Mr Lincoln's Army (43 page)

On the eastern side of the Antietam, a mile
away, the scene was much the same, except that here the men wore blue—very
dusty, worn, and dirty, much of it—and there were many more of them. They
brought guns up to the low heights bordering the east side of the creek: iron
rifles, mostly, many of them bearing at the breech the heavy band that marked
the long-range Parrott. From time to time they fired at the Confederate guns to
the west, battery and section commanders standing a little apart, peering
under the smoke to spot the shots. Behind the guns, safely under cover in
valleys and hollows, were dense masses of infantry, the men glancing
incuriously up at the guns as they moved into their places, each youthful face
a tanned, expressionless mask. Now and then the crash of the rival batteries
rose to a great tumult that sent long echoes rolling cross-country to the
mountains off to the east; then the noise died down and the country seemed
quiet, and the unending thump-shuffle of feet and the creaking of wagon wheels
could be heard. When the guns were being fired it seemed as if a great battle
were being waged, yet this was not really a battle at all; this was merely the
preliminary feinting and sparring, most of it due to nothing but the overeagerness
of the battery commanders and none of it doing very much harm.

On
the right-hand side of the road from Boonsboro, nearly a mile before the road
crosses Antietam Creek, there is a little rise of ground running out in a low
spur overlooking the valley, and here a man named Pry had built a fine big
two-story house of brick, with broad lawns and tidy outbuildings, and a grand
view opening off to the west and south. In his yard, on the crest of the
western slope, General McClellan had pitched his headquarters tents. Orderlies
had driven tall stakes into the ground in front of the tents, and telescopes
were strapped to the tops of these stakes, ready for use by any military eye
that cared to search the Rebels' side of the Antietam. Camp chairs from the headquarters
wagons had been set up, and a few regular armchairs had been brought out from
Mr. Pry's house, and the commanding general had taken his post here, surrounded
by his staff, their orderlies, the headquarters guard, and all the rest, with
the headquarters flag flying from a tall pole in the center. The morning wore
away and McClellan studied the long ridge to the west, and the generals came in
to report and to receive their orders. What was going to be the battle of the
Antietam was beginning to take shape, piece by piece, in the general's mind.

It was hot, that morning, with a blazing sun,
and no air was stirring in the protected hollows where the troops took
shelter. All through the morning the army kept coming up, the men filing into
place to right and left of the Boonsboro road, headquarters officers cantering
up and down the dusty road with papers in their hands to see that each unit got
to the proper location. Now and then groups of soldiers would leave their
places and walk to the top of some hill to see what the prospect might be. They
never stayed long because the Confederate gunners were watchful and sprayed
shell at any hillock where one of these groups appeared. When that happened the
Union batteries would strike at the guns that had fired the shells, and the
roar of the cannonade would rise to a brief crescendo, only to die away again
as the men took cover. Toward noon the sky became overcast and a little breeze
sprang up, and it was a bit cooler. McClellan stayed close to headquarters, conferring
with his officers and studying the Rebel position through telescopes. Except
for the guns and an occasional glimpse of moving men, there was not a great
deal to see. Undulations in the ground kept most of the Confederate Army out of
sight.

But the general felt that he was getting
a tolerably good idea of its position, and as the day lengthened, his battle
plan was formed. As far as McClellan could make out, the Confederate line ran
north and south along the ridge, its southern end anchored among the hills
south of the Boonsboro road, the other end going into the woods somewhere
beyond the white Dunker church. The position was strong, and it was not going
to be too easy for the Federals to reach it, because before they could get at
it they would have to cross the Antietam, and good crossings seemed to be few.
The bridge by which the Boonsboro road crossed the creek offered nothing but a
direct frontal assault on the center of the Confederate line, where many
batteries were clustered. A mile downstream there was another bridge, built of
stone and arched like the first, from which a road followed a little ravine to
cross the ridge and get into Sharpsburg from the southeast. This gave an
approach to the southern end of the Confederate line, but the ground was bad.
Steep hills looked down on the bridge from the Confederate side of the creek,
and those hills appeared to be full of armed Rebels, and the guns in front of
Sharpsburg commanded both the bridge and the road that led from it up the
ravine. Forcing a passage over that bridge and up onto those hills would be
just plain murder, unless Lee's attention could first be directed elsewhere.

North of the Boonsboro road the situation was
more promising. In front of the Pry house, a mile upstream from the place where
the Boonsboro road crossed the stream, there was a third bridge, sheltered in
the valley so that the Rebel guns could not reach it, with a winding road that
went off through the farmlands to the north and west; and still farther
upstream there were a couple of shallow places where men could wade the creek
well out of sight of the enemy's artillery.

It
looked, therefore, as if the sensible course was to cross the Antietam at these
protected upstream crossings, get troops over to the Hagerstown road well north
of the Confederate position, and send them sweeping down on top of the ridge,
rolling up the Rebel line as they went. At the same time, in spite of the
obstacles, it would be well to make a secondary attack at the bridge farthest
downstream. That might be costly, but it would keep Lee busy at both ends of
his line and prevent him from sending troops from his right, below the town, to
support his left, up by the Dunker church. Then, as a final touch: when these
two attacks were under way, watch the situation closely, and if all seemed to
be going well make a third smash right through the middle—Lee would probably
have weakened his center to support his two ends, and this third attack ought
to break his line and finish him off.

Thus
McClellan figured it out, while the troops waited in the valleys and the guns
boomed heavily, fell silent, and broke into action again, and the hot day
slowly passed. The whole Union Army was on hand except for Franklin, who was
still watching the Rebel detachments over near Harper's Ferry. Franklin must be
called in. Presumably he would be able to get his men up to the Antietam sometime
next day. McClellan studied the landscape again, talked with corps commanders,
and waited, while the sweating gunners brought more and more guns up to the low
bluffs that overlook the Antietam from the east. He was going to have
everything ready before he opened the fight, and nothing was going to be lost
through overhasty action.

Or
gained, either. He still had all the advantage, but time was continuing to run
out on him, and the bright opportunity that had been handed to him by grace of
the Indiana non-coms three days ago was getting dimmer and dimmer. Crampton's
Gap: one chance missed. South Mountain: a second chance missed. His luck was
still in, a third chance was offering, but there might be such a thing as
stretching good luck too far. For it was not by any means the whole of Lee's
army that faced him, this sweltering sixteenth of September. The afternoon
before, when the weary Confederates planted themselves on the Sharpsburg
heights and turned at bay, only the commands of Longstreet and D. H. Hill had
been present. This morning Jackson and Walker had brought their men in—very
tired and footsore men who had made an exhausting seventeen-mile night march
from Harper's Ferry. (Night marches were feasible, after all, if the man who
wore general's stars demanded them.) Three full Confederate divisions were
still at Harper's Ferry and could not reach Sharpsburg until the next day. Lee had
barely twenty-five thousand men on the field, while McClellan pondered his
battle plan and weighed his chances and decided not to attack until everything
was ready. The higher officers of the Army of Northern Virginia were frankly
amazed as they saw Lee serenely awaiting attack with this slender force, while
the blue columns were visibly building up overpowering strength on the far side
of the creek. General Longstreet, who was a hard man to impress, wrote later
that this day-long, ostentatious assembling of Federal legions was "an
awe-inspiring spectacle." Yet it remained a spectacle and nothing more,
all through the day, while the slow minutes ticked away.

For McClellan was facing an imaginary army
rather than the real one which was spread so thin on the Sharpsburg ridge: an
army that drew upon fabulous numbers and transcended all of the limitations
which poor transportation and insufficient supplies always imposed on
Confederate commanders. Whether the fault lay with the Pinkerton reports, with
McClellan himself, or somewhere else, the incredible fact remains that
McClellan was preparing to fight an army that simply did not exist. He believed
Lee to have a hundred thousand men at his command that day. The Federal army
was outnumbered; that offensive thrust which he must presently make, to drive
the invader back below the Potomac, was an enormously risky venture which
could not be undertaken at all except for the great valor of the troops and the
undying love which they had for their commander.

Between this imaginary Rebel army and the flesh-and-blood
army that was awaiting his attack there was an enormous difference. In his
invasion of the North, Lee had taken a gamble even more desperately daring than
the one he had taken on the Chickahominy, when he divided his army and wagered
the Confederacy's independence that McClellan would never find out how thin
was the screen that stood between him and Richmond. Lee crossed the Potomac
with an army that was on the verge of complete exhaustion. Shoeless men who
could tramp the dirt roads of Virginia without too much discomfort just could
not march on the hard roads of Maryland; they had fallen out by the thousands,
along with other thousands who felt that they had enlisted to defend Virginia's
soil, not to invade the North, and who in their unsophisticated way had turned
back when they got to the Potomac, planning to join up again once the army
returned to Virginia where it belonged. Altogether, from ten to twenty thousand
Southerners had left the ranks between Pope's defeat at Bull Run and the
arrival at Sharpsburg. Even when the troops at Harper's Ferry came up, Lee
would have barely forty thousand men to throw into action.

In a way this was almost an advantage. Every
faintheart, every weakling, every man whose spirit and body were not of the
stoutest, had been winnowed out. The ones who were left were the hard-rock men
who would be a long time dying. But even so, the odds were fantastic. It is
hard to find in all of Lee's career any act more completely bold than his calm
decision to stand and fight on the Antietam.

When Franklin came up McClellan would have,
by his own estimate, eighty-seven thousand men—with abundant reinforcements
not far off. His advantage, actually, was not as great as the figures seem to
show, because Confederates and Federals reckoned their numbers differently. The
Rebels counted only the men who would actually be carrying muskets, and the
Federals counted all who were "present for duty"—which meant that
they included all the cooks, orderlies, train guards, ambulance details, and
others who had non-combat assignments. Such details were particularly wasteful
just then; a Northern general who fought at Antietam said that it was necessary
to knock fully 20 per cent off the "present for duty" total to get
the actual combat strength. But even with that reduction, McClellan had every
advantage. Never before and never afterward, until the last gray days between
Petersburg and Appomattox, were the two armies to collide with the Rebel
strength so greatly reduced. In addition, Lee must fight with his back to the
Potomac, so that any blow which really crumpled his line would mean nothing
less than absolute disaster. Retreat would be out of the question if the
Yankees ever broke through.
¹

But McClellan saw the imaginary situation,
not the real one. And he had, by any reckoning, abundant reason for caution. He
might have been the man who could win the war in an afternoon; what he could
not for a moment forget was that he was also the man who could lose it in an
afternoon. Defeat north of the Potomac would mean the end of everything. The
army had just been reorganized, and it had many raw troops; from a military
point of view it was hardly an army so much as a collection of soldiers, fit to
be taken into battle only in a great emergency.

And on top of everything else the old poison
of distrust and hatred was still working. McClellan's own position was
unstable, not to say downright irregular. He had been restored to command by
President Lincoln personally, over the violent objection of the War Department,
the Republican majority in Congress, and most of the Cabinet. Nobody had
actually ordered him to take the army up here and fight the Confederates. All
that showed on paper was that he had been put in command of troops "for
the defense of Washington," and if anything went wrong here on the
Antietam it was quite likely that Secretary Stanton would proceed against him
for lawlessly exceeding his authority. McClellan wrote later that he fought the
battles of South Mountain and the Antietam with a noose around his neck— which
is to say that he fought, believing he would be executed for treason if he were
beaten—a consideration hardly designed to make a bold, dashing fighter out of a
man of McClellan's temperament.