Mr Lincoln's Army (61 page)
Specific
references are:
1.
Under the Old Flag.
2.
Quoted in
The
Hidden Civil War.
3.
Military Reminiscences
of General Cox.
4.
Under Five Commanders.
5.
Correspondence of John Sedgwick, Major General.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
At Daybreak in the Morning
Extensive use has been
made in this work of Major General James H. Wilson's spirited memoirs,
Under the Old Flag.
Wilson
was a young engineer lieutenant who served on McClellan's staff for a time and
who later became a very distinguished cavalry leader. As a young aide he
appears to have been brash and cocky, with a knack for confusing his own
functions with those of the major general commanding—altogether, it would seem,
an uncomfortable young man to have around headquarters. Opinionated as his book
is, however, it casts a most revealing light on the shortcomings of the high
command at this period. The stall' of the commanding general of the Army of the
Potomac was no place for an ardent young perfectionist—not until Grant came
along, which is another story.
Specific references are:
1.
For
details about the finding of the lost order, see "Antietam and the Lost
Dispatch," by John McKnight Bloss, in
Papers of the Kansas Commandery,
Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States.
Brigadier General
Silas Colgrove tells the story in
Battles
and Leaders,
Vol. II, Part 2.
2.
Gibbon's
Personal
Recollections.
3.
Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times.
4.
For
Reno and Barbara Frietchie, see
Personal
Recollections of the Civil
War,
by James Madison Stone.
5. An enthusiastic account
of this surprising little exploit occurs in a quaint pamphlet,
A Sketch of the 8th New York Cavalry,
by Henry Norton.
2. Destroy the Rebel Army
Regimental histories
usually give a very faulty picture of a battle as a whole, since each author is
responsible only for what he himself saw and relies on other authority—camp
gossip, as often as not—for events which took place out of his sight. But when they
are used to supplement the more formal reports and narratives, these histories
are invaluable. They bring life and color; with their help these battles of the
long ago cease to be bloodless set pieces out of military textbooks and become
as real and as moving as something out of today's newspaper.
Specific references are:
1.
For
these quotations, see
Battles
and Leaders,
Vol. TJ, Part 2, pp.
551 and
558.
2.
Details from
A
History of the 11th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
3.
See
A
Soldier's Diary: The Story of a Volunteer,
by David Lane.
4.
History of the 45th Regiment Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer
Infantry,
by Allen D. Albert.
5.
See the sprightly
History
of the 51st Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers,
by Thomas H. Parker.
6.
Writing some years after the war, General Hill made this
argument himself, but indignant Southerners—who were inclined to blame him for
losing Special Orders No. 191 in the first place—howled him down. It does seem,
however, as if he almost had a point
7.
For the experiences of the Black Hat Brigade, see Gibbon's
Personal Recollections
and Dawes's
Service
with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteers.
8.
Gibbon's
Personal
Recollections.
9.
See
History of the 5th Regiment New
Hampshire Volunteers
and
Penn-
sylvania at Antietam.
10.
Battles
and Leaders,
Vol. H, Part 2, p.
558;
The Bivouac and the Battlefield;
History of the 51st Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers,
and
History
of the 12th Massachusetts Volunteers.
11.
History
of the 3rd Regiment of Wisconsin Veteran Volunteer Infantry
and
Joseph
K. F. Mansfield: A Narrative of Events Connected with His Mortal Wounding,
by John Mead Gould.
3. Tenting Tonight
The literature on Antietam
is, of course, extensive, but most of it pays little attention to the wasted
day of September 16, when McClellan was flexing his army's muscles. The various
articles in
Battles and Leaders,
Vol. II, Part 2, are helpful, particularly the one by
General Cox. Palfrey's
The
Antietam and Fredericksburg
is
excellent and draws attention to the strange mix-up which occurred in
connection with the command of the three "wings" of the army.
Henderson's
Stonewall Jackson
makes clear the opportunity which McClellan lost by his
inactivity on this day. It should go without saying, probably, that anyone who
writes about the Army of the Potomac will get an invaluable indirect light on
that army from Douglas Southall Freeman's books about its great opponents—
R. E. Lee
and
Lee's Lieutenants.
Specific references are:
1. For an analysis of the discrepancy between the numbers
on McClellan's
rosters and the numbers that could actually be put on the
firing line, see Francis Winthrop Palfrey's
The Antietam and Fredericksburg.
2.
Under the Old Flag.
3.
For
Burnside's account of this, see his article in
Battles and Leaders,
Vol.
I, Part 2, pp. 660-63. One would give a good deal for a stenographic report of
his staff's remarks about the transfer.
4.
A Military History of the 8th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
CHAPTER SIX
1.
Toward the Dunker Church
Considering the fact that
Antietam was a head-on, slam-bang fight with no involved tactical maneuvering,
it is a battle whose details are uncommonly hard to trace. Principal reliance,
of course, is placed on the innumerable reports in the
Official Records,
Series
I, Vol. XIX, Part 2; but one is hampered by the fact that each commander, from
corps down to regiment, seems to have assumed that his own outfit had the
hardest assignment and gave and received the deadliest blows. In addition,
there are great discrepancies from report to report in the descriptions of the
ground, statements of numbers involved, and accounts of time sequences. And if
the reports of the Federal commanders are hard to reconcile, it is even harder
to dovetail them with the Confederate reports; one sometimes has the feeling
that the Federals and Confederates are describing two different battles.
Palfrey's
The Antietam and Fredericksburg
is perhaps the best account of the battle. General Cox
wrote of it extensively, both in
Battles
and Leaders
and in his own
Military Reminiscences,
An excellent narrative is contained in Lieutenant Colonel
William Allan's
The Army of Northern
Virginia in 1862,
and the descriptions
in Freeman and Colonel Henderson are extremely detailed and vivid.
Specific references are:
1.
For details, see
History
of the First Regiment Minnesota Volunteer Infantry; The 27th Indiana Volunteer
Infantry in the War of the Rebellion; Life and Letters of Wilder Dwight,
Lieutenant Colonel, 2nd Massachusetts Infantry,
and
Service
with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteers.
2.
"How Does One Feel under Fire?" by Captain Frank
Holsinger, in the
Kansas Loyal Legion
Papers.
3.
There is a good picture of this fighting in
Service with the 6th Wisconsin Volunteers.
4.
General Gibbon described the fighting of Battery B in his
Personal Recollections.
See also
The
"Ulster Guard" and the War of the Rebellion,
by Theodore B. Gates, and Theodore M. Nagle's
Reminiscences of the Civil War.
5.
This may be a good place to indicate the vast difference
between the numbers listed as "present for duty" and the numbers
actually engaged. On the books, Hooker had 14,856 men in his I Corps, and it is
usually assumed that he sent approximately that number into the fight.
Actually, it is very hard to see how he could have had more than 9,000 men in
action. He had three divisions —those of Meade, Ricketts, and Doubleday. In the
official reports Meade stated that his division went into action "under
3,000 strong," and Ricketts said that he took 3,158 men into the fight.
Doubleday did not give the strength of his division, but it seems quite certain
that it was no stronger on the firing line that morning than the other two. It
contained four brigades. One—Hoffman's—was detached as flank guard and did not
get into the fighting at all. Of the other three, at least two were far under
strength. Gibbon's four regiments were probably under 1,000 strong, all told:
he says he had fewer than 1,200 men at South Mountain, where he had 280
casualties. Phelps's brigade, according to the report of its commander, took
only 425 men into action at Antietam. The remaining brigade, Patrick's,
consisted of four New York regiments which had seen much service, and 1,500
would be a liberal estimate of the brigade's strength.
6. For Mansfield in action, see
Joseph K. F. Mansfield: A Narrative of Events Connected
with His Mortal Wounding; A Brief History of the 28th Regiment New York State
Volunteers, by C.
W. Boyce;
Pennsylvania at Antietam; The 27th Indiana Volunteer
Infantry in the War
of
the Rebellion,
and
History
of
the
3rd Regiment
of
Wisconsin Veteran
Volunteer Infantry.
2.
The Heaviest Fire of the War
A detailed description of
the way in which Sumner put his corps into action, with especial reference to
the unwieldy formation adopted for Sedgwick's division, is contained in
Walker's
History
of
the Second Army Corps.
The same points are also considered at some length in
Palfrey's
The Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Sumner did not survive the war and so
is not represented in the polemics which cluster around all Civil War battles;
his own ideas about the action, however, are presented in an article by his
son, Major General Samuel S. Sumner, in Vol. XTV of the
Papers
of
the
Military Historical Society
of
Massachusetts.
