Mr Lincoln's Army (40 page)

It was a bright little exploit, all in
all, and looking back on it, in its setting, one feels a twinge of regret that
Grimes Davis was only a colonel. A little touch of his spirit, just then, in
army headquarters or in the various corps headquarters, would have made the
story of the rest of the war very different indeed. For by the time he got to
Green-castle with his captured train, the garrison at Harper's Ferry had
surrendered; and Franklin, with eighteen thousand men, was sitting by the
roadside five miles from the scene of the surrender, reflecting on the perils
of his situation and warily doing nothing at all. And Lafayette McLaws was in
close touch with Stonewall Jackson and A. P. Hill and was no longer in any
danger whatever.

2.
Destroy the Rebel Army

From
his perch on top of South Mountain, Confederate General Daniel Harvey Hill
could look down and see the war coming up to meet him like a tremendous
pageant, unspeakably grand. Five miles to the east lay the Catoctin ridge, with
three roads coming over to the approach to Turner's Gap. Down each of these
roads rolled an endless blue column, pouring down the slope and into the open
valley as if the weight of unlimited numbers lay behind it, growing longer and
longer and spraying out at last, at the foot of South Mountain, into long
fighting lines, rank upon rank, starred with battle flags. The general looked,
and reflected that the old Hebrew poet who used the phrase, "terrible as
an army with banners," must have looked down from a mountain on just such a
scene as this. Hill was one of the least timid men in the army, but he
confessed afterward that he never in his life felt so lonely as he had that
day: all of the soldiers in the world seemed to be marching up against him, and
he had only five thousand men to stop them, some of which were still back at
Boonsboro.

Over on the Union side there were men who saw
the picturesque quality too. It was not very often, even in that day of
close-order fighting, that an entire army was massed in the open where everybody
could see it. This was one of the times when it happened, and it was enough to
take the breath away to look at it. A private in the 9th New York, his regiment
pausing for a breather on the Catoctin slope, wrote that it was a
"beautiful, impressive picture—each column a monstrous, crawling,
blue-black snake, miles long, quilled with the silver slant of muskets at a
'shoulder,' its sluggish tail writhing slowly up over the distant eastern
ridge, its bruised head weltering in the roar and smoke upon the crest
above." General Abner Doubleday, turning in his saddle to inspect his
brigade, cried involuntarily: "What a magnificent view." And
McClellan himself, one of the first to come over the ridge, reined up near the
village of Middletown to watch his men marching past. As the men came up to him
they took fire—the great open amphitheater of war, their own proud strength all
on display, and the hero whom they trusted to the death sitting his horse,
proud and martial-looking, the one man who could make war seem grand to men who
had been in many battles: they broke into wild cheers, yelling until they were
too hoarse to yell any more. A Massachusetts veteran described the scene:

"It seemed as if an intermission had
been declared in order that a reception might be tendered to the
general-in-chief. A great crowd continually surrounded him, and the most
extravagant demonstrations were indulged in. Hundreds even hugged the horse's
legs and caressed his head and mane. While the troops were thus surging by, the
general continually pointed with his finger to the gap in the mountain through
which our path lay. It was like a great scene in a play, with the roar of the
guns for an accompaniment."
¹

It
had taken time to build up this impressive scene, however. McClellan mounted
amid the troops, pointing dramatically to the rising slope where the battle
smoke was drifting up through the mountain laurel, is the center of an
unforgettable picture, but the picture had been some hours taking shape. There
had been nothing dramatic about the first two thirds of this day—which, since
the stage was all set for drama, simply means that the army had been very
leisurely about coming up for the assault. Indeed, during the entire morning a
few regiments of cavalry plus General Cox's division of Ohio infantry had had
the place pretty much to themselves, except for the Rebels on South Mountain.

Even so, this day—the fourteenth of
September, the same day Franklin's men were coming up to Crampton's Gap, off to
the south —began bravely enough. Union cavalry went across the valley at dawn,
and as the foot soldiers became visible behind them the Confederate cavalry
trotted back and went up the winding mountain roads. The sun had not been up
very long before Cox started his men after them. The Ohio soldiers left the
National Road a mile or two before it began to climb the irregular valley which
constitutes Turner's Gap, and followed a country road which goes through another
depression a mile or more to the south; two brigades of Western infantry, six
regiments in all, perhaps a total of three thousand men. There was a brief
delay after the troops took the side road. Cox and General Pleasonton, who had
the cavalry, trotted on half a mile along the main highway to arrange a couple
of batteries on a little knoll—a dozen twenty-pounder rifled Parrotts,
long-ranged guns for those days. The guns began to shell the top of the
mountain, and Confederate gunners on top answered them, while the infantry
stacked arms and waited in a little field. As they waited a sergeant on horseback,
with a big bundle back of the saddle, came rocketing up to the 11th Ohio—mail
from home, just arrived. The boys clustered round, and while the guns searched
the wood with shell to prepare the way for them they sat on the ground and read
their letters—each letter, no doubt, expressing the pathetic hope that the man
who received it would survive whatever lay ahead of him, would "take care
of himself" and, in the fullness of time, would get back home safe and
sound.

Just about the time the letters were
finished the orders came, and the men took up their rifles, formed a line of battle,
and started up the mountainside. The slope was not too steep, but in most
places it was abominably tangled with laurel and other scrubby growth, and the
going was tough. At times the men found themselves struggling ahead single
file, and regimental formations were badly mixed. As they got near the summit
the growth became less dense and the ground was more nearly level, and they
came out at last in a more open region of small farm clearings and pastures and
found Rebels behind a stone fence. Long volleys of musketry rolled back and
forth along the mountain ridge, while a Rebel battery near the gap to the north
threw case shot into the Ohioans' ranks. D. H. Hill had sent in one of his best
men, Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr., to hold this place, with a brigade
of North Carolina troops and a few squadrons of dismounted cavalry. Garland
stayed up where the fire was hottest, to encourage his men—they were
outnumbered and they knew it, and they were a little nervous—and presently a
Yankee bullet found him and killed him, and one of the Carolina regiments gave
way. The 30th Ohio got through the wall and hung on, and in a couple of places
there the Carolina and Ohio boys slugged one another with musket butts and
jabbed with bayonets. Cox decided that if he could get some men up on a little
rise of ground to the left all of the Rebels would have to go away, so he sent
the 11th Ohio off to tend to it.

Accompanied by its regimental dog, Curly—a
frisky pooch who enjoyed going out on the skirmish lines—the 11th went forward
cautiously, the exact Confederate position along the knoll not being known,
and pretty soon the 11th found itself in a nasty pocket, with Confederates
shooting at them from three directions, so they got back out in a hurry.
²
Then the 23rd Ohio came up to help, and the two regiments went storming up the
hill, firing as they went. The lieutenant colonel of the 23rd, a promising chap
named Rutherford B. Hayes, was shot down, wounded; William McKinley, sergeant
in the same regiment, was unhurt. The regiments kept on going, struggling
through dense thickets that seemed to be alive and humming with bullets, and
the Carolina brigade gave way at last and drew off down the western slope of
the mountain, most of the men out of action for the rest of the day. This part
of the mountaintop now belonged to the Army of the Potomac.

Actually, the whole mountaintop did, had the
Army of the Potomac just been on hand to take possession. Of the five brigades
in his command, Hill had had only two on South Mountain when the day began: one
posted in the center at Turner's Gap, where the National Road came through, and
the other one off here a mile to the south, where Cox and his Ohioans made
their attack. The other three were hot-footing it up from Boonsboro, but they
wouldn't be on hand for quite a while, and until they got there Hill had
nothing left but the thin brigade on the National Road, some artillery, a few
game remnants of the North Carolina brigade, and such dismounted cavalry as
Stuart had been able to leave with him. It was at this time, when he reflected
that he was standing there with something like a thousand muskets to stave off
the greater part of McClellan's army, that General Hill experienced that great
feeling of loneliness.

But the wind is tempered sometimes to the
shorn lamb, and so it was here. Thus far the Army of the Potomac was
represented only by the division of General Cox—some three thousand men when
the battle began. These men did their best, and Cox had the right idea: he
turned their faces toward the north, once the Carolinians had been driven off,
and prepared to advance along the crest to Turner's Gap. The ground was broken
and uneven, and it took time to get the men formed up. The Confederates had a
number of guns at the gap, with a good line on the little clearings where the
Ohioans were. Somehow they got the guns far enough forward to fire canister,
the charges ripping up the sod, as Cox wrote later, "with a noise like the
cutting of a melon rind." Cox sent back to his corps commander, Reno, for
help, and Reno sent more men forward. By the time they got there and found
their way up the difficult slopes it was a couple of hours past noon, and by
this time some of Hill's other brigades were coming up. Hill had made a good
showing, meanwhile, with the men he did have, and although the heads of
McClellan's long columns were coming over the Catoctin ridge, Hill had not yet
had to fight anything very much worse than equal numbers. He was in an
extremely bad spot, but he had already been given eight hours' leeway.

As more of Reno's men came up the mountain,
with Reno himself spurring up after them, Cox made ready to renew the attack. General
Orlando Willcox got his division into line somewhere off to the right of Cox's
Ohioans, and pretty soon the men went struggling forward. In Willcox's outfit
there were two untried regiments going in side by side—the 17th Michigan and
the 45th Pennsylvania. The Michigan boys were so painfully new that they could
hardly get from marching column into fighting formation. They had been mustered
in only a month ago, had been rushed down to Washington in feverish haste when
Stanton got panicky over Pope's defeat, and barely a week before this day on
the mountaintop one member of the regiment had written sadly that they did not
know even "the rudiments of military maneuvering," adding that
"there is not a company officer who can put his men through company drill
without making one or more ludicrous blunders." For some reason this
regiment was made up largely of men nearing middle age—except for Company E,
which had been enlisted from students at the State Normal School at Ypsilanti—and
they were desperately self-conscious and anxious to do the right thing in this
first engagement. They had their best clothes on-dress coats buttoned neatly up
to the throat, high-crowned black hats, each with a feather stuck jauntily in
the band. One veteran remembered that they even had their dress-parade white
gloves carefully folded and stuffed in their pockets; looking back with a
rueful smile, he wrote that it was "a wonder we did not put them on, so little
know we of the etiquette of war." Anyway, here they were, clumsily forming
line of battle in the underbrush, the sweating officers irritably horsing the
men into place by hand. They went stumbling forward, their dress uniforms
getting sadly torn by thorns and broken branches; and D. H. Hill's veteran
artillerists were getting the exact range of the ground they would have to
traverse.
³

The Pennsylvanians who went in with them were
not nearly so new, but they were equally ignorant of what battle was like. They
had been in service nearly a year and had been sent down to South Carolina on
the Port Royal expedition. That had been mere "Sunday soldiering,"
one of their number wrote afterward; they had occasionally seen isolated
Rebels on other islands several miles distant, but their only fighting had been
against gnats and mosquitoes, and they had lived high, eating oranges and sweet
potatoes, green corn and watermelon, with fresh fish out of the ocean. Now they
were in line beside the Michigan boys, forcing their way through a wood where
their major, to his shame, found his horse suddenly turned balky, so that he
had to dismount and proceed on foot, leaving the faithless beast behind. The
regiments came out at last behind a rail fence all grown up with long grass and
briars, with a pasture beyond and another of those ominous stone walls eighty
yards off on the far side. As usual, the stone wall was held by Rebels, who
squatted on their heels, rested their rifles atop the wall, and blazed away
with deadly aim.*