The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (136 page)

Best of all was Frederick, which they entered after the rebels had withdrawn beyond the Catoctins. “Hundreds of Union banners floated from the roofs and windows,” one bluecoat recalled, “and in many a threshold stood the ladies and children of the family, offering food and water to the passing troops, or with tiny flags waving a welcome to their deliverers.” Army rations went uneaten, “so sumptuous was the fare of cakes, pies, fruits, milk, dainty biscuit and loaves.” A Wisconsin diarist apparently spoke for the whole army in conferring the accolade: “Of all the memories of the war, none are more pleasant than those of our sojourn in the goodly city of Frederick.”

Presently it developed that there was more here for soldiers than an abundance of smiles and tasty food. For two of them, at any rate—three, in fact, if Private B. W. Mitchell and Sergeant J. M. Bloss, Company E, 27th Indiana, decided to share the third with a friend—there were cigars. Or so it seemed at the outset. Saturday morning, September 13, the Hoosier regiment was crossing an open field, a recent Confederate camp site near Frederick, when the men got orders to stack arms and take a break. Soon afterwards Mitchell and Bloss were lounging on the grass, taking it easy, when the former noticed a long thick envelope lying nearby. He picked it up and found the three cigars inside, wrapped in a sheet of official-looking paper. While Bloss was hunting for a match, Mitchell examined the document. “Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, Special Orders 191,” it was headed. At the bottom was written, “By command of General R. E. Lee: R. H. Chilton, Assistant Adjutant-General.” In between, eight paragraphs bristled with names and place-names: Jackson, Martinsburg, Harpers Ferry; Longstreet, Boonsboro; McLaws, Maryland Heights; Walker, Loudoun Heights. Mitchell showed it to Bloss, and together they took it to the company commander, who conducted them to regimental headquarters, where the colonel examined the handwritten sheet, along with the three cigars—as if they too might have some hidden significance—and left at once for division headquarters, taking all the evidence with him. Mitchell and Bloss returned to their company area and lay down again on the grass, perhaps by now regretting that they had not smoked the lost cigars before taking the rebel paper to the captain. As it turned out, they had sacrificed most of their rest-halt, too; for, according to Bloss, “In about three-quarters of an hour we noticed orderlies and staff officers flying in all directions.”

McClellan’s first considered reaction, after the leap his heart took at his first sight of the document which dispelled in a flash the fog of war and pinpointed the several components of Lee’s scattered army, was that it must be spurious, a rebel trick. It was just too good to be true. But a staff officer who had known Chilton before the war identified
the writing as unquestionably his. This meant that the order was valid beyond doubt: which in turn meant that McClellan’s army, once it crossed the unoccupied Catoctins just ahead, would be closer to the two halves of Lee’s army than those halves were to each other. What was more, one of those halves was itself divided into unequal thirds, the segments disposed on naked hilltops on the opposite banks of un-fordable rivers. The thing to do, quite obviously, was to descend at once on Boonsboro, where the nearest half was concentrated, overwhelm it, and then turn on the other, destroying it segment by segment. The war would be over—won. At any rate that was how McClellan saw it. Standing there with the documentary thunderbolt in his hand, he said to one of his brigadiers: “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobby Lee I will be willing to go home.”

Partly his elation was a manic reaction to the depression he had been feeling throughout most of the eleven days since Halleck’s order, issued in confirmation of Lincoln’s verbal instructions, gave him “command of the fortifications of Washington and of all the troops for [its] defense.” This had not been supplemented or broadened since. What he did beyond its limitations he did on his own—including the march into Maryland to interpose his army between Lee’s and the capital whose defense was his responsibility. Consequently, as he said later, he felt that he was functioning “with a halter around my neck.… If the Army of the Potomac had been defeated and I had survived I would, no doubt, have been tried for assuming authority without orders.” What the Jacobins wanted, he knew, was his dismissal in disgrace, and he had long since given up the notion that the President would support him in every eventuality. In fact, knowing nothing of Lincoln’s defiance of a majority of the cabinet for his sake, he no longer trusted the President to stand for long between him and the political clamor for his removal; and he was right. Back at the White House, after telling Hay, “McClellan is working like a beaver. He seems to be aroused to doing something after the snubbing he got last week,” Lincoln added thoughtfully: “I am of the opinion that this public feeling against him will make it expedient to take important command from him … but he is too useful just now to sacrifice.”

All this while, moreover, Halleck had been giving distractive twitches to the telegraphic lines attached to the halter. Though Banks had three whole corps with which to man the capital fortifications—Heintzelman’s, Sigel’s, and Porter’s, which, together with the regular garrison, gave him a total defensive force of 72,500 men—the general in chief swung first one way, then another, alternately tugging or nudging, urging caution or headlong haste. Four days ago he had wired: “It may be the enemy’s object to draw off the mass of our forces, and then attempt to attack us from the Virginia side of the Potomac. Think of this.” Two days later he was calmer: “I think the main force
of the enemy is in your front. More troops can be spared from here.” Today, however, his fears were back, full strength: “Until you know more certainly the enemy forces south of the Potomac you are wrong in thus uncovering the capital.” McClellan, his natural caution thus enlarged and played on—he estimated Lee’s army at 120,000 men, half again larger than his own—pushed gingerly northwestward up the National Road, which led from Washington to Frederick, forty miles, then on through Hagerstown and Wheeling, out to Ohio.

He averaged about six miles a day, despite the fact that he had reorganized his army into two-corps “wings” in order to march by parallel roads rather than in a single column, which would have left the tail near Washington while the head was approaching Frederick. The right wing, assigned to Burnside, included his own corps, still under Reno, and McDowell’s, now under Hooker, who had already won the nickname “Fighting Joe.” The center wing was Sumner’s and included his own and Banks’ old corps, now under the senior division commander, Brigadier General Alpheus Williams. The left wing, Franklin’s, included his own corps and the one division so far arrived from Keyes’, still down at Yorktown. Porter’s corps, which was released to McClellan on the 12th, the day his advance units reached Frederick, was the reserve. Including the troops arrived from West Virginia and thirty-five new regiments distributed throughout the army since its retreat from Manassas, McClellan had seventeen veteran divisions, with an average of eight brigades in each of his seven corps; or 88,000 men in all. Yet he believed himself outnumbered, and he could not forget that the army he faced—that scarecrow multitude of lean, vociferous, hairy men who reminded even noncombatants of wolves—had two great recent victories to its credit, while his own had just emerged from the confusion and shame of one of the worst drubbings any American army had ever suffered. Nor could he dismiss from his mind the thought of what another defeat would mean, both to himself and to his country. Despised by the leaders of the party in power, mistrusted by Lincoln, badgered by Halleck, he advanced with something of the manner of a man walking on slippery ice through a darkness filled with wolves.

It was at Frederick, that “goodly city,” that the gloom began to lift. “I can’t describe to you for want of time the enthusiastic reception we met with yesterday in Frederick,” he wrote his wife next morning. “I was nearly overwhelmed and pulled to pieces. I enclose with this a little flag that some enthusiastic lady thrust into or upon Dan’s bridle. As to flowers—they came in crowds! In truth, I was seldom more affected.… Men, women, and children crowded around us, weeping, shouting, and praying.” Then, near midday, his fears were abolished and his hopes were crowned. “Now I know what to do,” he exclaimed when he read Special Orders 191, and one of the first things he did
was share his joy with Lincoln in a wire sent at noon. In his elation he had the sound of a man who could not stop talking:

“I have the whole rebel force in front of me, but am confident, and no time shall be lost. I have a difficult task to perform, but with God’s blessing will accomplish it. I think Lee has made a gross mistake, and that he will be severely punished for it. The army is in motion as rapidly as possible. I hope for a great success if the plans of the rebels remain unchanged. We have possession of Catoctin. I have all the plans of the rebels, and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency. I now feel that I can count on them as of old.… My respects to Mrs. Lincoln. Received most enthusiastically by the ladies. Will send you trophies.”

He said he would lose no time, and five days ago he had told Halleck, “As soon as I find out where to strike, I will be after them without an hour’s delay.” But that did not mean he would be precipitate. In fact, now that the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was at hand, its very magnitude made him determined not to muff it as a result of careless haste. Besides, despite its fullness in regard to the location of the Confederate detachments, the order gave him no information as to their various strengths. For all he knew, Longstreet and Hill had almost any conceivable number of men at Boonsboro, and the nature of the terrain between there and Frederick afforded them excellent positions from which to fight a delaying action while the other half of their army shook itself together and rejoined them—or, worse still, moved northward against his flank. He already had the Catoctins, as he said, but beyond them reared South Mountain, the lofty extension of the Blue Ridge. The National Road crossed this range at Turner’s Gap, with Boonsboro just beyond, while six miles south lay Crampton’s Gap, pierced by a road leading down to Harpers Ferry from Buckeystown, where Franklin’s left wing was posted, six miles south of Frederick. These roads and gaps gave McClellan the answer to his problem. He would force Turner’s Gap and descend on Boonsboro with his right and center wings, smashing Longstreet and Hill, while Franklin marched through Crampton’s Gap and down to Maryland Heights, where he would strike the rear of Anderson and McLaws, capturing or brushing their men off the mountaintop and thereby opening the back door for the escape of the 12,000 Federals cooped up in Harpers Ferry. That way, too, the flank of the main body would be protected against an attack from the south, in case resistance delayed the forcing of the upper gap.

By late afternoon his plans were complete, and at 6.20 he sent Franklin his instructions. After explaining the situation at some length, he told him: “You will move at daybreak in the morning.… Having gained the pass”—Crampton’s Gap—“your duty will be first to cut off, destroy, or capture McLaws’ command and relieve [Harpers
Ferry].” After saying, “My general idea is to cut the enemy in two and beat him in detail,” he concluded: “I ask of you, at this important moment, all your intellect and the utmost activity that a general can exercise.” Intellect and activity were desirable; haste, apparently, was not. Just as he did not ask it of himself, so he did not ask it of Franklin. Lee’s disjointed army lay before him, and the best way to pick up the pieces—as he saw it—was deliberately, without fumbling. The army would get a good night’s sleep, then start out fresh and rested “at daybreak in the morning.”

And so it was. At sunrise, Franklin’s 18,000—who should indeed have been rested; they had seen no combat since the Seven Days, and not a great deal of it then except for the division that reinforced Porter at Gaines Mill—pushed westward out of Buckeystown, heading for the lower gap, a dozen miles away. The other two wings, 70,000 men under Sumner and Burnside, with Porter bringing up the rear, moved down the western slope of the Catoctins, then across the seven-mile-wide valley toward Turner’s Gap, a 400-foot notch in the 1300-foot wall of the mountain, where a fire fight was in progress. They moved in three heavy columns, along and on both sides of the National Road, and to one of the marchers, down in the valley, each of these columns resembled “a monstrous, crawling, blue-black snake, miles long, quilled with the silver slant of muskets at a ‘shoulder,’ its sluggish tail writhing slowly up over the distant eastern ridge, its bruised head weltering in the roar and smoke upon the crest above, where was being fought the battle of South Mountain.”

McClellan was there beside the pike, astride Dan Webster, the central figure in the vast tableau being staged in this natural amphitheater, and the men cheered themselves hoarse at the sight of him. It seemed to one Massachusetts veteran that “an intermission had been declared in order that a reception might be tendered to the general in chief. A great crowd continually surrounded him, and the most extravagant demonstrations were indulged in. Hundreds even hugged the horse’s legs and caressed his head and mane.” This was perhaps the Young Napoleon’s finest hour, aware as he was of all those thousands of pairs of worshipful eyes looking at him, watching for a gesture, and the New England soldier was pleased to note that McClellan did not fail to supply it: “While the troops were thus surging by, the general continually pointed with his finger to the gap in the mountain through which our path lay.”