Mr Lincoln's Army (41 page)

The
Pennsylvania and Michigan men knelt behind their own fence and fired back,
discovering immediately that an open rail fence is not nearly as good
protection as a solid stone wall. Somewhere beyond the Confederate firing line
there were Rebel batteries, which opened with shell and solid shot, sending the
fence rails flying. The greenhorns looked around nervously, saw General Willcox
calmly sitting his horse right up by the fence, took heart, and kept peppering
away at what they could see of the enemy across the field. Reno got some more
troops up, and at last the outnumbered Confederates backed away, firing as they
went, and disappeared in the forest. Reno sent fresher troops on after them
while the two new regiments caught their breath and took stock of the
situation. The Michigan men found that they had lost thirty men killed and
about a hundred wounded—fairly heavy losses, considering that they took some
five hundred men into action (they had been a thousand strong a month earlier,
but nearly half the regiment was sick and had been left behind). The
Pennsylvania regiment had had almost exactly equal losses. They had had their
baptism of fire, and the Michigan men proudly recorded that the veterans who
saw them in action told it around that they "fought like tigers."
Also, they noticed that there were a good many dead Rebels behind that stone
wall.

It was getting late in the afternoon by now,
and General Reno— who was up on the mountaintop taking personal charge of the
fighting —began to believe that the Confederates had retreated. Riding up to
the front, he took as good a look as he could at the checkerboard pattern of
clearings, woods, and laurel patches. There was nobody in sight on this side of
Turner's Gap, as far as he could make out, and he got ready to march straight
north along the crest to cinch matters.

Beside him was the 51st Pennsylvania, which
had been fighting hard. He directed it into an open field and told the colonel
to have the men stack arms and to let them boil coffee if they wanted to: it
would be a few minutes before he had his marching column formed. He turned his
horse, to ride back along the line—and just then a body of Confederates, darkly
concealed in the woodland ahead, let fly with an unexpected volley that
splintered the Pennsylvanians' stacked muskets, broke up the coffee-fire
groups, and knocked General Reno out of his saddle, dead. The 51st hurried to
grab its muskets and got into a horrible cross fire. There was still another of
those green regiments, the 35th Massachusetts, lined up behind the 51st, and
the 35th began wildly returning the Rebel fire without waiting to let the
Pennsylvania boys get out of the way. There was an infernal mix-up for a while
in that tree-fringed clearing, with a prodigious racket of small-arms fire,
reeking smoke clouds hanging in the air, bullets zipping by from all
directions, men getting hit, and a great shouting and cursing going up; but it
finally got straightened out, and the Federals drove in hard on the
Confederates in the wood and scattered them.
⁵

It was now close to four in the afternoon,
and all of the fighting so far had been done here south of the National Road by
Reno's men. The Confederates were in the immediate, visible presence of seventy
thousand Yankee soldiers, but they had not had to fight more than a tenth of
that number. In a sense, McClellan's finding of Special Orders No. 191 was
working to his disadvantage this afternoon. According to that document,
Boonsboro—which was only a couple of miles or so beyond the summit of the
mountain—was held by both Long-street and Hill, and as a result McClellan,
still clinging to the old, old idea of Lee's overpowering numbers, believed
that South Mountain was occupied by at least thirty thousand men. Therefore, he
played his cards cautiously, refusing to make a direct stab at the gap until he
had plenty of men in line.
⁶

Joe Hooker had been elevated to the command
of the I Corps-McDowell had been relieved, a man unlucky beyond all other generals,
taking his demotion in manful silence, without recrimination— and Hooker
brought the I Corps down from the Catoctin ridge. McClellan had him spread it
out for an advance up South Mountain to the north of the slopes where Reno's
men had been fighting so long. Hooker had three divisions in his corps—Meade's,
Ricketts's, and Hatch's—and he sent Meade's, Ricketts's, and most of Hatch's
around on a big swing a mile or more to the right of the National Road, to go
swarming up the heights that overlook Turner's Gap from the north. It took a
long time to move an entire army corps into position in those wooded hollows,
and it was getting along toward evening before they were ready to advance.
Hooker kept Gibbon's brigade back, and he had it form right on the highway,
with orders to start for the top as soon as the lines on the right began to
move.

Gibbon had his Black Hat boys all keyed up,
which was a good thing, since they had the toughest assignment of the lot.
Turner's Gap is a long, curving valley in the mountain, the road following the
narrow floor as it climbs to the summit; the soldiers who went up here would
have no chance for any fancy maneuvering but would have to go straight ahead in
the teeth of whatever direct fire the Confederates might arrange for them.
Since Hill was now being reinforced by Long-street—whom Lee had started back
from Hagerstown in a hurry, first thing that morning, when he learned that
McClellan was moving— this frontal fire was apt to be heavy. But Gibbon had
told his boys, before they left Frederick, how McClellan wanted two days of
good marching and how he had assured the general that this brigade could
outmarch and outfight anything in the army, and the men were on their toes.
McClellan himself was not far behind, on top of a little hill from which he
could see the highway all the way to the summit; whatever they did would be
done right under his eye.

Gibbon got his boys astride the road, 7th
Wisconsin on one side and 19th Indiana on the other, formed "by the right
of companies" —which meant that each regiment was made up of ten parallel
columns, each column representing one company marching two men abreast. They
couldn't fight in that formation, but they could get over rough ground easily
and could be brought up into line of battle without delay. The 2nd and 6th
Wisconsin fell in behind. The brigade was thin, with hardly more than eleven
hundred men altogether, the four regiments averaging a little under three
hundred men apiece. Two twelve-pounder smoothbores from reliable old Battery B
were moved up into the roadway, and the command set out.

They came under rifle fire before long, and
when they reached the Rebel skirmish line the two guns were wheeled around to
blast the Rebels with canister. The skirmishers withdrew, and Gibbon swung his
men into line of battle, bringing the two rear regiments up abreast of the two
in front—pridefully noting that the men did it as smoothly as if they were on
the parade ground, while McClellan watched through his field glasses from the
hilltop far below. Confederate artillery was posted at the summit and it had
the range: it put a shell into the middle of the 2nd Wisconsin just as those
ten company columns were wheeling into regimental front, dropping a dozen men
with that one burst. The two guns of Battery B did what they could to quiet the
Rebel guns, and the battle line went scrambling up the mountainside.

Up near the summit they found the Rebel
line—a formidable affair behind another of those stone walls, with the enemy
tucked snugly away where he could shoot downhill. The Rebels were in high
spirits, and when the Westerners came within handy range they yelled taunts in
the dusk: "Oh, you damn Yanks! We gave you hell again at Bull Run!"
Some of the Wisconsin boys called back: "Watch out, Johnny, this isn't
McDowell after you now—this is McClellan!" Then both sides gave up the
catcalling and began using their rifles, and the fight became hot and heavy,
with the Black Hat Brigade unable to advance an inch, and with Gibbon
wondering, presently, whether they could even stay where they were. Ammunition
ran low, and details were formed to collect cartridges from the dead and
wounded. The sun went down and it was pitch-dark, and back on his little
hilltop McClellan could follow the fight by watching the pin points of
stabbing flame from the muzzles of the muskets. Along toward nine o'clock the
fighting died out from sheer exhaustion, and the Black Hat Brigade prepared to
spend the night on the firing line. Since it started uphill it had lost some
280 men, about a quarter of its total number.
⁷

Off
to the north Hooker's corps had been making progress, although the progress
had been slow. Meade had his division of Pennsylvanians in front, and they went
clambering up a high, steep-sided spur of the mountain ridge on top of which
Confederate Robert Rodes had his fine brigade of Alabama troops. The Alabamians
were badly outnumbered, but they had all the advantage of position and were
rated as shock troops, under a general who was one of the best brigadiers in
the Confederate Army, and before night came down they gave the Pennsylvanians a
bad time of it. Coming up through the wood, the Bucktails caught it from a slim
Confederate skirmish line hidden behind trees. The Rebels here were expert
marksmen, and woods fighting was their specialty. They went dodging back from
tree to tree, reloading under cover and drawing a good bead before they fired.
But the Bucktails came from mountain country and were pretty good riflemen
themselves. They got the wood clear at last, and then Meade's men had nothing
but open fields in front of them and the Rebels had to give ground.

There was a delay along toward twilight, when
Meade thought he was about to be outflanked, but Hooker sent more troops in and
the supposed danger evaporated. The Rebels just did not have enough men on the
mountain to make a serious counterattack, and once McClellan got his available
strength into action, there could be only one outcome to the battle. By the
time it was dark the Pennsylvanians had got to the top and Rodes's brigade took
some very rough treatment, with a couple of hundred men shot down and an equal
number captured. The firing flickered out in the darkness finally all along the
crest, and the exhausted Federals prepared for a cheerless bivouac on the
mountaintop. During the night there was a good deal of firing by nervous
pickets, and some of the Union commanders feared a counterattack, but actually
the field had been won: Union troops were on the heights, where they had full
command of the pass, and the Rebels were grateful for the dark and a chance to
get away.

The Black Hat Brigade had a little tale to
tell around the camp-fires. Late in the evening the brigade found that it had
some prisoners to send back to army headquarters. A corporal and squad were detailed,
and the corporal led the way back to a country house which McClellan had taken
over. He was misdirected, somehow, when he went inside, and when he opened what
he thought was the door of the provost marshal's office he unexpectedly found
himself facing McClellan. McClellan, busy with some papers, looked up, frowning
at the intrusion, and said somewhat curtly: "What do you want?"

The corporal gulped and explained: he had
some prisoners to turn in and he had opened the wrong door by mistake.
Softening a bit McClellan asked the boy for his name and regiment. When he was
told his eyes brightened.

"Oh, you belong to Gibbon's brigade. You
had some heavy fighting up there tonight."

"Yes, sir," said the boy. "But
I think we gave them as good as they sent."

"Indeed you did.
You made a splendid fight."

The corporal
hesitated. Then, greatly daring, he said:

"Well, General, that's the way we boys
calculate to fight under a general like you."

McClellan got up, came around the table, and
gripped the corporal by the hand.

"If I can get that kind of feeling
amongst the men of this army," said McClellan, "I can whip Lee
without any trouble at all."

So the corporal went
back to his regiment, and the Black Hat Brigade had a story which went through
the whole army: General McClellan had shaken hands with an enlisted man and
complimented him on his brigade's fighting qualities.
⁸

At dawn there was a heavy mist on the
mountaintop, as if the battle smoke of the previous day's fighting had lingered
under the leaves. The commands there cautiously sent out patrols, which presently
brought back word: no Rebels in sight. Pleasonton's cavalry came up the
National Road and went down the western slope into Boonsboro as the mist
evaporated, driving out Fitz Lee's Confederate troopers and provoking a series
of running fights across the fields and down the country roads. A double handful
of Rebel stragglers were combed out of the town, and McClellan ordered Sumner
to push his corps through and take up the pursuit. Sumner put Richardson in
front, and the 5th New Hampshire had the advance, sweeping along the road past
dead cavalry horses, occasional wrecked caissons, and various other signs of a
hasty retreat. The New Hampshire boys legged it so fast that they later
remembered with pride that other commands had dubbed them "Richardson's
cavalry." In French's division, which followed Richardson's, was the
brand-new 130th Pennsylvania, whose untried soldiers gaped, wide-eyed, as they
saw their first live Rebels—a band of prisoners being escorted to the rear. In
this band was a dapper young Confederate officer, trim in a new gray uniform; one
of the Pennsylvania rookies called out to him: "Are there any more Rebels
left?" The officer replied grimly that they would see lots of Rebels very
shortly—a prophecy, said the 130th's historian, which was amply fulfilled.
⁹