Mr Lincoln's Army (51 page)

French's men were too dead-beat to do more
than form a new line in the captured roadway, but Richardson's men were
fresher, and anyway, Richardson was a driver. He lost little time sorting out
the scrambled commands but took them on as they were, into the rolling fields
south of the lane, so that they swarmed over the Confederates' second line,
broke it, and went plunging down into hollow ground in the angle between the
sunken road and the Hagerstown pike.

Once more the battle had come to a moment of
supreme crisis, and final victory was within reach. The Confederate General
Hill, imperturbable in the midst of disaster, somehow scraped the ultimate
bottom of the barrel and got together a handful of men from his beaten command
and led them forward in a new countercharge - taking a musket himself, it is
said, to lead them in person. Barlow saw it coming and broke it up, and
Richardson went off to get some artillery. His infantry got down into the
hollow and drove the Confederates out of Mr. Piper's farm buildings, but there
the disorganized attack lost its impetus, and by a supreme, despairing effort
the Rebels kept them from going any farther. Richardson reappeared with Battery
K, 1st U.S., and planted it on a hill south of the sunken road; it silenced a
couple of Rebel smoothbores near the Hagerstown road, then came under a heavy
fire and began to lose men. Richardson had the battery commander move back,
cautioning him to save his guns and men: there would be a big advance just as
soon as Richardson could get his division realigned, and the general wanted
the battery in shape to accompany it.

The battery withdrew readily enough, as
ordered, getting into a more sheltered spot where the Rebel fire wasn't quite
so bad; and, apparently from nowhere and by magic, there appeared a
well-dressed civilian with a two-horse carriage, who drove up without paying
any attention to all the bullets, pulled up his horses, alighted, and began to
hand baskets of ham and biscuits to the dumfounded gun crews. This done, he
invited the wounded men to get into the carriage so that he could carry them
back to a dressing station. As they got in he walked forward to inspect his
team, a shell fragment having slightly wounded one of his horses. Satisfying
himself that the animal was not badly hurt, he saw that the wounded men were
comfortable, waved his hat cheerily to the astounded battery commander, and
drove off—an unnamed man of good will who shows up briefly in the official
reports and then vanishes as mysteriously as he came.
⁸

At this moment Lee's battle line was a frayed
thread, held by scraps and leftovers of tattered commands who clung to the
ridges by the Hagerstown road and fought like automatons. Batteries had been
hammered all to pieces: a mile to the rear, officers and men were working
feverishly with wrecked gun carriages and limbers, trying to make patchwork
repairs so that at least some could be put back in service. Longstreet, who
held top command along this part of the line, had sent his own staff officers
in to work the guns of one ravaged battery and was standing nearby holding
their horses and helping to correct the ranges. The only infantry in his
immediate vicinity was a lone regiment which was completely out of ammunition,
waving its flags vigorously to create an illusion of strength. He had called
for reinforcements, but there were none to be had, except for a few worn-out
skeletons of regiments and some stragglers rounded up and sent back into the
fight. The Confederates were still keeping up a brave fire, but there was no
weight back of it—no possibility that it might suddenly flare up into a great,
obliterating wave of destruction in case of need. Many years later Longstreet
confessed that at that moment ten thousand fresh Federals could have come
through and taken Lee's army and all it possessed.

The ten thousand fresh Federals were at hand,
and to spare. Franklin's army corps was on the field, and Franklin believed
that he had brought it there to fight. Richardson's division was still in good
shape despite its terrible losses. Franklin was preparing to advance and
Richardson was moving guns up, getting his ranks reassembled, making ready to
attack beside him; and at this distance it is very hard to see how that attack
could ever have been stopped.
⁷

The only trouble is that it never was made.
Bringing some guns up to a new location, Richardson was hit by a rifle bullet
and was carried off the field—only slightly wounded, it seemed, but in a few
days an infection set in and the wound killed him. Barlow went down,
desperately wounded. McClellan detached Hancock from his own brigade and sent
him in to take Richardson's place, so there was still a fighting commander up
front; but white-haired old Sumner, senior officer on this part of the field,
shaken by the disaster in the West Wood and by the killing he had seen since,
countermanded the order for an offensive and forbade Franklin and Hancock to
attack. Franklin argued hotly, but Sumner was unyielding; he had seen nothing
but catastrophe that day and he firmly believed half of the army had been
scattered, and he told Franklin that if his attack should fail the day would be
lost beyond saving.

One of McClellan's staff officers rode up,
bearing from the commanding general a suggestion that the army attack if possible,
and Sumner cried out to him: "Go back, young man, and tell General
McClellan I have no command! Tell him my command, Banks' command and Hooker's
command are all cut up and demoralized. Tell him General Franklin has the only
organized command on this part of the field!"
⁸

Back to headquarters went this gloomy
message. McClellan reflected on it briefly, considered once more the danger of
being overbold—and upheld Sumner. The ten thousand fresh Federals Long-street
was talking about stayed where they were, and Lee's frayed line held.

Late that afternoon there was one final
flare-up. The 7th Maine was detached from the front line and sent forward to
drive Rebel sharpshooters out of the Piper farm buildings, down where Richardson's
drive had reached high-water mark a few hours earlier. The little regiment got
to the farmyard, chased the sharpshooters, found itself surrounded in an
orchard, cut its way out, and came staggering back to the lines with
sixty-eight men around the colors—it had set out with 240. A Vermont brigade
which had watched the whole performance stood up in the lines and cheered as
the exhausted soldiers came back. The skipper of the Maine regiment remarked
afterward that if only that Vermont brigade had been sent forward in support they
could have broken the Rebel line even then; up at close quarters he had seen
for himself how weak the Confederate defenses really were.

But that was just one more of the
might-have-beens. North of the town of Sharpsburg the fighting was over. The
Federals drew their line partly in front of and partly behind the sunken
road—the road itself was so full of dead men, so horrible with its torn
fragments of flesh, its congealing pools of blood in ruts and hollows, that it
could no longer be used as a trench.

3.
All the Landscape Was Red

In
the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the
errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times—it
was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army—that
it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and
rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity. But if some
such ranking could be made, this battle of the Antietam would surely be represented.
Here, if anywhere, the soldiers were thrown into action and left to fight their
way out. There would have been unqualified disaster if the generals had not
been commanding men better than themselves.

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.