commanded by colonels with little experience. Just as important, his performance at Antietam showed that he had clearly mastered the role of executive officer—subordinate to Lee on the field yet working closely with him, taking initiative when he needed to, cooperating with other generals, and deftly managing his side of the battlefield.29 If thi
s particular martial skill was sometimes lacking during the Seven Days, the fights at Antietam and Second Manassas proved that he had learned to operate within an army as well as in independent command. His personal presence on the battlefield had become a critical component of Confederate success. Thirty miles away, where Richard Ewell was recovering from the amputation of his leg after his wounding at Manassas, and hearing the distant sound of artillery at Sharpsburg, he became extremely agitated and finally confessed to his doctor that he could not listen to the battle without worrying that Jackson would be killed. The future of the Confederacy, he believed, depended in large part on his chief’s survival.30
At noon, surgeon Hunter McGuire met Jackson at his command post behind the lines at the Dunker church. McGuire was eating one of the peaches a local woman had given him. Jackson’s face brightened when he saw his favorite fruit. “Do you have any more?” he asked. McGuire gave Jackson several pieces, which he consumed immediately and with great relish. He apologized to McGuire for his gluttony, saying it was the first food he had eaten all day.
“Can our line hold against another attack?” asked McGuire, surveying a field littered with the dead and dying.
“I think they have done their worst,” Jackson answered calmly. “There is now no danger of the line being broken.”31
Jackson, who had a remarkable ability to read a battlefield through the smoke and thunder and chaos of a fight, turned out to be right. There would not be another attack. The battle on the Confederate left—and Jackson’s part in the Battle of Antietam—was over. That afternoon he and Jeb Stuart would, under Lee’s orders, gather troops for an advance against the 1st, 6th, and 12th Corps. But the two men would decide very quickly that they did not have nearly the numbers or firepower to pull it off.
Meanwhile, as the roar of musket and artillery fire to their right attested, the fight was just beginning for James Longstreet and the rest of Lee’s army.
• • •
George McClellan was worried. After what had happened to him in the morning, he had good reason to be. He had sent three army corps to turn the rebel flank. They had been badly mauled, and at midday the defiant rebel left stood exactly where it had been when Hooker’s first assault began. What had gone wrong? From the luxury of the rear, well behind the creek, surrounded by his reserves of more than thirty thousand men, it was hard to tell. McClellan’s headquarters was in a large house on a commanding elevation, where the scene in and around it was as unlike Jackson’s primitive, artillery-raked command post behind the Dunker church as it could possibly be. “Here was the immense cavalry escort waiting in the rear,” wrote Captain George F. Noyes, a staffer with division commander Brigadier General Abner Doubleday, “staff horses picketed by dozens around the house, while the piazza was crowded with officers seeking to read with their field-glasses the history of the battle at the right.”32 At the center of all of this sat McClellan, almost preternaturally calm, conversing quietly with staff members, consulting Fitz John Porter as usual, sending and receiving messages, and gazing through a telescope to try to make sense of what was happening. But according to Noyes it was almost impossible to see anything, even from a vantage point several hundred yards closer to the front. “I could not distinguish a single battery,” wrote Noyes, “nor discern the movements of a single brigade, nor see a single battalion of the men in gray. Smoke-clouds leaped in sudden fury from ridges crowned with cannon, or lay thick and dim upon the valleys, or rose lazily up over the trees; all else was concealed; only the volleyed thunder was eloquent.”33
The fact was that, through those great shifting pools and shrouds of smoke, the battle was already spinning out of McClellan’s control. He had not intended to break off his attack on the rebel left. But that attack had extinguished itself, partly because many Union commanders were wounded, partly through simple battlefield attrition, and partly because of the extreme havoc that had been wrought on regimental and brigade-level organization. Not only that, but one of Sumner’s 2nd Corps divisions—under the stout, red-faced William H. French, Jackson’s old Florida nemesis, who had earned the nickname Blinky for his habit of rapidly fluttering his eyes when he spoke—that was supposed to follow him onto the field, had lost sight of Sumner and instead moved obliquely south and west, driving into the Confederate center and touching off a battle there.34 McClellan’s purpose in attacking the rebel left had been to turn it if possible but in any case to force Lee to shift troops from the rest of his line, thus weakening his center and right. This was exactly what had happened. Lee had actually thrown nearly three-fourths of his available force into Jackson’s fight.35 Unfortunately McClellan’s spyglass did not reveal this astonishing fact to him. What was more, in spite of his 9:00 a.m. orders to Major General Ambrose Burnside and his 9th Corps on his far left to cross the creek and move against Lee’s right, Burnside still seemed frozen in place. To McClellan this was all very unsettling.
Antietam was really three battles, fought more or less sequentially on September 17 between dawn and dusk. The first of these was the four-hour Hooker–Jackson donnybrook in the north. The second, just as frenzied and recklessly violent, took place in the center. At about nine thirty, while Jackson was demolishing Sumner in the West Woods, French’s 5,700 Union troops advanced against 2,500 rebels under D. H. Hill, who were deployed within the embankments of the Sunken Road, a small, dirt lane used by farmers that had been worn down over the years by rain and wagon wheels. From its first moment, Hill’s Confederates opened fire at a range of 60 yards and took out 450 of the 1,400 men in French’s lead brigade. The rebels held most of the advantages: they were firing from superb cover and they were closely supported by artillery. The Yankee troops had neither. They stood and delivered from 80 yards out, one brigade at a time, and went down by the hundreds. Though the men behind the embankment were shooting from cover, they, too, fell in heaps where they stood, mostly from ghastly head and neck wounds, back into their long trench. Most such firefights burn themselves out quickly. Incredibly, this “savage, continual thunder” went on for nearly two full hours.
By noon dead men lay in piles everywhere, and the Federal numbers were beginning to tell. Major General Israel Richardson, one of the Union’s finest commanders, had joined French on the field with his three-brigade division of Sumner’s 2nd Corps. At about 1:00 p.m. Richardson’s Federals finally turned the rebels’ right flank. There was chaos in the Sunken Road as they were struck from front, flank, and rear. Now French’s men moved against their left, too, at which point the Sunken Road turned from a stout defensive position to a death trap, earning its historic name: Bloody Lane. The Confederate line collapsed completely. Many men surrendered. Many more ran and many of them were shot as they ran. They retreated in disorder for half a mile, where they found Lee’s “center” that had been stripped earlier of its manpower and now held nothing but some artillery and whatever infantry Longstreet had been able to cobble together. Clearly, the center would not hold. The rout thus presented yet another great opportunity: Richardson and French were now in a position to destroy Lee’s main line of defense in front of Sharpsburg. There was little left to stop them. As Edward Porter Alexander put it gloomily, “Lee’s army was ruined. The end of the Confederacy was in sight.” Richardson saw it, and requested artillery from McClellan to finish the job. McClellan refused. Richardson was preparing to attack anyway when he was wounded in the leg by case shot and carried from the field. This temporarily stalled the Federal advance.
While all this action was taking place, the third battle in the sequence, utterly different from the other two, was being fought on the Confederate right. The fight had begun at about 10:00 a.m., when soldiers from Ambrose Burnside’s thirteen-thousand-man 9th Corps attempted to cross the lower bridge over Antietam Creek. The Confederate defense across the river consisted only of a depleted force under Confederate brigadier general D. R. Jones. After Lee’s leftward troop shifts of the morning, he had only four thousand men defending a mile of front sou
th of Sharpsburg. It was yet another mismatch, if only Burnside could take advantage of it. Unable to find a suitable ford, Burnside focused on the twelve-foot-wide bridge—known to history as Burnside’s Bridge—assaulting it several times in the morning, and each time being repulsed by seven hundred to eight hundred Confederates firing from the high, steep, wooded ground on the other side. At 1:00 p.m. Burnside’s men, under an officer who had formerly run fashionable dance clubs in New York, finally broke through, using a rudimentary tactic: they ran like hell across the bridge, taking appalling casualties. Now his corps was crossing, moving up the slope toward Lee’s thin defenses in front of the town. There was little to stop him.
For all of his caution and hands-off management, and the chaotic reversals of the day, McClellan found himself in midafternoon poised for a definitive, lethal strike at Lee. On the right, elements of the 1st and 12th Corps had rallied, and now were organized and strong enough to advance yet again on Jackson’s lines. They were supported by Franklin’s 6th Corps, which was deployed near the East Woods. In the center were French’s and Richardson’s troops of the 2nd Corps, victorious at the Sunken Road, rested and resupplied with ammunition. Just behind the creek waited Porter’s entirely fresh 6th Corps. On the southern end of the line, Burnside was now over the bridge and ready to attack the Confederate right. McClellan had missed opportunities on September 14, 15, and 16 to smash Lee’s divided army. Here was perhaps his best opportunity to destroy the entire rebel force in place.