Mr Lincoln's Army (53 page)

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 certainty 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.