Terrible Swift Sword (66 page)

himself and in his soldiers, he knew
that McClellan always moved slowly, and he believed that McClellan's army was
more or less demoralized. After the war he told a friend that "I intended
then to attack McClellan, hoping the best results from the state of my troops
and those of the enemy," and another post-war interviewer wrote that Lee
said that if he could have kept the Federals in the dark about his own movements
for a few days longer "he did not doubt then (nor has he changed his
opinion since) that he could have crushed the army of McClellan." Once
more, Lee was risking everything in order to win everything.
¹⁶

It
might have worked; it is hard to dispute the measured judgment of Robert E.
Lee. But no one will ever know about this particular might-have-been; because
as the army left Frederick, bound for the sheltering rampart of South Mountain,
one of Lee's officers lost the order which set forth all of the movements which
Lee's army was going to make, and on the evening of September 13 that order was
presented to General McClellan. Now McClellan had the game in his hands.

4.
A Town Called Sharpsburg

What it came down to
was that General Lee had taken forty badly worn infantry brigades north of the
Potomac to defeat an army twice as large as his. The odds were forbidding, but
they had been carefully calculated. They would swing in Lee's favor if he could
get time and space for the maneuvers which would deceive his foes and set them
up for the kill. The concealing screen of South Mountain offered an
opportunity. West of this long ridge Lee was out of sight, with unlimited room
to move and fast-marching men to move in it, and invisibility ought to buy the
time he needed. It was true that the Federal infantry could break the screen
whenever it really tried—the mountain gaps were held only by Stuart's cavalry,
backed by D. H. Hill's infantry—but if past performance meant anything the Army
of the Potomac would not move fast against an enemy which it could not even
see.

Risky as they seemed, Lee's plans were
justified. It was pure freakish chance that tripped him; the fantastic accident
which led a nameless Confederate officer to lose a copy of the campaign
orders, which led two Federal infantrymen to find that copy, and which placed
it shortly thereafter in front of General McClellan. When McClellan read it
(to compound the fantasy, he had at his side an officer who recognized the handwriting
and so could assure him that the document was genuine) Lee's invisibility
ceased to be. Now McClellan knew exactly where Lee was, what he was doing and
where he was going to be next.

It seemed to McClellan that Lee had made a
great mistake, and in a letter to Mr. Lincoln the Federal commander exulted
that Lee "will be severely punished for it." Full of confidence,
McClellan explained: "I have all the plans of the Rebels and will catch
them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency. I now feel that I
can count on them as of old."
¹

Before the Federal
soldiers could show whether they were equal to the emergency their commanding
general would have to do his own part. On the evening of September 13 his opportunity
was wide open.

Lee
himself was near Hagerstown, Maryland, with Longstreet and nine brigades. Five
more brigades, under D. H. Hill, were twelve miles south of Hagerstown, at
Boonsboro, a few miles west of Turner's Gap where the National Road crossed
South Mountain. All the rest of the army, divided into three separate columns,
was off to the south, converging on Harper's Ferry under the direction of
Stonewall Jackson, and two of these three columns were south of the Potomac.
Lee's army of invasion had split into pieces like an exploding shell, and the
Army of the Potomac, massed in and near Frederick, Maryland, was ideally
situated to exploit this situation. No Civil War general was ever given so fair
a chance to destroy the opposing army one piece at a time.

Not only was the invading army
dispersed, it was also in a condition of extreme military destitution. Its
soldiers had marched out of their shoes, almost out of their uniforms and far
away from their rations—thousands of haversacks contained nothing but green
corn and ripe apples gathered from Maryland's fields and orchards—and
straggling had been almost ruinous. A New York
Times
correspondent, observing Stonewall Jackson at
Harper's Ferry, wrote loftily that this famous general wore a most seedy
uniform and had a hat "which any northern beggar would consider an insult
to have offered him," and found the men in the ranks much seedier:
"Ireland in her worst straits could present no parallel." Long
afterward a Confederate veteran wryly confessed that he and his fellows were
indeed "a set of ragamuffiins," and said that "it seemed as if
every cornfield in Maryland had been robbed of its scarecrows." Digging
into his memory, the veteran became specific:

"None had any
under-clothing. My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers, a stained,
dirty jacket; an old slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn; a begrimed
blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and
corn, a cartridge box full, and a musket. I was barefooted and had a stone
bruise on each foot. . ._. There was no one there who would not have been 'run
in' by the police had he appeared on the streets of any populous city."
²

So the Army of Northern Virginia was not
much to look at; yet it was something special to meet. Lacking all else, it
still had those cartridge boxes and muskets, it knew just how to use them, and
extreme hardship had swept away everybody except the men who could stand
anything. If McClellan meant to round up and destroy these soldiers he would
have to work at it.

He tried, and the inspiration born of a
look at his opponent's cards lifted him up briefly. He sent his army forward on
September 14, and in due time it broke through the South Mountain rampart in
two places, at Turner's Gap and at Crampton's Gap six miles to the south, and
if he had been just a little more aggressive he would have saved Harper's
Ferry, mashed the fragments of Lee's army and won the war before September
died. But there were always a few hours to spare. The Federal columns that were
to break through the mountain screen were to move tomorrow morning as early as
possible—instead of this minute, tonight, before the sun goes down, and if
everybody isn't ready march with the ones that are and let the Devil take the
hindmost . . . When the Army of the Potomac advanced to seize the South
Mountain passes, Lee started to call everything off and get his men back to
Virginia while they were still alive; then he found that he would be given half
a day or so of grace. On September 15 Jackson captured Harper's Ferry and
11,000 Union prisoners, along with heaped-up supplies, and D. H. Hill's men
held Turner's Gap just long enough to make all the difference, and so instead
of retreating to Virginia Lee ordered what there was of his army to concentrate
at a town called Sharpsburg, down behind the high ground that overlooked
Antietam Creek, close to the Potomac, in western Maryland.

Antietam Creek is not much of a stream and
Sharpsburg was not much of a town, and the army that Lee planted behind the
creek on September 15 was not just then much of an army; Longstreet and D. H.
Hill, mostly, with some guns, perhaps 18,000 men in all, with the rest of the
army due to come up after a while from Harper's Ferry, and McClellan got the
Army of the Potomac there a few hours later, looked at the guns and the
bayonets on the high ground beyond the creek, and concluded that he ought to
study the situation. The only way to beat Robert E. Lee was to come and get
him, and Lee had his guns ranked on the hills with the leathery, hardcase
soldiers in rags lined up with them, and it seemed that this was no time to be
hasty. So McClellan's engineers laid out the lines the men were to occupy, and
the men filed into them, and the day ended and night came down, and next
morning it was September 16, and for a time there was a fog which made it hard
to see what the Rebels were up to; and all through September 16 the Army of the
Potomac waited, posting artillery on the heights east of the creek, and more
and more of Lee's army came up (including Stonewall Jackson in person) and at
sundown there was a brief, meaningless clash between McClellan's right wing
and Lee's left wing, and the long day in which the Federal Army had a
three-to-one advantage in numbers came to an end. There was a drizzling rain
that night, and a queer silence lay over the field, and in the morning there
would at last be a fight. And still more of Lee's army reached the scene.

For more than a century men have been
trying to understand Lee's willingness to stand and fight at Sharpsburg. His
army was fearfully overmatched. Even when the last troops came up from Harper's
Ferry he would have hardly more than 40,000 men, and McClellan had 87,000 with
more coming up.
³
The position overlooking Antietam Creek was strong
but it was not invulnerable, and it had one dangerous weakness; fighting there,
the Army of Northern Virginia stood with its back to the Potomac and there was
only one ford for a crossing. If the Federals ever broke the line and made a
really quick Confederate retreat necessary, Lee's army would simply be
destroyed. On the face of it there was every reason for a quiet departure
without a fight and hardly any reason for remaining and defying the Army of the
Potomac to do its worst. And yet . . .

And yet Lee stayed when he did not have to
stay and fought when he did not have to fight, and since he was not out of his
mind the only conceivable answer is that he believed that he could win.

He had believed this all along. He would not
have entered Maryland otherwise; if to fight at Sharpsburg was to risk the loss
of his entire army, to go north of the Potomac at all was to take the same
risk. Lee wanted an absolute victory, and to get the kind of fight that could
bring such a victory he had to run the risk of absolute defeat. To leave
Maryland now without putting the matter to the test would be to confess that
there could not be the kind of victory that could mean Confederate
independence. Perhaps the assignment was just too big. Perhaps the one real
chance to sweep the board clean had vanished when McClellan's army got away
from the Chickahominy and took refuge in its camp at Harrison's Landing, and
perhaps the Confederacy's only course now was to hang on and make the war so
expensive that the Yankees would finally get tired of it and quit trying. This
might be the case, but Lee would not accept it until he was sure of it.
Sharpsburg was where he would find out.

This
war saw many terrible battles, and to try to make a ranking of them is just to
compare horrors, but it may be that the battle of Antietam was the worst of
all. It had, at any rate, the fearful distinction of killing and wounding more
Americans in one day than any other fight in the war. If there was any
essential difference in the fighting qualities of Northern and Southern
soldiers Antietam fails to show it. It was a headlong combat, unrelieved by
any tactical brilliance, a slugging match in cornfields and woodlots and on the
open slopes of the low hills that came up from the brown creek. Neither
commanding general did what he wanted to do; actually, once the fighting got
under way neither commander had a great deal to do with it except to stand firm
and refuse to call retreat, and in the end it was about as close to a draw as
so large a battle could be . . . except that it became the great turning point
of the war, meaning more than either general or either army intended, a grim
and fateful landmark in American history. American soldiers never fought harder
than they did when they fought each other on September 17 on the outskirts of
Sharpsburg.

It began in the
earliest dawn, with a misty drizzle to obscure the half-light, when Federal
skirmishers went prowling southward astride the turnpike that came down to
Sharpsburg from Hagerstown. On the left was a big cornfield, with stalks taller
than a man's head, and on the right there were open pastures rolling off to
hills where Jeb Stuart had planted his horse artillery; and straight ahead,
about a mile away, the turnpike went over a bit of rising ground and passed
a
whitewashed Dunker church, picturesquely
framed by an open grove of trees. If the Federals could occupy this ground
around the church they would break the left end of Lee's battle line, and
McClellan had called for a big attack: one army corps to make the first drive
and two more to come in beside and behind to make it
a
crusher.

The
skirmishers were feeling the way for Joe Hooker's corps, on the extreme right
of McClellan's line. These troops had been led until recently by McDowell, and
in the general reshuffle following Pope's retirement McDowell had been put on
the shelf and his command had been given to Hooker, a more dashing general and
a far luckier one; florid, handsome, self-centered, coarse of fibre, always
ready to fight. Now Hooker had his men moving south toward the Dunker church in
a gray rainy daybreak.

Stonewall Jackson was waiting for him,
with artillery massed around the Dunker church and solid ranks of infantry in
the cornfield and west of the turnpike. The skirmishers probed at the front and
found it strong, and the advance drifted to a halt; then Hooker put three dozen
fieldpieces in line on a low ridge and had the guns blast the cornfield with
a
methodical, murderous bombardment that
flattened the tasseled corn and the defenders who had been posted in it, and
after a while the guns stopped firing and the Federal infantry went forward. It
had to fight its way, but the line in the cornfield had been almost blown to
bits and the Rebel units to the west were overpowered, and Hooker's corps kept
moving; and at last it swept the last of Jackson's infantry out of the way and
came up toward the Dunker church.