Mr Lincoln's Army (42 page)

Back on the mountaintop the brigades that had
done the fighting the day before pulled themselves together, took stock of
their losses —altogether, eighteen hundred Union soldiers had fallen—and sent
out parties to bury the dead and pick up discarded equipment. Young Captain
Noyes grew thoughtful as he watched one party laying dead Confederates in a
trench, and noted in his diary: "How all feeling of enmity disappears in
presence of these white faces, these eyes gazing upward so fixedly in the gray
of the morning hour." And a soldier of the 9th New York, viewing a similar
scene, remarked that "there was no 'secession' in those rigid forms, nor
in those fixed eyes staring blankly at the sky." Less melancholy, a
private in the 51st Pennsylvania recorded that he and his buddies looted the
haversacks of dead

Rebels
and found them full of good food—better rations, he remarked, than the Union
men were carrying. On the way down the mountain the 12th Massachusetts saw Joe
Hooker, well pleased with the work of his new corps, "in the saddle taking
his brandy and water, looking as clean and trim as though he had just made his
morning toilet at Willard's."
¹⁰

Piece by piece the army reassembled and
took to the road, following Sumner. Without ceremony the XII Corps, which had
been under the luckless Nathaniel P. Banks, found that it had a new commander
—a white-haired, wintry-faced old regular named Joseph K. F. Mansfield, who
had been graduated from West Point away back in 1822, before most of the
soldiers in this corps had been born, and who showed up this morning in a fine
new blue uniform, an improvised staff trotting at his heels. He took hold
strong, while his corps was in the act of getting on the road, and one of the
soldiers noted with approval that while he appeared to be "a calm and dignified
old gentleman" he quickly showed that he "was the personification of
vigor, dash and enthusiasm." Another recorded that he rode "with a
proud, martial air and was full of military ardor."
¹¹
Several
new regiments, fresh from training camps at home, came plowing up through
Frederick and joined the army—or tried to, anyway. There was a great traffic
jam on the road between Frederick and Boonsboro, with ambulances and details of
prisoners going back against the tide and with long wagon trains clogging the road
as they tried to slip in between the marching divisions, and the recruits had
to stand by in the cornfields to wait their turn.

The army was feeling good. It was enjoying an
experience which, from one end of the war to the other, the Army of the Potomac
did not have very often—chasing a Confederate army which was in full retreat,
after a battle which had been a clear-cut Union victory—and it was like a tonic.
The men had been told a day or so earlier that they were going to relieve
Harper's Ferry and had not yet been informed that that place had already
surrendered; and as the long miles passed underfoot the men in the ranks made
good-natured gibes about it, asking one another: "Who in hell is this
Harper, and where's his ferry?" Early in the afternoon the 5th New
Hampshire passed through a little hamlet and came out on a chain of low heights
overlooking a pleasant, winding little creek, with rising ground beyond and
the steeples and housetops of a town showing over the hills. They were halted
there, since the Confederates had guns posted on the opposite hills and seemed
disposed to contest any further advance, and the rest of the army slowly came
up and poured off into fields and farmyards on either side of the road. Pretty
soon McClellan and his staff cantered up amid a long wave of cheers, and the
general rode to a hilltop and spent a long time examining the lovely, rolling
countryside with his field glasses, while a Confederate battery tossed so many
shells at him that he sent his staff back into a hollow for protection.

The little town that he could just see beyond
the hills was the town of Sharpsburg. The stream that wound through the open
valley was Antietam Creek, gleaming brown in the afternoon sun and looking like
a promising place to fish in the cool of a summer evening. A couple of miles
away, in front and to the general's right, there was a little white church with
a wood behind it: a church of the Dunker sect, whose members believed church
steeples a vanity and held that war was sinful. Flags and guns and moving men
were to be seen on the slopes between the church and the town. Lee and his army
had stopped retreating and had turned to fight.

The sporadic cannonading died away and the
afternoon became peaceful again. McClellan was in no mood to hurry things. Most
of his army was still spraddled back over a long stretch of road, and it would
take a good many hours to assemble all of it. Franklin was some miles away,
near Crampton's Gap, and it might not be wise to call him in until it was
certain that the Rebels who had seized Harper's Ferry were up to no more
mischief in that area. So McClellan established headquarters on the lawn of a
pleasant house on a hill overlooking the valley. That morning he had sent his
wife a hasty telegram, saying that the army had "gained a glorious
victory"; this he had followed with a note saying that he was pursuing the
enemy "with the greatest rapidity, and expect to gain great results."
The air had been full of jubilant talk that morning, and McClellan had written:
"If I can believe one-tenth of what is reported, God has seldom given an
army a greater victory than this." He had also reported the victory to the
President, incautiously telling him that "General Lee admits they are
badly whipped"—a statement which caused Secretary Welles to wonder tartly
to whom Lee made this statement that it should be so promptly brought to
McClellan's ears. In another message home McClellan proudly asserted that the
victory had "no doubt delivered Pennsylvania and Maryland."

No doubt. And yet the sky was slowly but
steadily darkening. The finding of Lee's lost order had put the game in
McClellan's hands; forty-eight hours had passed since then, and two chances had
been missed. The Harper's Ferry garrison had not been relieved, and the
separate pieces of Lee's army had not been destroyed before they could unite.
Two states might well have been "delivered," but the war had not been
won—and it was final, shattering victory which McClellan had originally been
thinking about. D. H. Hill had had some terribly lonely hours on top of South
Mountain, but not until late afternoon had he been compelled to meet more of an
attack than his slim numbers could handle, and it was dark before the Federals
had brought up men enough to seize the crest by sheer force. The fight had been
a Union victory beyond question, and yet, as Hill himself remarked, "if it
was fought to save Lee's trains and artillery, and to reunite his scattered
forces, it was a Confederate success." And it was precisely that kind of
success which McClellan could not afford to let the Confederates win just then.

If this point was obvious to the Confederate
soldier, it was also dimly visible to Lincoln back in Washington, watching and
waiting in almost unbearable suspense as the war came to its greatest moment of
climax. Receiving McClellan's triumphant announcement that the mountain passes
had been forced, Lincoln sent him this reply:

"God bless you and all with you. Destroy
the Rebel army if possible."

3.
Tenting Tonight

The
country around Sharpsburg is surpassingly lovely, with low hills rolling lazily
down to the Potomac on the west, and little patches of trees breaking up the
green-and-brown pattern of the farmers' fields. The river comes down unhurried,
going to the south in wide loops and then swinging to the east; and just before
it turns again to go south the copper-colored Antietam comes down and joins
it—another unhurried stream that makes little loops and bends of its own as it
follows a north-and-south line to enter the river. Between the creek and the
river is the town of Sharpsburg, lying on the western slope of a gentle ridge
that slants off, east and west, to the two streams.

This ridge is not sharply defined; just a
stretch of higher ground, tapering off to the south in the blunt angle where
the creek meets the river, and merging imperceptibly with the hills of the
Maryland countryside a mile or two north of town. It is full of minor heights
and hollows, with easy spurs and valleys running east toward the creek, dotted
here and there with little open groves. The main road from Sharpsburg to
Hagerstown runs north from the town along the broad crest of this ridge. The
other principal road goes east from the town, gets over the height, and goes
down a long slope to cross Antietam Creek on an arched stone bridge, after
which it runs off northeast to Boonsboro. Half a dozen miles to the east the
blue mass of South Mountain lies upon the land.

All of this is good farming country, with a
look of quiet and uneventful prosperity. There are many cornfields and
pastures, orchards and gardens surround the farmhouses, and there are huge
barns. Little country roads zigzag in between the fields, worn down by many
generations of use until, in some places, they are below the level of the
ground they cross. They are bordered by fences—mostly barbed wire, nowadays;
weathered rail, two generations ago. Here and there the ground is broken by an
outcropping of rock.

Now this country town, together with the
streams and the principal roads, had names before the armies came together
there, because men have to have names for such places in the daily routine of
living. But most of the landscape lay nameless, except for purely local,
informal titles like Piper's cornfield, or Poffenberger's wood, and it serenely
and happily lacked history and tradition. Nothing had ever happened there
except the quiet, undramatic, unrecorded round of births and deaths, christenings
and weddings, cornhuskings and barn-raisings, the plowing of the ground in the
spring and the harvesting of fat crops in the fall. Life moved like the great
tide of the Potomac a mile or so to the west—slowly, steadily, without making a
fuss, patiently molding the land to its own liking.

As one comes up the hill on the road from
Boonsboro, after crossing the creek and just before entering the town, there
is the National Cemetery, green and well kept, white headstones marking the
places where many dead men he in orderly military formations, with pleasant
trees casting broken shadows on the lawn. It is a large cemetery, and it was
not there at all on the morning of September 16, 1862; there was nothing there
then but the broad crest and the peaceful grove, with the spires and roofs of
Sharpsburg half hidden beyond. If a man stood in this grove and looked to the
north he could see the white block of the little Dunker church, a mile away,
beside the Hagerstown pike. And on that September morning in 1862, anyone who
looked at the church would have seen two bits of woodland lying near it—one
west of the Hagerstown road, surrounding the church on three sides and
stretching northward for half a mile or more, and the other east of the road,
separated from it by open fields several hundred yards wide. Two quieter bits
of woodland could not have been found in North America, and no one outside the
immediate neighborhood had ever heard of them; no one had ever taken human life
in either of them. But ever since then, because of what was about to take place
there, those two wood lots have had a grim, specialized fame and have been
known in innumerable books and official records as the West Wood and the East
Wood—as if, in all that countryside, there were no other bits of wood that lay
just east and west of a country road. In the same way, there was a forty-acre
cornfield lying on the east side of the road, between the two plots of trees,
which ever since has simply been
the
cornfield,
as if there had never been any other.

The woods have been cut down since then, and
where the cornfield used to be there is a macadamized roadway flanked by gleaming,
archaic-looking monuments and statues, with little markers here and there
unobtrusively beckoning for attention. But in the fall of 1862 no one was
dreaming of statues, and because they had had good growing weather the corn was
in fine shape—more than head-high, strong, richly green, the tall stalks waving
slowly in the last winds of summer.

And over and above all of this
perfection of peace and quiet, on the sixteenth of September, there was a
silent running out of time and a gathering together of the fates, as issues
that reached to the ends of the earth and the farthest borders of national
history drew in here for decision. The peace and quiet had already been
destroyed. In the grove where it would soon be necessary to lay out a cemetery

(grass
waving in the summer breeze beside the tiny faded flags: it's all right now,
it's all right) men in trim gray uniforms sat on their horses and looked to the
east through field glasses. Many other men, much less neatly dressed in gray
and tattered brown and every imaginable shade between, were filling the zigzag
country lanes and trampling down the grain in the farmers' fields all along the
ridge. Dust hung in the air as long columns of six-horse teams labored up the
roads, swung off into the fields at higher places on the ridge, and sent
polished guns into battery to the tune of crackling bugle calls. Now and then a
set of these guns would shoot out quick jets of bright flame and rolling clouds
of soiled smoke, the guns jarring backward with each discharge, scarring the
ground beneath their trails and breaking the air with heavy sound.