"Smalley!" cried Wilson, excited.
"Ride rapidly to Hooker and tell him to rally his corps and lead it back
to the field, for by doing so he may not only save the day but save the Union
also!"
Smalley's
horse had been wounded, and he himself was weary and covered with dust from
riding about the field, but he was game; he pointed out, however, that Hooker's
wound would probably make it impossible for him to mount a horse.
"That makes no difference,"
said Wilson. "Let him get into an ambulance and drive back to the field.
Or, what is still better, put him on a stretcher and with his bugles blowing
and his corps flag flying over him let his men carry him back to the fighting
line while his staff take the news to the division and brigade
commanders."
Smalley took fire. "Hooker will go
back—I'll answer for it!" he said, and he galloped away—to return
crestfallen half an hour later with the report that Hooker said his wound was
too painful to let him make the attempt. Wilson, always a caustic critic of
Federal generals, wrote of Hooker: "From that day forth I regarded him as
possessing but little real merit."
9
Just what, if anything, would have been
accomplished if this flamboyant project had gone through is, of course, an open
question; but the young lieutenant's suggestion does stand out as the one
proposal made at any time during the day to make use of the great reserve of
enthusiasm and ardor which was possessed by that youthful army. Here were
soldiers not yet grown battle-weary and army-cynical: young men still romantic
enough to respond to the waving flag and the blaring bugle, foolish enough to
try the impossible, and to do it, too, if the right man asked them to.
McClellan had that force at his disposal as no other commander of this army
ever had it—and he could never quite bring himself to the point of using it. As
one of his veterans wrote long after the war: "It always seemed to me that
McClellan, though no commander ever had the love of his soldiers more, or tried
more to spare their lives, never realized the metal that was in his grand Army
of the Potomac.
...
He never
appreciated until too late what manner of people he had with him."
10
And it seems that McClellan's great love for
his soldiers actually worked to prevent him from making full use of them. He
knew that his men had fought harder that day than they had ever fought before;
believed, in fact, that they were completely fought out, that they had done all
that any man could ask them to do. He dreaded to see their bloodshed and
suffering, and he had been seeing nothing else all day. From one end of the war
to the other the Army of the Potomac never lost so many men in one day's
fighting as it lost here on the Antietam: not at Gettysburg, not in the
Wilderness, not anywhere.
McClellan's
capacity for sending his men in to be hurt had simply been exhausted. So they
were hurt no more that day—and were to go on fighting until 1865.
And the long day ended at last, and the long battle
ended, and both sides were about where they had been at dawn. The sun went down
over the western hills, blood-red in the smoky air: an observer at headquarters
saw it, just as it was setting, with the gunners of one isolated battery
silhouetted black against its enormous disk as they loaded for a final shot,
seeming to stand in the sun. As the land grew dark, fires were visible; shells
had ignited innumerable haystacks on the fields, and these glowed in the
twilight. On Burnside's front, boys from the 21st Massachusetts carried their
wounded into a farmhouse where an energetic young woman named Clara Barton had
set up a dressing station. The sound of the guns died down, and a more dreadful
noise rose from the battle lines—the steady, unceasing, unanswerable crying
and moaning of thousands upon thousands of wounded boys who lay in the open
where the stretcher-bearers could not reach them; a crying that continued
throughout the night. A survivor of the mangled 16th Connecticut wrote
afterward: "Of all gloomy nights, this was the saddest we ever
experienced."
4.
The Romance of War Was Over
It
all happened a long time ago, and that part of the reality which is represented
by smoke and flame and bloodshed casts a thin shadow now, its original darkness
bleached out by the years. Yet something endures, even if it is no more than
the quiet truth that nothing is ever wasted, and the story of what happened
along the Antietam is not just the story of young men who passed needlessly
through the fire to Moloch. For in the end the young men who passed along that
path were triumphant, and the incapacity which cost them so much has ceased to
matter.
Their triumph was not the winning of a
battle, for this battle seemingly was not won by anybody; to all appearances it
was simply a stalemate that wrecked two armies. Yet victory was in it. After it
had been fought—because it had been fought—history came to a turning point.
Indecisive tactically, the battle shaped all the rest of the war: meant, at the
very least, that the war now must be fought to a finish. There could no longer
be a hope for a peace without victory. The great issues that created the war
were going to be settled, at no matter what terrible cost. This fight was
decisive.
Yet at the moment it did not look decisive.
It looked like a standoff, and the morning after the battle the two exhausted
armies lay on the field staring blankly over the silent guns, as if they were
appalled by what they had done to each other. Here and there men on the rival
lines made an informal truce so that the wounded could be carried in, but the
pickets were alert and scattered shots rang out now and then, warning the
ranging stretcher-bearers not to go too far. All day long the soldiers awaited
a new outburst of fighting. Heavy reinforcements came into McClellan's lines,
and generals went out to study new angles of attack; McClellan listened to
them, nodded sagely, and decided to delay the offensive until next day. On the
opposite side Lee considered an attack north of the Dunker church, regretfully
gave it up when Jackson reported the Federal position there too strong to be
carried, and waited for the day to end; and the hot sun came down on fields and
copses where lay thousands of unburied bodies. And at last it was night again,
and after dark the Federals heard in their front a steady, unbroken sound like
the flowing of a great river, hour after hour—the tramping of the brigades of
Lee's army moving back to cross the Potomac on the return to Virginia. When
morning came the noise had ceased and the Union Army had the field to itself,
with none but dead men in front of it.
The cavalry and Fitz-John Porter's infantry
were sent on to the river to make sure the last Rebels had gone. They rounded
up a few belated stragglers, and they did a good deal of sniping across the
water at Lee's rear guard. Porter ran some artillery down to the bank, and that
night some of his regiments crossed, captured a few guns, and went forward to
see what further damage they could do. The Confederates struck back savagely in
the gray of the next morning: A. P. Hill's division again, lashing out at McClellan
for the last time. A new Pennsylvania regiment, which, having been armed with
condemned muskets, somehow found itself on the front line, discovered that its
weapons could not be fired, and took a brutal beating before it could get back
to the northern shore. There was no more fighting. The Army of Northern
Virginia withdrew slowly up the Shenandoah Valley, and the Army of the Potomac
stayed where it was, too worn to pursue, and wearily went to work to tidy up
the battlefield.
This battlefield was unspeakably awful by
now. Swollen corpses darkened by the sun lay everywhere, giving off a frightful
stench, and burial parties were put to work. (Any regiment which had got into
the bad graces of its brigadier, a veteran wrote later, was sure to be given
this assignment.) Great fires were built to consume the innumerable carcasses
of dead horses, and nauseating greasy smoke went drifting down-wind and
compounded the evil. The men dug long trenches for mass burials of dead
Confederates—McClellan said they buried twenty-seven hundred of them, but the
count seems to have been too high—and they tried to make individual graves for
their own comrades, putting up little wooden markers with names and regimental
numbers wherever they could.
Even men who had been in the thickest of the
fighting were astounded when they went about the field and saw how terrible the
killing had really been. One officer counted more than two hundred dead
Southerners in a five-hundred-foot stretch of the Bloody Lane. An Ohio soldier
wrote that the lane was "literally filled with dead." Stupefied
Pennsylvania rookies gossiped fatuously that the Confederate bodies they were
burying had turned black because the Rebels ate gunpowder for breakfast. One
Northern soldier, moved by a somewhat ghoulish curiosity, carefully examined a
body which hung doubled over a fence in rear of the Bloody Lane and found that
it had been hit by fifty-seven bullets. Under the ashes of burned haystacks,
in front of Burnside's corps, soldiers found the charred bodies of wounded men
who had feebly crawled under the hay for shelter and had been too weak to crawl
out when the stacks took fire.
Worst
of all, perhaps, was the Hagerstown turnpike between the West Wood and the
cornfield, where charge and countercharge had swept back and forth repeatedly,
and where the post-and-rail fences on each side of the road were grotesquely
festooned with corpses. The colonel of the 6th Wisconsin called this place
"indescribably horrible" and said that when he rode through his horse
"trembled in every limb with fright and was wet with perspiration."
This officer served throughout the war, and when he wrote his reminiscences, in
1890, he said that what he saw along the Hagerstown road that morning was worse
than anything he saw later at Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle, at Cold Harbor, or
in front of the stone wall at Fredericksburg: "The Antietam turnpike
surpassed all in manifest evidence of slaughter." Yet General Gibbon felt
that the cornfield itself was even worse; the dead were actually piled on top
of each other in places, and it seemed as if whole regiments had gone down in
regular ranks. One soldier wrote that it would have been possible to walk from
one side of the cornfield to the other without once stepping on the ground.
There were two dozen dead horses and scores of human corpses in Mr. Miller's
barnyard.
1
There had been a great deal of killing, in
other words. McClellan's official casualty list, which was made up a few days
later, showed more than two thousand Federals killed in action and about ten
thousand wounded. Rebel casualties were apparently slightly lower, although
exact figures are lacking. Altogether, bearing in mind the number of wounded
men who were to die, it is probable that five thousand young men lost their lives
here; and whatever the correct figure may be, there seems no reason to doubt
the accuracy of the contemporary writers who called the Antietam the worst
single day of the entire war. Some regiments were down to pathetic remnants.
Captain Noyes recorded that he met a company officer the morning after the
battle who was carrying a huge piece of salt pork and was wondering what on
earth to do with it—it was the day's meat ration for his company, just issued,
and he was the company's sole survivor. Noyes added that he checked on this
officer's amazing statement and found that it was true. Company G of the 12th
Massachusetts had been reduced from 32 men to five; the whole regiment, even
after it called in all convalescents and detailed men, numbered only 119 when
it was formed for a review two weeks after the battle. The 80th New York had
only 86 men to answer roll call the day after the battle, and the 28th New
York—which had been a skeleton to begin with—was down to 53. The Irish Brigade
had received 120 recruits just before the battle; it reported that 75 of the
new men had been shot. Regimental losses of 50 per cent were common; had been
suffered, for instance, by three of the four regiments in Sedgwick's front
line during the fifteen-minute ambush in the West Wood.
The
stragglers were at least coming back to the fold. General Meade, who was
temporarily in command of Hooker's corps, wrote to his wife that the corps'
"present for duty" total rose by five thousand in the three days
after the battle, explaining that the increase was made up of "the
cowards, skulkers, men who leave the ground with the wounded and do not return
for days, the stragglers on the march, and all such characters." He added
bitterly that this sort of thing was entirely due to the inefficiency of
regimental and company officers.
2
Like a good brigadier, Gibbon made
a careful check of his own returns and discovered that the Black Hat Brigade's
strength had increased by eighty in those three days; and he wrote proudly that
"everyone
of these were men who
had returned from detached service and hospitals so that I had
no
stragglers." To add to his pride, he was learning
that his brigade now had a new nickname, used by the whole army—the Iron
Brigade, a name it carried for the rest of the war. Nobody was quite sure where
it came from. The accepted story was that McClellan, watching its progress up
the gap at South Mountain, had exclaimed in admiration: "That brigade must
be made of iron!" Whatever its origin, the name stuck, and the brigade
lived up to it valiantly the next summer at Gettysburg.
3