Terrible Swift Sword (67 page)

This
was almost it, but not quite. Out of the woods behind the church came a new
Confederate battle line—John B.

Hood's shock troops, the men angry
because they had been sent forward just when they were cooking what would have
been their first really good breakfast in a week. (During the night a meat
ration had been issued.) This line formed in the clearing and suddenly it was
all ablaze with deadly musketry, firing volleys that broke the Federal column
apart; then it charged, yelling after the manner of the Rebels, greatly aided
by some brigades of D. H. Hill which came in through a fringe of woods and
farmlots off to the east. Hooker's men were driven into retreat, some of them
going slowly, fighting as they went, others going headlong for any refuge they
could find. They went north along the turnpike, whose rail fences were
grotesquely festooned with corpses, or back across the cornfield whose torn
ground held an unutterable litter of dead and wounded. (Hooker said later that
of all the dismal battlefields he ever saw nothing was quite as bad as that
wretched cornfield.
⁴
) At last the Federals got back to their
original starting point, Hooker disabled with a bullet in one foot, and the powerful
Federal artillery beat the Confederate advance to a halt.

Then McClellan sent in a fresh army
corps, the one formerly led by General Banks, commanded now by a
white-whiskered old Regular named Joseph Mansfield; and these men drove the
Confederates out of the cornfield. Mansfield himself was mortally wounded, but
his men kept going, put half of Hood's division out of action, cleared out a
plot of woods just east of the cornfield, got one tentacle up to touch the
Dunker church—and then came to a sullen halt, bruised and spent and winded.

There was a brief lull, partly because
the two corps commanders had become casualties, partly because these two
Federal corps had been virtually wrecked. Then a third Federal corps came into
action—Army of the Potomac veterans, three big divisions under crusty old
Edwin V. Sumner, coming up to break the Rebel line; coming up, by unhappy
chance, one division at a time, hitting three moderate blows instead of one
crusher . . . and suddenly the pattern for the whole business becomes clear, and
the tactical details no longer have much meaning.

The
thing really was just about over now, except for the killing, which would go on
all day without really changing anything; for the pattern by which the Federals
fought on this day made decisive victory impossible.

The
Army of the Potomac was fighting the whole battle the way Sumner fought his
part of it: that is, it was fighting
a
series
of separate engagements rather than one co-ordinated battle, and so it could
never get the proper advantage out of its overwhelming superiority in numbers.
Lee's army was never quite stretched past the breaking point.

Thus: Hooker's corps
attacked, was used up, and retired. Then came Mansfield's, which did just about
the same. Then came Sumner's, one division at a time. The first division, John
Sedgwick's, was flanked, routed, and driven from the field (by a Confederate
division that had just come up from Harper's Ferry) before the second began to
fight. This second division broke its back trying .to storm a sunken lane which
went zigzag across the Confederate center: a strong position, held by D. H.
Hill's people. Then the third division came up, and it flanked and carried this
sunken lane and came up against the Confederates' last line of defense—which
was so desperately thin by now that Longstreet had his own staff helping to
work the guns in a half-wrecked battery, and D. H. Hill had picked up a musket
and was trying to rally stragglers. Precisely then and there Lee's army could
have been broken.

Sumner's
third division was fagged by this time, but it probably would have kept going
if its commander, Brigadier General Israel Richardson, had not been mortally
wounded. Right behind it, however, there was a fresh army corps, Franklin's,
ready to be used; but at this point the Federal high command concluded that its
entire right wing was on the verge of disaster and that Lee might at any moment
make
a
big
counterattack. Franklin's corps was put on the defensive, and the threadbare
Confederate center felt no more pressure. Instead, the Federals attacked on
their own extreme left, a mile and
a
half
from the breakthrough point along the sunken road.

This attack was like the others, late
and utterly unco-ordinated. It was made by Burnside's corps, which contained
four divisions, and these characteristically were sent into action one at a
time. This offensive began after all the other offensives had ended, and
although it was the weakest of them all it nearly succeeded, and if it had
succeeded Lee would have lost his grip on the ford across the Potomac and his
army would
have been done for.
But McClellan was late in ordering the attack, Burnside was slow to execute the
order, and coordination was enforced by no one; and finally, well on in the
afternoon, A. P. Hill's division came up after a hard seventeen-mile march
from Harper's Ferry, and it drove Burnside's advance back almost to Antietam
Creek and stabilized the situation. Hill's arrival highlighted one of the
strange features of the battle. From the moment the two armies first confronted
each other here, Lee had been given forty-eight hours to reassemble his
scattered forces, and this last piece slipped into place just when it was most
needed.

So
the battle ended, at last, and the armies held much the same ground they had
held at dawn—except that nearly 23,000 men had become casualties. As always,
the night that followed the battle was hideous: from one end of the line to the
other the darkness was dreadful with the cries of wounded men who were calling
for help. The Federals held the cornfield and the sunken road and the various
crossings of the Antietam, and Lee held an unbroken position covering the ford
that led back to Virginia; he had lost a fourth of his army but he had not been
driven away, and in a narrow tactical sense he had actually had the better of
it. Incredibly, he remained in position all of the next day, September 18, and
he and Jackson even planned to take the offensive, giving it up at last when a
close study of the situation showed that it simply was not possible.
⁵
McClellan for his part had had all the fighting he wanted. He received 13,000
fresh troops that morning, and he had on the scene two army corps which had
hardly been used, but he was willing enough to wait; and that night, while the
Army of the Potomac lay in its soiled bivouac, Lee's army rounded up its guns,
its stragglers, and as many of its wounded as could be moved and threaded its
way back across the Potomac to safety. The Maryland campaign was over.

What it meant could be seen better from
a distance than at close range. Whatever might be true of the battle itself,
Lee had unquestionably lost the campaign; the attempt to win a decisive victory
north of the Potomac had failed. McClellan notified Halleck that "Maryland
is entirely freed from the presence of the enemy, who have been driven across
the Potomac," and to Mrs. McClellan on September 18 he sent a thin chirp
of pleasure: "The spectacle yesterday was the
grandest I could conceive of; nothing could be more sublime. Those in whose
judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it was a
masterpiece of art."
⁶

The soldiers themselves knew only that they
had been in a terrible fight. The battle had had a strange spectacular quality,
because most of it was fought out in the open where everybody could see it,
and the veterans remembered what they had seen as well as what they had had to
endure. A Northern newspaperman recalled "long dark lines of infantry
swaying to and fro, with columns of smoke rising from their muskets, red
flashes and white puffs from the batteries—with the sun shining brightly on all
this scene of tumult, and beyond it upon the rich dark woods and the clear blue
mountains south of the Potomac." A reporter from Charleston told of the
immense billows of smoke from the great ranks of Federal cannon (Southern
artillerists remembered Sharpsburg forever as "artillery hell") and
reflected that the whole of the great Federal Army was in plain sight, assault
waves carrying flags up to the Confederate lines, behind them huge columns
"so far in the distance that you could recognize them as troops only by
the sunlight that gleamed upon their arms." A Wisconsin soldier let it go
by calling the whole thing "a great enormous battle—a great tumbling
together of all heaven and earth."
⁷

They all remembered the terrible guns.
One Southerner remarked, with feeling: "Of all mean things the climax is
reached when compelled to receive the fury of cannonading with no opportunity
to inflict damage," and a Confederate surgeon burst out: "I never was
so tired of shelling in my life before.
I
hate
cannons."
A Pennsylvanian said
the battlefield was "a truly sickening and horrible sight," and
added: "No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible
sights
I
witnessed
this morning.
...
Of this war
I
am heartily sick and tired." David H
Strother, the former
Harper's
correspondent
who had the odd record of serving first on Pope's staff and then on
McClellan's, said that when he crossed the battlefield after the Confederate
retreat he found dead bodies hideously swollen and blackened: "Many were
so covered with dust, torn, crushed and trampled that they resembled clods of
earth and you were obliged to look twice before recognizing them as human
beings."
⁸

A wounded Mississippian had the last
word. After Sumner's men had advanced toward the Dunker church, a Union officer
passed over ground covered by Confederate wounded and paused to tell this
prostrate Mississippi soldier, "You fought well and stood well." The
wounded man looked up at him and said: "Yes, and here we lie."
⁹