Mr Lincoln's Army (39 page)

Their comrades were having hot work for a
while there on the wooded slopes. Firing down from above, the Confederates were
shooting just a little high—not high enough to miss, the Northern boys
complained afterward, but just high enough to inflict a dreadful number of
head wounds, nearly all of which were fatal. Mindful of his orders, Franklin
kept banging away with his artillery and made a prodigious racket, and down in Harper's
Ferry the Union garrison—which knew perfectly well by this time that it was
thoroughly trapped—heard the noise and began to feel hopeful again.

Late in the afternoon the last Confederate
resistance dissolved, and the Federal assault waves cleared the crest of the
ridge and halted, while the main body of Franklin's troops went marching
through the gap and swarmed down into Pleasant Valley. McLaws awoke at last to
the realization that he was in desperate trouble as the broken remnants of his
rear guard came streaming back down the valley, and he and Stuart took fresh
troops and hastened up to repair the dike, while the long shadow of Elk
Mountain filled the valley with evening dusk and began to creep up the side of
South Mountain to the east. A Confederate brigadier came pelting up to them,
crying that all was lost, but McLaws and Stuart didn't think so. They formed a
line of battle across the valley and got ready to

make
the best fight they could, while the fugitives were rallied and formed up to
help the fresh troops.

Franklin rode through the gap, surveyed the
line of Rebel soldiers a mile or more to the south, and considered that this
was no time to be hasty. He had carried out the letter of his instructions,
which is to say that he had forced his way through the gap. It still remained
to "cut off, destroy or capture McLaws' command," but it seemed to
Franklin that he was outnumbered and that the Rebel line was too strong to
break, what with darkness coming on and his own troops winded. Also, additional
Confederate forces might well be coming down on him from Turner's Gap, for all
he knew, and if he was fighting McLaws when they came he would be taken in the
rear. So, in the end, he did nothing, deferring his next move to the morrow.

On top of the mountain that night the
Federals who had carried the crest slept on the field of battle, gleaning it carefully
for discarded valuables. The 4th New Jersey, which had been carrying the old
smoothbore muskets, claimed to have re-equipped itself completely with rifled
Springfields dropped by wounded or fugitive Rebels. The slopes were covered
with the wounded men of both armies, and late at night the soldiers went
clambering over the rocks, bringing casualties to the field hospital. They
picked up their own wounded first and then brought in Confederates, until at
midnight the exhausted surgeons, their linen coveralls streaked and smeared
with blood, told them not to bring in any more because no more could be handled
that night. So the 16th New York laid out a little camping place on the
mountaintop, built fires, and made the wounded Southerners as comfortable as
they could, with food and water at hand. They had taken a number of unwounded
prisoners, and they detailed two of these to keep the fires going and look
after the wounded men, and then they made their own bivouac. In the morning
they found that the unwounded men had fled and half a dozen of the wounded had
died during the night, and they carried the rest off to the hospital. Then they
went down into Pleasant Valley and joined the main body.

Now it happened that night that there was one
officer, in all the Union Army, who didn't believe in waiting until tomorrow.
He was only a cavalry colonel, and he was inside Harper's Ferry, completely
surrounded by Rebels, and there wasn't a great deal he could do about it, but
what little he could do he proposed doing. Oddly enough, he was a Mississippian
by birth—one of two Mississippians in the regular army, it was said, who had
stuck with the Union when the war came. He was Colonel Benjamin F. Davis,
called Grimes Davis at West Point and in the old army, and he was roosting in
Harper's Ferry as commander of the 8th New York Cavalry. On the night of
September 14 he knew as well as anybody else that the place would have to be
surrendered next morning: the Confederates finally had all the heights lined
with artillery, and the town couldn't be held an hour once those guns opened
up, which they would unquestionably do as soon as it was light. What made Davis
unique that night was that he didn't intend to fold his hands and wait for the
inevitable.

Like its colonel, his regiment was feeling
frustrated. The 8th New York had been raised in the country around Rochester in
the summer of 1861, and the government had been slow about the matter of
providing horses: for a solid year the 8th had worn sabers and talked cavalry
lingo but had gone about on foot, not having a horse to its name. The regiment
had footed it up and down the Shenandoah Valley with Banks in the spring of
1862, sharing in the humiliations which befell that officer's command and
feeling them more keenly because of its utter inability to ride as cavalry
should. Finally, about the time Pope was getting licked at Bull Run, the 8th
New York got its horses, and it had ridden brightly up the Potomac just in time
to get penned up here at Harper's Ferry, where there was nothing whatever for
cavalry to do and, currently, no prospect of anything better than a ride off to
Libby Prison in Richmond. So when Colonel Davis finished a stormy conference
that evening with the post commander and then came outside and whistled up his
cavalry, the boys were ready for action—any kind of action, just so it got them
out of that hole in the mountains to some place where they could ride.

What Davis proposed was that, since the post
was going to be captured, anybody who could get out ahead of time should do
so. He had finally won permission to take the cavalry and try it, the cavalry
on hand consisting of his own 8th New York, the 12th Illinois, and a mixed
handful from the 1st Maryland and 7th Rhode Island. A Unionist who lived in the
region and knew all the mountain roads was going to act as his guide; in
addition, Davis had one of his own scouts who had just slipped in through the
Confederate screen and had a pretty good idea where all the Rebel commands were
posted.

As
soon as the town got dark, then, Davis lined up his troopers, some thirteen
hundred in all. The regimental sutler, knowing that he couldn't get his goods
out and that he would inevitably be looted of all he owned next day by needy
Rebels, passed down the ranks, giving away tobacco: an act of generosity that
almost floored the soldiers, sutlers being men who never gave anything away.

Davis took his post at the head of the
column, with his guide and his scout and a picked patrol of twenty-five
troopers. The 12th Illinois and the Marylanders and Rhode Islanders came next,
and the 8 th New York was formed at the rear. In single file, moving at a walk,
the little band crossed the Potomac on a pontoon bridge and headed off to the
northwest on a narrow, winding road through the mountains —an obscure little
road that ran right under the overhanging cliffs of Maryland Heights, the one
road out that McLaws had failed to block. (It was the same road, if anybody had
stopped to think about it, down which John Brown had moved, with death in his
eyes and a monstrous vision of flame and bloodshed in his heart, when he made
his descent on the Harper's Ferry enginehouse in 1859.)

The boys had quite a night for
themselves. As soon as the head of the column got across the river it moved at
a trot, so that the line kept getting longer and longer; Colonel Davis was ten
miles up in Maryland by the time the last man left the bridge. The road took
them within a few rods of McLaws's camp, but the jingling and the clattering
seem to have escaped the notice of McLaws's pickets, and the cavalry got away
clean. (Jeb Stuart had warned McLaws earlier to guard that lonely little road,
but McLaws had other things on his mind and had paid no attention.) It was
pitch-dark there under the trees, and except when they were going uphill—which
was a good part of the time—the men rode at a trot. One trooper recalls that
"the only way we could tell how far we were from our file leaders was by
the horses' shoes striking fire against the stones in the road."

Two miles from the river Davis's advance
patrol surprised and scattered a Confederate picket post. Two miles farther the
Rebels had erected a road block of fence rails and overturned wagons, the
routed pickets having broadcast a warning. Davis anticipated this, however, and
led his command cross-lots by some winding woods path his guide knew about, and
they left the road block behind. As they got out of the tangled mountain region
they moved through cornfields and pastures as much as by road. Altogether it was
a tough, grinding ride, and some of the horses gave out. When that happened,
the dismounted men were taken up by their comrades; Davis was determined not
to leave a man behind.

They swung out to by-pass the town of
Sharpsburg, under the starlight, driving off a squad of Confederate cavalry
that was patrolling the roads there. A few miles north of town they hit the
Hagers-town turnpike and went clattering north in fine style. Then, up ahead in
the dark, Davis heard the rumble of wagons. He spurred on past a fork in the
road and ran into a big Rebel wagon train, escorted by a small detachment of
cavalry, bound for Sharpsburg. It was too dark for anybody to see the color of
his uniform, and Davis had a fine Mississippi accent, so he simply posed as a
Confederate officer and notified the driver of the leading wagon that he was to
turn sharply to the right when he got to the fork in the road; and he told the
commander of the Rebel cavalry escort to wait by the roadside and fall in at
the rear of the train. Then he galloped back to his own command, formed the 8th
New York alongside the fork to take care of the wagons, and got the rest of the
men lined up to handle the Confederate troopers.

All unsuspecting, the sleepy wagon drivers
took the right-hand fork, starting off on a road that led to Pennsylvania,
while the 8th New York, riding single file, fell in beside the train. As the
last wagon made the turn and the Rebel cavalry escort came up, Davis sent his
Illinois troopers in on the charge with drawn sabers, and the surprised Rebels
were broken up and sent scattering down the country roads in the dark. When it
began to grow light the wagoners came to a little, noticed the blue uniforms, and
asked the troopers what outfit they belonged to. Proudly the soldiers answered;
8th New York Cavalry. The teamsters pulled up in a hurry, swearing and fuming,
and some of them jumped down to unhitch their horses, but the New Yorkers drew
revolvers and persuaded them to climb back in their seats, and the train went
jolting along, drivers very glum, cavalry bubbling over with delight.

At about nine in the morning the whole
cavalcade got to Greencastle, Pennsylvania, where Davis called a halt and
examined his capture. There he found that he had seized nothing less than
General Longstreet's reserve ammunition train—forty-odd wagons, each drawn by
six mules, with some two hundred prisoners. He turned the train and prisoners
over to the authorities and led his tired command into a field to get a little
sleep. News of the capture got through the town, so that by the time the boys
had their horses unsaddled and watered and picketed the townsfolk were coming
out on foot and in buggies, carrying all sorts of things to eat—fresh bread,
hams, baskets of eggs, and so on. The cavalry ate a tremendous breakfast and
felt like heroes and stretched out for a good sleep in the shade, and one of
their number wrote: "The boys thought that soldiering wasn't so bad, after
all."
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