Crossing (44 page)

General Jackson halted and stared at the woman on the sidewalk, obviously mystified.

One of the staff officers rode up close to him and murmured, “She means you to ride over it, General.”

Now he smiled at the lady, who smiled back as if her face were suddenly lit by heavenly beams. Jackson doffed his cap and slowly rode over the scarf.

Behind him, the staff and aides exchanged delighted grins. Jackson was famous now, perhaps second only to Robert E. Lee. His face was well known from portraits in the newspapers. Ever since his triumphs at Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas, the people along the marches had recognized him. They often crowded Little Sorrel, hugging her; others touching the general’s boots; mothers holding up babies for him to lay his hand on their heads; ladies thrusting handkerchiefs up to him to touch; still others handing him flowers and small flags and often, since his oddities had become known, lemons. No matter how often it happened, no matter if it was one lady or a crowd, General Jackson was obviously baffled by the attention, and it made him embarrassed and awkward. His staff loved it.

They marched and marched. On the ninth, General Lee ordered Jackson to his old command and the scene of such drama, Harpers Ferry. The strategic village was once again in the hands of the Federals, and it was vital for Lee to take it to protect the rear of the army, who were to march to Hagerstown, Maryland, and then farther north to engage the enemy.

After arranging his artillery in a careful sweep surrounding the town, Stonewall stood with his staff on a crag of Bolivar’s Heights, looking down at the Federals ensconced in Harpers Ferry. The town was surrounded by hills, which made it easy to attack and impossible to defend.

One of Jackson’s officers said, “It sure is down in a bowl, isn’t it?”

Jackson said succinctly, “I’d rather take the place forty times than undertake to defend it once.”

And so, almost before the first rolling artillery volley was finished, the Federals sent up the white flag, and 12,000 men surrendered. Jackson again had captured a rich unspoiled treasure—13,000 small arms, seventy-three cannons, and countless foodstuffs, supplies, and other stores.

It was September 15, 8:00 a.m. Even before he went down into the town, Jackson called Yancy to him. “Dispatch to General Lee. Double-quick, Sergeant Tremayne.”

“Yes, sir.” Yancy saluted and Midnight took off in a flurry of dust and smoke that lingered on the air. It was sixteen hard miles, on the old Shepherdstown Road and crossing the Potomac at Boteler’s Ford, to Lee’s headquarters just west of Sharpsburg, Maryland.

At three o’clock, Yancy returned. He was covered in dust, his boots wet to the knee. Midnight was lathering, his legs covered with mud up to his hocks. Still he pranced and stamped.

Yancy jumped off and hurried to Jackson, who was still in the village making arrangements to parole the prisoners. “Sir,” he said breathlessly, “I have a return from General Lee.”

Eyeing him shrewdly, Jackson took the note. He looked up at Yancy and asked, “Did you see the ground?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

“General Lee is hard-pressed, sir. Vast numbers of the enemy have massed east of Sharpsburg.”

Jackson nodded. Lee’s dispatch had said that if Jackson had not overcome Harpers Ferry that day, Lee was contemplating a retreat. He urged Jackson to come to Sharpsburg with all speed.

They marched all night, quite a feat after the last two weeks of marching and maneuvering and skirmishing. But they were Jackson’s foot cavalry, and they were relentless. They reached Sharpsburg early on the morning of September 16. Two armies faced each other, intent on destruction, across a winding, cheerful little creek called Antietam.

It was September 17, 1862. Johnny Rebs called it the Battle of Sharpsburg; Yankees called it the Battle of Antietam. Each of the places on that horrendous battlefield carried its own too-clear imprint.

Dunker Church, where the bloodletting began at six o’clock that morning. And where Stonewall Jackson, calm and imperturbable in the midst of screaming bullets and murderous artillery, directed his men in his final counterattack, saving the Confederate left from complete destruction.

The North Woods, where General Joe Hooker’s Union troops harassed the Confederate left all the day, visions of blue coats weaving in and out of the soft-wooded shadows, and sometimes storming out in waves, men in gray falling before them.

The East and West Woods, where both blue and gray fought and died, the sweet glades scarred by rifle fire and artillery explosions and men lying on the ground, coloring it scarlet.

The Cornfield, twenty acres of what had been well-ordered rows of sweet corn, with men of both the North and the South lying as they fell, just as the cornstalks lay from the onslaught. On that day the lines surged back and forth over the Cornfield no less than eight times. In the end neither army possessed it, only the dead.

The Sunken Road, which came to be known as Bloody Lane, because it was filled in some places six deep with Confederate dead.

Burnside’s Bridge, surrounded in some places six deep with Federal dead.

General John B. McClellan was timid. He imagined General

Robert E. Lee as all-powerful, and in his head he always was certain that the Army of Northern Virginia was half again, or sometimes twice as numerous as it was. “Little Mac,” as he was affectionately known in the army, hated to risk his men. He could map out grand strategies, but when it came to completely committing his army to an aggressive offense, as General Lee always did, Little Mac would procrastinate, always asserting that the job could not be done unless he had more reinforcements, more cannons, more rifles, more ammunition, more aides, more couriers, more food, more tents, more blankets, more shoes, and more intelligence. Even his defensive moves were halfhearted and ineffective because of his reluctance to fight.

At Sharpsburg he outnumbered General Lee’s army almost two to one, with a force of 75,000 facing Lee’s army of 40,000. All that day McClellan attacked and defended in a piecemeal fashion. The Confederates cut up those Yankee pieces even more, and in pieces they retreated.

The Army of Northern Virginia lost over 10,000 men, killed, wounded, and missing. Federal casualties were close to 12,500. When the final awful numbers were tabulated, 22,546 men had fallen on that Bloodiest Day.

One thing happened to Yancy that day that should have made him glad. But because it happened at such a grim and critical moment during the Battle of Sharpsburg, he recalled it with wonder, mixed with the pall of dread that overlaid his every image of that battle.

When Jackson had withdrawn from Harpers Ferry, he had left General A. P. Hill’s division behind to deal with the parole of their 12,000 prisoners and to inventory and transport the captured guns and material to Sharpsburg. Consequently, he was late arriving on the field; in fact, he arrived just at the moment that the Confederate right was about to crumble, and thus the Federals could easily have flanked them and then utterly destroyed them.

When General Jackson sighted the first of Hill’s troops as they appeared on the Shepherdstown Road, Jackson sharply called out for Yancy. He rode up and the general grabbed Midnight’s bridle.

“General Hill is just arriving on the road, there, to the south. No time to write a dispatch; ride to him as fast as you can and ascertain if he is still at his strength and numbers or if he has lost stragglers along the road. And hurry back to me.”

“Yes, sir,” Yancy said and hurried off toward the south.

General A. P. Hill was already at the line of battle and was directing the first brigades marching into their positions.

Yancy rode at a blinding gallop to the front, through confusion of soldiers hurrying to get placed along the line. He drew up to the head of the brigade. Then he reined in Midnight so abruptly that he reared and screamed. General Hill turned, and in a single blinding instant, Yancy’s mind was filled with images imprinted as surely as if he were seeing them with his eyes instead of his brain:

General A. P. Hill, in his blazing red flannel shirt, shouting orders and cursing at the top of his lungs on the bloody center of the Battle of Gaines’ Mill
.

Grinning at Yancy. “Orders from Stonewall, huh? What? Attack the North Pole?”

Looking down at his right arm, watching the dark stain spread
.

Stunning blow to his head … gray … then black
.

Yancy remembered it all—the noise, the screams, the guns, the smell, the fear, the pain. It filled his mind for a moment, and he had to shake his head to clear it. Then he rode up to General Hill and shouted, “General Hill! Message from General Jackson!”

And so he thought no more about it. He knew he would not have time until much later that night.

As night fell, the few guns firing here and there spluttered out. Lee’s officers were expecting an order to retreat. In spite of the fact that the Confederates had undoubtedly driven the Federals from the field in a shamefaced retreat, the Army of Northern Virginia had been mauled badly, and withdrawal would have been understandable and perfectly honorable.

But Robert E. Lee stood his ground.

The Army of Northern Virginia camped that night. Fatalistically they ate confiscated supplies more plentiful than they had since

Second Manassas, anticipating another cruel fight the next day. Faithfully they believed in Robert E. Lee and with certainty believed, in spite of their cruelly reduced numbers, that they would drive the hordes of men in blue from the field once again.

Yancy and Peyton Stevens found a grassy swath under a bullet-scarred oak tree in the West Woods, where General Jackson had set up his overnight headquarters. Both of them were deadly tired, though they only felt a peculiar numbness, and they were ravenously hungry. They built a fire, neither of them speaking, only gathering up wood and hollowing out a shallow hole and going through the business of lighting the wood in a light breeze.

Peyton Stevens was pale and drawn and looked twice his age. Yancy was pasty-faced, the hollows of his jaw deep, his cheekbones sharp, his eyes red. They had fat peaches from one of the orchards they had passed on their march from Harpers Ferry. As always, Peyton had plenty of stores of tinned beef, peas, salmon, and even lobster. Yancy had brought a loaf of fresh bread from the prison bakery at Harpers Ferry that had, miraculously, survived in his haversack, along with some confiscated beef jerky.