Mr Lincoln's Army (52 page)

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 three
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.

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.