Mr Lincoln's Army (44 page)

So he bided his time: studying, calculating,
attending to details. Noon came and went. Clouds formed in the sky and there
was a little breeze to make the day cooler, and the guns on the hills fell
silent. One of McClellan's staff officers wrote that "nobody seemed to be
in a hurry. . . . Corps and divisions moved as languidly to the places assigned
them as if they were getting ready for a grand review instead of a decisive battle."
²
McClellan rode from end to end of his lines, moving a detachment here and there
into better position, endlessly watching the opposing heights. Once he detected
a change in the position of a couple of Rebel batteries and conceived that Lee
was regrouping his forces; that called for further delay, while additional surveys
were made. Ammunition trains were coming up, and McClellan, always the good
administrator, personally supervised the arrangements for supplying troops and
batteries.

As he perfected his plans he let himself
create a mix-up in the chain of army command—unimportant enough, on the
surface, but due to have far-reaching effects on the way the battle was fought.

Somewhat informally, McClellan had recently
grouped his army into three principal sub-commands, or wings. General Sumner,
commander of the II Corps, had been given command over General Mansfield's XII
Corps as well. Franklin had his own VI Corps and Porter's V Corps; and General
Ambrose E. Burnside, who had joined on the march up from Washington, had the
direction of Reno's old IX Corps and of Hooker's I Corps. In planning his
attack, however, McClellan scrambled this grouping—partly, his staff whispered,
at the urging of Joe Hooker, who considered that he could make a better fight
and win more glory if he were out from under Burnside's control. At any rate,
the attack on the extreme right had been entrusted to Hooker, who was to have
Mansfield's corps in immediate support, with Sumner standing by to lend a hand
if necessary. In Franklin's absence Porter was to hold the center and act as
army reserve, and when Franklin came up he would be put in wherever he seemed
to be needed most. Burnside was on the extreme left, facing the downstream
bridge, where he would attack as soon as Hooker's drive was rolling well.

Thus the new wing commands had completely
fallen apart, and nobody in particular had general charge of anything. Hooker,
theoretically under Burnside, was off on his own at the other end of the line.
Mansfield, technically under Sumner, seemed to be temporarily attached to
Hooker. Sumner, supposedly commanding a third of the army, had only his own
corps and was to help Hooker, although Hooker was not empowered to give him any
orders. And Burnside, who was new to the Army of the Potomac, was left to play
a lone hand on the hardest front of all, attacking the bridge that crossed the
Antietam under the overhanging hills to the south. All of the lines of
responsibility had been cut, and if the next day's fighting was going to be
co-ordinated in any way, the co-ordination would have to be provided by
McClellan himself—and McClellan was a general who, like Lee, much preferred to
leave the actual conduct of the fighting to his subordinates once a battle was
begun.

The arrangement promised to make Hooker the
hero of the next day's fight, and so that general, always eager for
distinction, was very happy about it. It didn't sit at all well with Burnside,
however, and it unquestionably had a grave effect on the fighting his men were
to do.

There was to be a time when the Army of the
Potomac would dislike and distrust Burnside intensely—not because he was
personally objectionable, but because he presently developed an almost
unfailing knack for bringing on defeat whenever he went into action. That time
had not yet come, however, and in September 1862 he was immensely popular with
the IX Corps, which knew him, and was generally respected by the rest of the
army. Neither he nor the corps had been with the army very long, but both the
general and the men brought a first-rate record in with them. Judging strictly
by past performance, Burnside was a good man with the habit of success.

In 1861 he had been a Rhode Island
businessman of some prominence, a West Pointer who had resigned from the army
because garrison life in peacetime seemed unbearably dull. He got back in
quickly enough when Fort Sumter was fired on, and raised the first of Rhode
Island's troops. Late in that first summer of the war he proposed that an
amphibious expedition be fitted out to descend on the North Carolina sounds,
taking possession of seacoast cities and forts, giving Jefferson Davis a new
front to defend, and closing the ports of entry for blockade runners. The
suggestion was a good one and the administration accepted it, appointing
Burnside to organize and lead the expedition. He got it under way early in
January 1862, sailing from Hampton Roads with a heterogeneous fleet of
transports and strong navy support.

Everything worked out fine, and the
expedition was a brilliant success. Burnside made a good impression even
before the fleet sailed. In the job lot of transports that had been collected
so hurriedly there were some remarkably unseaworthy old tubs, and the soldiers
protested strongly about having to go to sea in them: they had signed up to
face Rebel bullets, but they didn't want to be drowned. Burnside promptly
ended all grumbling by moving himself and his headquarters staff off the fine
new steamer that had been set aside for him and embarking the smallest and most
rickety little vessel of the lot—and almost paid for it with his life when the
fleet ran into a gale off Cape Hatteras and the little steamer came within an
inch of foundering.
³

He
seems to have been a very likable person, this Burnside. McClellan was very
fond of him (until after the Antietam had been fought, anyhow) and used to
write informal, chatty letters to him beginning "Dear Burn." Lincoln
appears always to have retained a good deal of faith in him, even after
Burnside had repeatedly demonstrated that it had been a military tragedy to
give him a rank higher than colonel. One reason might have been that, with all
his deficiencies, Burnside never had any angles of his own to play; he was a
simple, honest, loyal soldier, doing his best even if that best was not very
good, never scheming or conniving or backbiting. Also, he was modest; in an
army many of whose generals were insufferable prima donnas, Burnside never
mistook himself for Napoleon. Physically, he was impressive: tall, just a
little stout, wearing what was probably the most artistic and awe-inspiring set
of whiskers in all that be-whiskered army. He customarily wore a high,
bell-crowned felt hat with the brim turned down and a double-breasted,
knee-length frock coat, belted at the waist—a costume which, unfortunately, is
apt to strike the modern eye as being very much like that of a beefy city cop
of the 1880s.

At any rate, McClellan's order of battle for
September 17 seems to have touched off all of Burnside's troubles. In a sense
it left him all dressed up with no place to go. He was supposed to command two
army corps, but one corps had been taken away from him. The one that remained
had been commanded by Reno, and Reno had been killed on South Mountain; and
Burnside, getting a bit stuffy for once in his career, refused to resume direct
command of it because he felt that to do so would be to consent to a demotion.
So he told General Cox, the ranking division commander, to assume command of
the IX Corps; he, Burnside, would remain a wing commander even though the wing
had been cut in half.

The result was that the IX Corps in this battle
had two commanders—and no commander at all. McClellan gave his orders to Burnside,
and Burnside majestically passed them on to Cox, and neither man was quite
responsible for operations. Once the action began, there was likely to be a
mix-up of the first magnitude.

On the afternoon of September 16, however,
nobody foresaw any of that trouble. Along about four o'clock Hooker's corps
pulled itself out of the fields along the Boonsboro road, followed a country
lane back of the Pry house, and went splashing through the upper fords of the
Antietam, with Hooker in the lead riding a magnificent white horse and looking
every inch and quite consciously the gallant general. A soldier in the 6th
Wisconsin remembered afterward that the way led through apple orchards and that
the boys ducked out of ranks to fill their pockets and haversacks with the ripe
fruit. Signal stations had been set up on the hills far ahead, and as they
marched the men could see the flags wigwagging furiously. The corps began to
climb through the rising farmland on its way to strike the Hagerstown road,
and from the ridge to the west the move became visible, and Confederate guns
banged away, groping ineffectually for the range.

The line of march led near the East Wood-that
parklike open grove that lay half a mile northeast of the Dunker church—and the
wood was occupied that afternoon by the Confederate division of

John
B. Hood: two brigades of Texas and Mississippi troops who were generally
considered the hardest fighters in all of Lee's army, which is about all the
compliment any troops need. They had their pickets well out in front, and
before long the Yankee skirmishers brushed into them and there was a brisk
interchange of small-arms fire. General Meade came riding up, brusque and
impatient, to look the situation over. He sent couriers dashing off, and in a
few minutes he had his Pennsylvania division deployed in line of battle facing
the wood, and the Bucktails went forward in a long skirmish line. The rifle
fire became heavy, and the colonel of the Bucktails was killed, and smoke and
early twilight filled the fringes of the wood. Both sides rolled guns forward
to take a hand in the fight, and as these opened, the guns farther back reached
out at long range to make their own contribution, and for an hour or more there
was a really vicious little battle there under the trees. Far off to the
Federal left, soldiers of the 8th Ohio crept up on a hill to watch in the
gathering dusk, and one of them—filled with all of a soldier's enthusiasm for
a fight in which he himself does not have to take part—wrote: "Nothing
could have been more grand. The red glare of flame along the Rebel line for
more than a mile, the bright streams of fight along the track of the shell, and
the livid clouds of smoke as the shell burst in the air, constituted a
spectacle brilliant beyond comparison."'
⁴

The firing was heavy and sustained enough to
make Longstreet believe that a major attack had been made and repulsed. But the
Federals didn't want the East Wood just then—Hooker was simply trying to
protect the flank of his corps as it marched into position farther north and
west—and the firing died out at dusk. Meade drew his division off, and only the
rival picket lines were left to snipe at each other, sullenly, in the evening
dark. On the Confederate side Hood's division was drawn back out of the wood,
and replacement troops were sent up to bivouac where they had fought.

Hooker took his men well to the north before
halting for the night. Doubleday's division, in the lead (Hatch had been
wounded at South Mountain, and Doubleday had the division now), got to the
Hagerstown road and formed up facing directly to the south, with Meade's
Pennsylvanians on its left and a little more to the south, and the third
division, that of Ricketts, to the left of the Pennsylvanians. Having thus
reached what looked like a good jumping-off place for the next day's battle,
Hooker established his headquarters in a farmer's yard a little east of the turnpike,
and his men spread their blankets where they had halted and turned in for a
little sleep.

It wasn't a very good night for sleeping. It
began to rain after the sun went down, and there were intermittent spells of
what one veteran recalled as "dismal, drizzling rain" all through
the night; and out in front the pickets were nervous, opening up now and then
with a blaze of firing that occasionally stirred some of the batteries and
caused them to join in, although it was too dark for the gunners to hit much of
anything. The gunfire rose to such a pitch, once, that an aide roused Hooker
and called him out of his tent, fearing that the Rebels might be beginning a
night attack. Hooker stood in the farmyard and listened, the raindrops
glistening on his florid, handsome face, and looked at the spurts of flame off
in the dark, estimating the direction of the fire. Then he shook his head.
"The Rebels must be firing into their own men—we haven't any troops off
that way," he said. Then he went back to bed.

There was a tension in the atmosphere for the
whole army that night. Survivors wrote long afterward that there seemed to be
something mysteriously ominous in the very air—stealthy, muffled tramp of
marching men who could not be seen but were sensed dimly as moving shadows in
the dark; outbursts of rifle fire up and down the invisible picket lines, with
flames lighting the sky now and then when gunners in the advanced batteries
opened fire; taut and nervous anxiety of those alert sentinels communicating
itself through all the bivouacs, where men tried to sleep away the knowledge
that the morrow would bring the biggest battle the army had ever had; a
ceaseless, restless sense of movement, as if the army stirred blindly in its
sleep, with the clop-clop of belated couriers riding down the inky-dark lanes
heard at intervals, sounding very lonely and far off. The 16th Connecticut, a
new and almost completely untrained regiment, which was lying along the
Antietam near the downstream bridge, fell into a panic and sprang wildly to
arms once when some clumsy rookie accidentally discharged his musket. Veteran
regiments nearby cursed them wearily, cursed the high command for banning all
campfires—the Rebels had had all day to spot the Union positions, but the top
brass had ruled out fires that night for security reasons— and glumly munched
the handfuls of ground coffee they couldn't boil. In Richardson's division the
men were marched to the ammunition wagons in the darkness to draw eighty
rounds per man, twice the usual allotment; they accepted the grim omen in
expressionless silence.