It came in the form of a message from Jackson, to whom Lee had been sending couriers with information of the latest developments. “Through God’s blessing,” Stonewall had written at 8.15 p.m. from Bolivar Heights, “the advance, which commenced this evening, has been successful thus far, and I look to Him for complete success tomorrow.… Your dispatch respecting the movements of the enemy and the importance of concentration has been received.” To Lee this represented a chance to retrieve the situation. By the shortest route, Harpers Ferry was only a dozen miles from Sharpsburg. If the place fell tomorrow, that would mean that a part at least of the besieging force could join him north of the Potomac tomorrow night; for when Jackson said that instructions had been “received,” he meant that they would be obeyed. McLaws, too, might give the Federals the slip and march northwest without crossing the river. Accordingly, while Hill and Longstreet pushed on westward unpursued, Lee sent couriers galloping southward through the darkness. Unless the Army of the Potomac got into position for an all-out attack on Sharpsburg tomorrow—which seemed doubtful, despite McClellan’s recent transformation; for one thing, there would be no more lost orders—the Army of Northern Virginia would not return to native ground without the shedding of a good deal more blood, Union and Confederate, than had been shed on South Mountain.
McLaws was a methodical man, not given to indulging what little imagination he had, and in this case—his present dangers being what they were, with McClellan’s left wing coming down on his rear through Crampton’s Gap—that was preferable. A forty-one-year-old Georgian, rather burly, with a bushy head of hair and a beard to match, he had been four months a major general, yet except for commanding two brigades under Magruder during the Seven Days had seen no previous service with Lee’s army. Now he had ten brigades, his own four and Anderson’s six, and he had been given the most critical assignment in the convergence on Harpers Ferry. Maryland Heights was the dominant one of the three. If the place was to be made untenable, it would be his guns that would do most to make it so.
His march from Frederick had been deliberate: so much so that he was a day late in approaching his objective, after which he spent another day brushing Federal detachments off the hilltop and a night cutting a road in order to manhandle his guns up the side of the mountain. At last, two days late, he got them into position on the morning of September 14 and opened wigwag communications with Jackson and Walker, across the way. Northward, up the long ridge of South Mountain, D. H. Hill’s daylong battle rumbled and muttered; but McLaws, having posted three brigades in that direction to protect his rear, kept his mind on the business of getting his high-perched guns laid in time to open a plunging fire on the Ferry whenever Stonewall, who was a day late and still completing his dispositions, gave the signal. During the afternoon a much nearer racket broke out northward, but whatever qualms McLaws felt at the evidence that his rear guard was under attack were eased by Stuart, who had ridden down from Turner’s Gap. The bluecoats in front of Crampton’s Gap did not amount to more than a brigade, he said, and McLaws turned back to his guns. Presently, though, as the noise swelled louder, he rode in that direction to see for himself—and arrived to find that he had a first-class panic on his hands. Right, left, and center, his troops had given way and were fleeing in disorder. That was no blue brigade pouring through the abandoned gap, they told him. It was McClellan’s entire left wing, a reinforced corps.
Fortunately they had given a good account of themselves before they broke: good enough, at any rate, to instill a measure of caution in their pursuers. McLaws had time to rally the fugitives and bring three more brigades down off the heights, forming a line across the valley less than two miles south of the lost gap. The day was far gone by then, the valley filled with shadows, and Franklin did not press the issue. McClellan had told him to “cut off, destroy, or capture McLaws’ command,” and apparently he figured that the seizure of Cramp-ton’s Gap had fulfilled the first of these alternatives. Also, now that he was in McLaws’ rear, he had the worry of knowing that the Confederate main body was in his. Anyhow he decided not to be hasty; he had his men bed down for the night in line of battle.
Next morning, as he was about to proceed with his advance, the rebels just ahead began to cheer. One curious bluecoat sprang up on a stone wall and called across to them:
“What the hell are you fellows cheering for?”
“Because Harpers Ferry is gone up, God damn you!”
“I thought that was it,” the Federal said, and he jumped back down again.
McLaws had stood fast and Jackson had kept the promise sent by courier to Lee twelve hours before. One hour of plunging fire from the surrounding heights smothered the batteries below. Soon afterwards the white flag went up. Except for two regiments of cavalry that had escaped under cover of darkness—across the Potomac, then northward up the same road old John Brown had come south on, three years ago next month—the whole garrison surrendered, including the men who had marched in from Martinsburg. “Our Heavenly Father blesses us exceedingly,” Jackson wrote his wife, enumerating his gains: 12,520 prisoners, 13,000 small arms, 73 cannon, and a goodly haul of quartermaster stores.
According to a northern reporter’s O-my-God lay-me-down reaction to his first sight of Stonewall and his men, they had great need of the latter—especially the general himself. “He was dressed in the coarsest kind of homespun, seedy and dirty at that; wore an old hat which any northern beggar would consider an insult to have offered him, and in general appearance was in no respect to be distinguished from the mongrel, bare-footed crew who follow his fortunes. I had heard much of the decayed appearance of the rebel soldiers, but such a looking crowd! Ireland in her worst straits could present no parallel, and yet they glory in their shame.” The captive Federals (except perhaps the Irish among them) could scarcely argue with this, but they drew a different conclusion. “Boys, he isn’t much for looks,” one declared, inspecting Jackson, “but if we’d had him we wouldn’t have been caught in this trap.”
Pleased as he was, the Valley commander took little time for gloating. “Ah,” he said to a jubilant companion as they stood looking at the booty, “this is all very well, Major, but we have yet much hard work before us.” Though he was unaware of the lost order—“I thought I knew McClellan,” he remarked, “but this movement of his puzzles me”—he was aware that Lee was being pressed, and he was eager to move to his support. Five of the six divisions started for Sharpsburg that afternoon and night. The sixth was A. P. Hill’s. Like Hood, once combat was at hand, he had burned to pass from the rear to the front of his division on the march to Harpers Ferry, but like Hood he would not compromise his honor with an expression of regret. He simply requested, through a member of the staff, to be released from arrest for the duration of the fighting, after which he would report himself in arrest again. Jackson not only assented; he gave him a prominent part in the operation, and afterwards left him in charge of the place while he himself rode off in the wake of a message he had sent Lee that morning soon after he saw the white flag go up:
Through God’s blessing, Harpers Ferry and its garrison are to be surrendered. As Hill’s troops have borne the heaviest part of the engagement, he will be left in command until the prisoners and public property shall be disposed of, unless you direct otherwise. The other forces can move off this evening so soon as they get their rations.
“That is indeed good news,” Lee said when it reached him at Sharpsburg about noon. “Let it be announced to the troops.”
McClellan’s soldiers were feeling good, and so was their commander. For the first time since Williamsburg, back in early May, they were following up a battle with an advance, and as they went forward, past clumps of fallen rebels, they began to observe that their opponents were by no means the supermen they had seemed at times; were in fact, as one New York volunteer recorded, “undersized men mostly … with sallow, hatchet faces, and clad in ‘butternut,’ a color running all the way from a deep, coffee brown up to the
whitish brown of ordinary dust.” He even found himself feeling sorry for them. “As I looked down on the poor, pinched faces, worn with marching and scant fare, all enmity died out. There was no ‘secession’ in those rigid forms, nor in those fixed eyes staring blankly at the sky.”
They left them where they lay and pushed on down the western slope, following McClellan, whose enthusiasm not even the fall of Harpers Ferry could dampen. Though this deprived him of 12,000 reinforcements which he thought he needed badly, it also vindicated the judgment he had shown in vainly urging the general in chief to order the post evacuated before Jackson rimmed the heights with guns. Moreover, though Old Brains could take no credit for it, his blunder had resulted in the dispersion of Lee’s army, and this in turn had made possible yesterday’s victory at South Mountain, as well as the larger triumph which now seemed to be within McClellan’s grasp. Elated, he passed on this morning to Halleck “perfectly reliable [information] that the enemy is making for Shepherdstown in a perfect panic,” and that “Lee last night stated publicly that he must admit they had been shockingly whipped.” To old General Scott, in retirement at West Point, went a telegram announcing “a signal victory” and informing him that his fellow Virginian and former protégé had been soundly trounced: “R. E. Lee in command. The rebels routed, and retreating in disorder.” Both reactions were encouraging. “Bravo, my dear general! Twice more and it’s done,” Scott answered, while Lincoln himself replied to the earlier wire: “God bless you and all with you. Destroy the rebel army if possible.”
That was precisely what McClellan intended to do, if possible, and that afternoon, five miles southeast of Boonsboro—the scene of another triumphal entry and departure—he came upon a line of hills overlooking a shallow, mile-wide valley through which a rust-brown creek meandered south from its source in Pennsylvania; Antietam Creek, it was called. Beyond it, somewhat lower than the ridge on which he stood with his staff while his army filed in and spread out north and south along the line of hills outcropped with limestone, rose another ridge that masked the town of Sharpsburg, all but its spires and rooftops, and the Potomac, which followed a tortuous southward course, dividing Maryland and Virginia, another mile or so away. What interested him just now, though, was the ridge itself. There were Confederates on it, and Confederate guns, and one reason that they interested him was that they took him under fire. He sent his staff back out of range, dissolving the gaudy clot of horsemen who had drawn the fire in the first place, and went on with his study of the terrain.
A mile to the right of the point where the cluster of spires and gables showed above the ridge, and facing the road that led northward along it to Hagerstown, a squat, whitewashed building was set at the forward edge of a grove of trees wearing their full late-summer foliage; the autumnal equinox was still a week away. The sunlit brick structure, dazzling white against its leafy backdrop, was a church, but it was a Dunker church and therefore had no steeple; the Dunkers believed that steeples represented vanity, and they were as much opposed to vanity as they were to war, including the one that was about to move into their churchyard. On the near side of the road, somewhat farther to the right, was another grove of trees, parklike on the crown of the ridge, and between the two was a forty-acre field of dark green corn, man-tall and ripening for the harvest.
McClellan put his glasses back in their case and retired to do some thinking. Lee had chosen his army’s position with care, disposing it along the high ground overlooking the shallow valley so that its flanks were anchored at opposite ends of the four-mile bend of the Potomac. That was his strength; but McClellan thought it might also be his weakness. Once Lee was dislodged from that ridge, with only a single ford in his rear, he might be caught in the coils of the river and cut to pieces. The problem was how to dislodge him, strong as he was. McClellan estimated yesterday’s rebel casualties at 15,000 men, but that still left Lee with more than 100,000 according to McClellan, whose total strength—including Franklin, still hovering north of Harpers Ferry—was 87,164. Fortunately, however, there was no hurry; not just yet. The army was still filing in, hot and dusty from its march, and anyhow the day was already too far gone for an attack to succeed before darkness provided cover for a rebel getaway. He decided to work the thing out overnight. Meanwhile the troops could get a hot meal and a good night’s rest by way of preparation for whatever bloody work he designed for them to do tomorrow.
Tomorrow came, September 16, but such bloody work as it brought was done by long-range shells from batteries on those ridges east and west of the mile-wide valley with its lazy little copper-colored creek. Wanting another good look at the terrain before completing his attack plan, McClellan rose early and went to the observation post where his staff had set up headquarters. Off to the right of the Boonsboro road and half a mile north of the center of the position, it was an excellent location, just beyond reach of the rebel guns, and there was plenty of equipment there for studying the enemy dispositions, including high-power telescopes strapped to the heads of stakes driven solidly into the ground. Unfortunately, however, these could not penetrate the thick mist that overhung the field until midmorning. By then the sun had burned enough of it away for McClellan to see that the Confederates had made some changes, shifting guns at various points along their line. The time consumed in noting these was well spent, he felt, for he wanted to eliminate snags and thus leave as little to chance as he possibly could. When the blow fell he wanted it to be heavy. Noon came and went, and on both sides men lay drowsing under the press of heat while the cannoneers continued their intermittent argument, jarring the ground and disrupting an occasional card game. By 2 o’clock McClellan had his attack plan: not for today—today, like yesterday, was too far gone—but for tomorrow.
It was based essentially on the presence of three stone bridges that spanned the creek on the left, center, and right. The one on the left was closest to Sharpsburg and the enemy line; in fact it was barely more than its own length away from the latter, since the western ridge came down sharply here, overlooking the bridge and whoever tried to use it. The center bridge, crossed by the Boonsboro road a mile above the first, had some of the same drawbacks, being under observation from the ridge beyond, as well as some of its own growing out of the fact that it debouched onto an uphill plain that was swept by guns clustered thickly along the rebel center. The upper bridge, a mile and a half above the second, had none of these disadvantages, being well out of range of the batteries across the way. What was more, an upstream crossing would permit an unmolested march to a position astride the Hagerstown road, well north of Lee’s left flank, and a southward attack from that direction, if successful, would accomplish exactly what McClellan most desired. It would bowl the Confederates off their ridge and—in conjunction with attacks across the other two bridges, launched when the first was under way with all its attendant confusion—expose them to utter destruction.
In essence that was McClellan’s plan, the outgrowth of much poring over the landscape and the map, and now that it had been formulated, all that remained—short, that is, of the execution itself—was for him to assign the various corps their various tasks in the over-all scheme for accomplishing Lee’s downfall. Scrapping the previous organization into “wings,” he decided that Fighting Joe Hooker was the man to lead the attack down the Hagerstown road, supported by Brigadier General J. K. F. Mansfield, who had arrived from Washington the day before to take over Banks’ corps from Williams. Sumner, too, would come down from that direction, bringing a total of three corps, half of the whole army, to bear on Lee’s left flank. If that did not break him, Franklin too could be thrown in there—he had been summoned from Maryland Heights and was expected to arrive tomorrow morning—raising the preponderance to two thirds. Burnside, back in command of his own corps after the death of Reno, was given the job of forcing the lower bridge and launching the direct assault on Sharpsburg, after which he would seize the Shepherdstown ford and thus prevent the escape of even a remnant of the shat
tered rebel force. Porter, astride the Boonsboro road, in rear of the center bridge, would serve a double function. As the army reserve, his corps could be used to repulse any counterattack Lee might launch in desperation, or it could be committed to give added impetus at whatever point seemed most critical, once success was fully in sight. Or else he could force the middle bridge for an uphill charge that would pierce Lee’s center and chop him in two; whereupon Porter could wheel left or right to assist either Burnside or Hooker in wiping out whichever half of the rebel army survived the amputation.
The battle would open at daylight tomorrow, but McClellan—after taking his staff on a fast two-mile ride along his outpost line, drawing fire all the way from the guns across the creek, which permitted his own superior batteries, emplaced along the eastern ridge, to spot and pound them heavily—decided to use what was left of today in getting his men into position to launch the opening attack. Accordingly, about 4 o’clock that afternoon, Hooker’s corps began its upstream crossing, the general leading the way on a high-stepping big white charger. The crossing itself was well beyond range of the rebel guns, but the line of march led near the grove of trees northeast of the Dunker Church, with the result that as the flank of the column went past that point it struck sparks, like a file being raked across a grindstone. Hooker drew off; he wanted those woods, but not just yet; and made camp for the night in line of battle astride the Hagerstown road, less than a mile beyond the Confederate left-flank outposts. Poised to strike as soon as there was light enough for him to aim the blow, he was exactly where McClellan wanted him.