Mr Lincoln's Army (37 page)

The paper was headed "Headquarters, Army
of Northern Virginia," and was dated September 9. It was labeled
"Special Orders No. 191," and it was studded with names like General
Jackson, General Longstreet, General McLaws, and so on—names known to every
enlisted man in the Union Army. It was signed "R. H. Chilton, Assist.
Adj.-Gen.," and at the bottom was the name of the addressee: "Maj.
Gen. D. H. Hill, Commanding Division."

Whatever this might amount to, it seemed
altogether too hot for any two enlisted men to hang onto, so the soldiers got
to their feet and hurried off to show it to Captain Kopp, skipper of Company E.
The captain took one look and sent them to regimental headquarters, where they
handed it to Colonel Silas Colgrove, who was having a chat just then with
Brigadier General Nathan Kimball, brigade commander from Sumner's corps. These
two read it and exchanged glances; Kimball went away and Colgrove got on his
horse and went galloping off to his division commander, Brigadier General A. S.
Williams. Williams took his turn reading it and beckoned to his assistant
adjutant general, Colonel Pittman, who stuck the paper in his pocket, yelled
for his horse, and set out for army headquarters as fast as the beast could
carry him. And so the paper got to McClellan, while Bloss and Mitchell went
back to the field and stretched out on the grass again.

It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that
none of the accounts of this affair mention what finally happened to the
cigars. Bloss wrote later that he and Mitchell simply forgot about them;
Colonel Colgrove had the impression that the boys had rewrapped the cigars in
the paper and put them back in the envelope before they gave it to him. There
the trail dies out. Did anybody ever smoke them, in the end—those cigars that
were so important in the history of the war?
¹

Fate had not been too kind to McClellan up to
now. After that first dazzling, too-lucky stroke that had lifted him from the
western Virginia mountains to the top command at Washington he had had nothing
but bad fortune. But as he studied the paper the Hoosier corporal had picked up
he could see that the opportunity of a lifetime had come to him. For what he
had in front of him was nothing less than Lee's official orders, telling where
every last division of the Confederate Army was and what it was up to—the plans
of Confederate GHQ in complete detail. It was just too good to be true, and
McClellan was cautious: could the paper possibly be genuine? His staff examined
it. One officer, it developed, had known Colonel Chilton, Lee's assistant
adjutant general, quite intimately in the old army and was familiar with his
handwriting. He studied the paper and gave his verdict: genuine, beyond a
doubt—that was unquestionably written in Chilton's hand.

With that verdict the fog of war which always
limits the vision of an army commander suddenly dissolved and everything became
clear. McClellan knew as much about Lee's plans as if he had personally
attended Lee's last staff conference. The game was being handed to him on a
silver platter.

The town of Frederick, where McClellan
then was, is some forty miles northwest of Washington. The National Road, as it
was called in those days, comes up from Washington, passes through Frederick,
and continues west and north until it reaches Hagerstown, about twenty-five
miles farther on, where it swings west to reach Wheeling and the Ohio country.
From Hagerstown, good roads drop southward to the Potomac and the Shenandoah
Valley; other roads lead north into Pennsylvania. Just about halfway between
Frederick and Hagerstown the National Road climbs over the long, wooded height
of South Mountain—not an isolated peak, as one usually pictures a mountain, but
a great, slowly curving ridge that begins on the Potomac nearly opposite
Harper's Ferry and runs far up into Pennsylvania, where it passes a few miles
west of Gettysburg. Just now it lay on McClellan's western horizon like an
ominous thundercloud fifty miles long, full of veiled lightnings: for behind
that blue curtain lay the striking power of the Confederacy, embodied in the
dusty gray divisions of the Army of Northern Virginia, securely hidden from
inquisitive Federal eyes.

Innumerable rumors had been coming in, but
they were next to useless. Peaceful civilians who saw a scouting detachment
were apt to magnify it into an army corps when they reported it, and the nervous
alarms they sent back were sure to be garbled in transmission. The news
McClellan had been getting from beyond the mountain proved nothing except that
there were a lot of Rebels over there somewhere and that the Union folk in the
area were almighty worried. He had his cavalry forward trying to locate the
enemy, but every road they took led them straight up against Jeb Stuart's
patrols. Rebel cavalry had the gaps in the mountain well covered, and it would
take more than Yankee cavalry to open those gaps. A forward lunge by the army
itself would of course send Stuart's cavalry flying, but in the absence of any
knowledge about Lee's position and intentions it seemed to McClellan that it
would be dangerous to make such a lunge. The blow might take the army into the
wrong place and enable Lee to go rampaging off unopposed, doing fatal damage
among the rich and nearly defenseless cities of the North. Up to this moment
Lee had all the advantage.

Now, in a twinkling, this advantage had
passed from Lee to McClellan. Lee's Special Orders No. 191, which had been
issued just four days ago, told precisely what the Confederate Army was doing
and where it was situated. Right now it was in the act of gobbling up that
isolated garrison at Harper's Ferry. Stonewall Jackson and his command had been
detached from the army and sent back into Virginia, roundabout, to come up on
Harper's Ferry from the south. The division of General A. P. Hill was with him.
General John G. Walker, commanding another Rebel division, had also gone below
the Potomac to approach the town from the east—he was to make for Loudoun
Heights, a little mountain that rises on the eastern bank of the Shenandoah,
where it joins the Potomac, and overlooks the little town where John Brown once
raised the flag of slave revolt. Two more Confederate divisions under General
Lafayette McLaws were descending on Harper's Ferry from the north and were to
occupy the lofty ridge of Maryland Heights, on the north side of the Potomac,
whence they could look right down the throats of the Union garrison. The rest
of the Confederate Army—Longstreet's command, plus the division of D. H. Hill,
together with the reserve artillery and the supply trains—was to wait at Boonsboro,
a little town on the National Road just beyond South Mountain. When Harper's
Ferry had been duly captured everybody was to head north and join up with Lee
and Longstreet, either at Boonsboro or at Hagerstown, a dozen miles up the
road.

There it was, all spelled out, and McClellan
had it right on his desk. He was the beneficiary of the greatest security leak
in American military history—the only one that ever finally affected the
outcome of a great war.

Harper's Ferry, of course, was doomed. It was
in the bottom of a soup bowl, and once the Rebels got up on the rim, there
would be no stopping them. The place had always been indefensible, and Halleck's
refusal to order the garrison out when there was time looked sillier than ever
now. But quite unintentionally Halleck had baited a trap, and Lee was stepping
right into it. His pause to capture this outpost (he banked heavily on
McClellan's extreme caution) was giving McClellan the most dazzling opportunity
any Northern general was to have throughout the whole length of the war.

For Lee's army was at this moment completely
scattered, and McClellan, his own army united, was closer to the scattered
pieces than those pieces were to each other. Lee was entirely at his mercy.
There was nothing to keep the Army of the Potomac from breaking through the
mountain wall and stamping out those separated segments of Lee's army one at a
time. The Army of Northern Virginia could be destroyed, which would win the war
overnight, and it could be done by a man whom the radicals in Washington were
proclaiming a disloyalist who did not want to win!

There was just one catch in it. McClellan
would have to move fast. Those orders would be out of date before long. They
were four days old already, and the Rebel army could do a power of marching in
four days, as sundry Northern generals had found out. The door was wide open,
but it was likely to swing shut quickly. If McClellan was to take advantage of
his opportunity he had no time to spare. Every minute might count.

And yet, actually, the situation was even
better than McClellan supposed. Having given him this break, the fates were
providing him with a little extra bulge to allow for contingencies. Lee's
logistics were a trifle off, and the snatch at Harper's Ferry was taking longer
than expected. Special Orders No. 191 did not give the time schedule, but Lee
had anticipated that the job would be finished by now. The various elements had
begun their march on September 10; by the twelfth, it had been believed,
Jackson would be taking possession of Bolivar Heights, the long ridge that
dominates Harper's Ferry from the south, Walker would be in position across the
Shenandoah, and McLaws would be on top of Maryland Heights. On September 13,
therefore, according to Lee's plan, the garrison would be held by the throat
and would have to surrender, prisoners and captured supplies could be started
south, and the victors could be on their way north again.

But nobody had moved as fast as that. Only
now, while McClellan was reading the order, was the head of Jackson's column
coming within sight of the Federal troops on Bolivar Heights, and it would take
another day for Jackson to get fully into position. Only now was McLaws
fighting his way up the steep ridge to take possession of the peak north of the
Potomac; only now was Walker getting his men in place on the crest of Loudoun
Heights. McClellan was getting from one to two full days more than he had any
reason to hope for. In addition, the rest of Lee's army was no longer
concentrated at Boons-boro, close to the gap through which the National Road
crossed South Mountain. Since writing the order Lee had heard a rumor (later
proved false) that Federal troops were coming down from Pennsylvania in some
strength, and he and Longstreet had moved up to Hagerstown to head them off.
Nobody but D. H. Hill was anywhere near the all-important gateway, and Hill's
division was so worn by hard fighting and straggling that it numbered barely
more than five thousand muskets. Lee's army was even more scattered than the
order showed, in other words, and it would take it longer to get reassembled.
When the fates finally gave McClellan this break they went out of their way to
make it a good one.

General John Gibbon happened to visit army
headquarters early that afternoon. His Black Hat Brigade was getting thin and
he wanted to have it strengthened if he could. He and McClellan were on
friendly terms, having known each other back in the old army days, and he was
admitted to McClellan's tent without delay. When he got in he could see that a
good deal seemed to be happening. McClellan asked him to sit tight for a minute
and went on dictating orders, receiving reports, sending staff officers
hurrying off here and there, everybody energetic and active. Finally there came
a lull. McClellan turned to him, taking a folded paper out of his pocket and
displaying it jubilantly, his eyes sparkling.

"Here is a paper with which, if I cannot
whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home," McClellan said. "I
will not show you the document now, but"—he turned down one fold to show
the writing— "here is the signature, and it gives the movement of every
division of Lee's army. Tomorrow we will pitch into his center, and if you
people will only do two good, hard days' marching I will put Lee in a position
he will find it hard to get out of."

Gibbon, of course, was delighted; also, this
gave him his opening, and he took it without delay as a good soldier should. He
had a brigade, he said, that would do all the marching and fighting the
general could ask for—four crack Western regiments that were as good as any in
the army, if not a little bit better. But they had been worn down by hard
service and the brigade was a little skimpy, when new troops came in could the
general assign a good Western regiment to Gibbon's brigade? McClellan listened
attentively. He always liked to hear his troops praised, and he glowed as
Gibbon talked. When Gibbon finished McClellan promised that he would have the
first Western regiment that came to camp. Gibbon left, feeling highly encouraged,
and McClellan returned to the task of getting the ponderous army in motion.
²

Basically his problem was fairly simple—to
get across South Mountain while Lee's army was still in pieces, to overwhelm
the separate fragments, and, if possible, to rescue the Harper's Ferry garrison
so that those twelve thousand soldiers could be added to the Army of the
Potomac.

Of the many roads that crossed South Mountain
in various places there were only two that mattered now: the National Road,
leading through Turner's Gap to Boonsboro and thence to Hagerstown, and a road
that forked off in a more southerly direction west of Frederick, crossed the
mountain at Crampton's Gap, six miles south of Turner's Gap, and came out on
the far side just five miles north and east of Harper's Ferry. A quick drive
through Turner's Gap would bring the army down on what looked like Lee's main
body—Longstreet's and D. H. Hill's commands. A simultaneous smash through Crampton's
Gap would crush the two divisions led by McLaws, would open the door so that
the men at Harper's Ferry could come out, and would leave Jackson and the
others completely isolated on the south side of the Potomac. When all of that
had been done, Jackson and A. P. Hill and Walker could be hunted down at
leisure and there would be nobody of any consequence left in the entire state
of Virginia to oppose an irresistible descent on the Confederate capital.