243042.jpg

CHAPTER 12

THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM: HOOKER’S FIGHT

6:00–9:00 am

245734.jpg

IT RAINED HARD DURING THE NIGHT, THEN CLEARED OFF AT SUNrise, a little after 6:00 AM. A spatter of skirmisher fire could be heard along Hooker’s front, especially under the dripping leaves in the East Woods where infantry from Meade’s division had been tangling all night with Confederates from Trimble’s Brigade. Then the long-range guns east of the Antietam tuned up, dropping 20-pound shells into the trees—­scaring the infantry but doing little real harm. The sun at low angle threw the shadow of the East Woods across the open ground between the woods. The infantry in Jackson’s front line—J. R. Jones’s men in the West Woods and Lawton’s skirmishers drawn up in Miller’s cornfield—saw the dark mass of blue-coated infantry tramping forward into the shadow, steel sparking across the front where their bayonets caught the light. Fighting Joe Hooker had told McClellan he would attack at first light, and he kept his word.

As a division commander on the Peninsula and at Second Bull Run, Hooker had maneuvered three brigades of infantry with energy and skill, leading from the firing line to encourage his men by heroic example and to maintain control of his units amid the stress and confusion of battle. A good corps commander needed those skills, and others besides. Instead of the division commander’s three brigades, he had to maneuver three divisions, eleven or twelve infantry brigades, and an artillery reserve. He had to envision and control the action of troops beyond his line of sight, manage the distribution and concentration of far more firepower, and intelligently relate his own actions to the overall plan of action laid down by army headquarters. It was difficult enough for a general experienced in divisional command to quickly grasp and master the technique of corps command. Hooker had led I Corps for less than two weeks, and in its only major combat had been subordinate to Burnside. Now McClellan had assigned him the semi-independent command of a two-corps wing, which made him responsible for coordinating the action of five divisions across a mile-wide battlefront.1

Hooker handled the assignment like a corps commander, not a wing commander. He reconnoitered I Corps’ front, chose his objective, and half an hour before sunrise his aides delivered the orders that would organize his own three divisions for an assault. Not until all that was done did an aide carry to General Mansfield the order to bring XII Corps forward to “support” I Corps’ attack. By the time the order was delivered, however, I Corps was already heavily engaged. Mansfield needed more guidance than that. He was nearly sixty years old, had only commanded his corps for forty-eight hours, and had not exercised field command for fifteen years. Hooker should have conferred with him well before dawn, to make certain Mansfield understood the lay of the land, the planned course of the operation, and XII Corps’ role in it. Lacking such preparation, Mansfield understood the order to support Hooker’s attack only in the most general terms. He was also unsure about how, where, and when Hooker wanted his support. XII Corps was therefore slow to assemble and hesitant coming forward. It would take an hour or more to bring Mansfield’s ten thousand troops into action. Until then, Hooker’s three divisions—fourteen thousand men (including artillery) but only nine thousand infantry—would have to fight a Confederate force of comparable strength.2

NORTHERN FRONT, 5:30–7:30 AM

Hooker had chosen the proper objective for I Corps’ attack, the patch of high ground marked by the little weatherbeaten Dunker Church. The open ground between the two woods and the line of the Hagerstown Pike pointed the obvious path to the target, and Hooker organized his divisions for a frontal assault right down that alley, two in front and one as backup. The brigade commanded by Brigadier General James Ricketts would lead. Ricketts had commanded artillery in the Regular Army since 1839, but when the war broke out the shortage of trained professionals led to his transfer to the infantry and promotion to brigadier general. He formed his three brigades in line of battle behind the East Woods, then advanced—Duryee’s Brigade on the right of the line swinging around the end of the woods and striking straight for Miller’s cornfield, while the other two brigades were slowed by having to pass through the East Woods.

Hooker’s other lead brigade was commanded by Brigadier General Abner Doubleday, a plodding old Regular who did not invent baseball, whatever the legends may say. His division was camped astride the Hagers­town Pike. Hooker formed its brigades in columns and ordered it to advance up the pike behind and to the right or west of Ricketts’s lead brigade, supporting the attack through the cornfield and defending Ricketts’s flank against Rebel infantry in the West Woods.

Behind Doubleday and Ricketts the brigade led by Brigadier General George Meade would advance as the corps reserve. Grizzled, crusty, and goggle-eyed, Meade was a rising star in the army, an 1835 graduate of West Point who had made an excellent record as an engineer and as a combat officer in Mexico and the Seminole War. Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania made Meade a protégé and got him a brigade command early in the war. Meade earned the place in combat on the Peninsula, where his brigade belonged to Porter’s V Corps. He had been transferred to I Corps to improve its quality, and he was doing that. Within a few months he would rise to command an army corps, and in less than a year he would lead the Army of the Potomac against Lee at Gettysburg.

Intently focused on his line of attack, Hooker failed to take account of the threat from beyond the corridor. As his infantry pressed forward it was hit from the right flank by Jeb Stuart’s cannons on Nicodemus Hill, more than half a mile to the west. At that distance solid roundshot and explosive shells ripped gaps in the marching columns, destroyed artillery pieces or the limber chests of ammunition, killed horses and men. Hooker was not prepared to deal with a threat from that direction. Until he could bring up guns from his corps reserve and align them to fire against Stuart’s batteries, his men had no defense against the Confederate shell fire. As the Union troops approached the northern edge of the Miller cornfield, they were also hit by fire from the batteries posted around the Dunker Church, which included the artillery of Lawton’s Division and Colonel S. D. Lee’s detachment from the army reserve.

Duryee’s brigade were the first Union troops into the corridor, 1,100 infantry wheeling to their left around the northwest corner of the East Woods and tramping forward in double line of battle toward the cornfield. The steady walking pace of their advance was set by the regimental drummers, a steady repetitive ratta-pan pan. When the drum-rattle quickens the step picks up, but following the cadence keeps the fighting line intact even when bullets and shells begin to whirr past.

The other brigades of their division were lagging, pushing through the woods on their left. Well behind and to the west of Duryee, the lead unit of Doubleday’s division, the “Iron Brigade,” commanded by Brigadier General John Gibbon, was marching down the Hagerstown Pike in a double column. Union officers on horseback could see amid the tall stalks of standing corn the dull gleam of morning sun reflected on the rifle barrels of Rebel infantry.

At the northern edge of the cornfield Duryee’s Federals halted, two lines of riflemen one behind the other. The rattabang and smoke blast of their volley were instantly answered from the southern side of the cornfield, and the noise and smoke solidified as both sides blazed away, the piercing tenor of musketry punctuated by blasts from S. D. Lee’s artillery alongside the Dunker Church.

The basis of battlefield tactics in the Civil War is the clash of troops formed in opposing lines of battle, the infantry in each regiment massed shoulder to shoulder in two lines. For soldiers armed with single-shot rifle muskets, this was the only way to concentrate infantry firepower. Once within rifle range of the enemy—say one hundred yards—­infantry on both sides would begin firing, the attackers loading and firing as they advanced across the open ground, their pace slowed by the need to prime, load, ram, and fire the muzzle-loaded rifle musket.

In theory, once the attacking force has damaged or shaken the defense by fire, it has to charge with the bayonet and break the opposing line by physical force. In practice, however, bayonet charges on Civil War battlefields were rarely carried to completion. The only way to get volunteer troops to commit themselves to a bayonet charge was to forbid them to load or to cap their weapons. If attacking troops were allowed to return fire, that is generally what they would do. Civil War engagements tended to bog down in inconclusive firefights, fading out as ammunition was exhausted. It required dynamic and intelligent leadership at the regimental level, and high morale in the troops, to break such a standoff and get the attack moving forward again. Then the defenders, seeing the mass that rises against them and sensing the thinness of their own line, hearing the weakness of their own defensive fire, may break to the rear. But in this war the advantage was usually with the defense. Because the attackers advance shoulder to shoulder, the individuals in the mass feel the volume and accuracy of defensive fire, registered as noise and fury but also by the sound of bullet impacts on their neighbors in the line, the dull thud of a body blow or the sharp crack of bone-break, and they sense the weakening of their line as comrades fall right and left. At some point they may reach a kind of dead-line, beyond which it is impossible for them to move. Then, depending on circumstances, they may back away, or break and run to the rear—or come to a stand and begin firing again at much closer range.

There again the attackers would be at a disadvantage. The firepower of a Civil War brigade is not just its rifle strength but the power of its associated battery, the little four- and six-pounder Napoleons. The weakness of the offense is that as you close with the enemy you leave your own guns behind, and your ranks actually mask or block the fire of your artillery support, while the enemy’s cannons are firing point-blank. Against infantry more than five or six hundred yards away the gunners use solid shot and explosive shells. As the distance narrows they switch to case shot, each case a hollow iron ball filled with an explosive charge and more than a hundred bullets, that fire in a forward spread when the shell explodes. At four hundred yards the gunners switch to canister, the deadliest weapon against infantry—a thin-walled can packed with up to 120 bullets, sometimes more than one can to a charge, equivalent to the fire of a battalion in line but far more concentrated, like the blast of a monstrous shotgun into the ranks.3

The Army of the Potomac was superior in number of artillery pieces, and the Army of Northern Virginia had no match for the long-range batteries ranked on the hills east of the creek. However, at the point of contact, where Hooker’s wing clashed with Jackson’s, the Confederates had the advantage. Hooker had to shift four of his nine reserve batteries to counter the shelling from Stuart’s guns on Nicodemus Hill, instead of using them to support his infantry attack. The long-range fire from east of the Antietam could not entirely compensate for the lack of pieces closer to the battle line. Big shells from the twenty-pounder Parrott guns exploded in the West Woods, smashing tree limbs down on the Rebel infantry. Division commander J. R. Jones was knocked out by concussion from an exploding shell and carried to the rear, command passing to Brigadier General William Starke. Shell fire also damaged and discomfited S. D. Lee’s Confederate batteries sited in the open around the church, blowing up ammunition-filled limber chests, killing horses and men. But the bombardment lacked the accuracy and destructive power to knock out Lee’s batteries, and the guns of J. R. Jones’s and Hood’s Divisions were sheltered by the West Woods.4

Direct artillery support for Duryee’s attack was limited to two four-gun batteries from the divisional reserve, which trotted into position and unlimbered in a field by an orchard a hundred yards behind the infantry. S. D. Lee’s guns shifted from antipersonnel to counterbattery fire, in an attempt to knock out the Federal guns with explosive shell. The Union guns responded in kind. Then, on order, they changed from shell to canister, firing musket-ball blasts that scythed the corn in swathes and exposed the Rebels’ fence-rail breastwork at the southern edge of the field, where a brigade of Confederate infantry commanded by a Colonel Douglass was waiting. Duryee’s order, echoed by his regimental commanders, sent the double line tramping through the cornstalk wreckage with lowered bayonets. In front of them Douglass’s Confederates rose up and began firing right in their faces, and bullets also began striking them from the left flank, fired by units of Trimble’s Brigade that had been skirmishing with Union troops in the East Woods. These troops were just beginning to be pressured by the Federal brigades of Hartsuff and Christian, which were still working their way south through the East Woods.

Duryee’s lines came to a stand some 250 yards from the Rebel breastwork and instead of breaking stood there firing as fast as rifle-muskets could be loaded for some uncalculated but astonishing length of time. Finally, with a third of his men down and Confederate troops edging up through the woods to fire into his flank, Duryee ordered a retreat. His brigade backed off in good order, returning fire as it went.

As Duryee’s brigade came back out of the cornfield the Iron Brigade, in their distinctive black hats with the black cockade, leading Doubleday’s Division, came trotting down the Hagerstown Pike. Right behind Gibbon’s men were the four New York Regiments and Second U.S. Sharpshooters of Colonel Walter Phelps’s New York brigade. These two brigades were headed straight down the corridor between the two Woods, toward the cornfield and the Dunker Church. Doubleday’s third brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Marsena Patrick, was to protect the right flank of the assault brigades by attacking southward into the West Woods and clearing it of Confederates.

Doubleday was fortunate to have three highly competent brigadiers, because the fighting on his front would be at close quarters and subject to changes so rapid that only skilled officers operating close to the action could respond effectively. General Patrick was fifty-one, with a bald head and a grizzled full beard that flared outward. He had graduated from West Point in 1835, and served in the Seminole and Mexican wars, but was one of those ambitious and intelligent Regulars who had left the army in the 1850s to prosper in the railroad business. Colonel Phelps was a thirty-year-old citizen-soldier about whom little is known. Politics was probably responsible for his original appointment as colonel of the Twenty-second New York, but he learned quickly on the job and would be maintained in brigade command throughout the war. The most able of the three was John Gibbon, and in the coming fight he would display the skill and courage that would lead him to higher rank, as a division and later a corps commander.

Gibbon’s Iron Brigade had quick-marched down the pike for over a mile under punishing artillery fire from Stuart’s guns on Nicodemus Heights. They were angry rather than demoralized, and eager to pay the enemy back.

The Iron Brigade fronted the cornfield, with Phelps’s Brigade hastening up to form a line on its left. Gibbon started forward into the cornfield, the Second and Sixth Wisconsin forming his first line, followed by one section of guns from the brigade artillery, behind them the Seventh Wisconsin and Nineteenth Indiana and the second section of guns. As the Black Hats pressed forward they were hit from the flank by volleys of rifle fire from Rebel troops in the West Woods. To meet that threat Gibbon ordered his second-line regiments and gun section to wheel right and protect the brigade’s advance by attacking the Confederates in the woods.5

The flanking fire came from the Confederacy’s legendary “Stonewall Brigade,” the Fourth, Fifth, Twenty-seventh, and Thirty-third Virginia.6 This was the brigade whose determined stand at First Bull Run earned General Jackson his nickname. Since then it had endured the ferocious forced marches and hard battles of Jackson’s Valley campaign, the Seven Days, Cedar Mountain, and Second Bull Run. Its numbers were depleted to less than half its normal strength, but it was still a formidable force. Its commander, Colonel Andrew Jackson Grigsby, was a veteran and a hard fighter. But as Gibbon’s regiments advanced against them from the eastern face of the woods, the lead elements of Patrick’s Federal brigade came in from the northern end to threaten their flank. Patrick also had to divide his own force to deal with Rebels deeper in the woods who were threatening his right flank, but two of his regiments joined with Gibbon’s Seventh Wisconsin and Nineteenth Indiana to push the Rebels back toward the southern end of the woods.

Meanwhile, in the cornfield, Phelps had pushed his brigade forward to support Gibbon’s advance. The Eighty-fourth New York came up to extend the left, or eastward, end of Gibbon’s line, with the rest of the New Yorkers just behind in reserve. As Phelps’s reserve line marched south along the edge of the West Woods, they also took fire from that flank. Phelps sent the Second U.S. Sharpshooters toward the wood to counter. As the Union troops came out of the cornfield they were also hit with heavy rifle and artillery fire from the Confederate infantry and artillery defending the high ground around the Dunker Church. There the battle line halted and, as before, Union and Confederate units stood and faced each other across the open ground below the church. Double lines of riflemen loaded, rammed, aimed, and fired, deafened by long ripping bangs of rifle fire, blinded by the gray clouds of gunsmoke that accumulated and settled over the front, blotting out the lines so that the commanders had to fight their units more by ear than by sight. The hunters, farmers, and backwoodsmen of the Sixth Wisconsin with their black hats were steady under that fire. Alongside them stood the Eighty-fourth New York—originally a militia regiment, the Fourteenth Brooklyn, a k a the Brooklyn Chasseurs. They had been outfitted as zouaves, in the uniform worn by the French army’s tough Arab auxiliaries, short blue jackets and red pants that ballooned over white puttees. But they had earned their laurels at Bull Run, where they had repeatedly charged the hill held by the Stonewall Brigade—charged so hard that the Stonewalls dubbed them “those red-legged devils.”7

Confederate gunners blasted canister into the cloud, and it was answered by the battery that Gibbon ran up onto a small rise behind his firing line. Gibbon’s line was being raked by oblique fire from Starke’s Brigade in the West Woods, despite the efforts of Phelps’s sharpshooters to suppress them. To deal with it he would have to wheel his two front-line regiments forty-five degrees to their right—which would expose their flank to Confederate General Lawton’s Georgia Brigade in front of the church. Gibbon and Phelps organized a nearly seamless maneuver. As Gibbon’s two Wisconsin regiments swung west, the reserve line of Phelps’s New Yorkers stepped forward to bear the brunt of fire from the Dunker Church. The firefight here rose to a pitch of frenzy, the firing constant as rear ranks passed loaded rifles forward. “Men and officers of New York and Wisconsin are fused into a common mass, in the frantic struggle to shoot fast. . . . Every body tears cartridges, loads, passes guns, or shoots. Men are falling in their places or running back into the corn.” To a Southern war correspondent at Lee’s headquarters, it sounded “like the rolling of a thousand distant drums.”8

Directly to the east of them, the five regiments of Hartsuff’s Brigade finally came out of the East Woods into the cornfield and joined the firing line—without Hartsuff, who had been seriously wounded and replaced by one of his regimental commanders. This was a mixed brigade of New York, Maine, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts regiments. Among the latter was the Twelfth, the Webster Regiment, so-called because its first commander was the son of Daniel Webster, the legendary Bay State senator and statesman. There were many upper-class Bostonians in the Twelfth, which gave the regiment a kid-glove aura. They were also deeply imbued with abolitionist sentiments—disliked McClellan’s politics and liked to get his goat by singing “John Brown’s Body” whenever he reviewed them. A regiment had to be good at soldiering to sustain that kind of attitude.

They were in a very bad spot, exposed to direct fire from Colonel Lee’s guns in front of the Dunker Church. Blasts of canister ripped into the turf with a sound like a knife through a melon rind. “Just in front of us a house was burning, and the fire and smoke, flashing of muskets and whizzing of bullets, yells of men, etc., were perfectly horrible.” But their fire kept the Confederate gunners from raking the Iron Brigade as it wheeled to its right to attack the Rebel line in the West Woods.9

Gibbon sent his two Wisconsin regiments forward against Starke’s Louisianans, and with Phelps’s Second Sharpshooters they assailed the West Woods position from the east. As they did, Patrick’s Federal troops and Gibbon’s other two regiments pressed down through the trees from the north, catching Starke’s men in a crossfire. With bullets hitting them from two sides they broke ranks and went to the rear. General Starke was shot three times and died before he could reach an aid station. Command of Major General J. R. Jones’s Division passed down to the senior colonel, Grigsby of the Stonewall Brigade—but by now the division was probably no larger than an understrength brigade.

To Confederate General Lawton, commanding at the Dunker Church, it seemed that Federal pressure on his line was mounting to the crisis point. The artillery batteries posted around the church were being blasted by McClellan’s long-range guns, firing from beyond the Antietam. The troops holding his left in the West Woods were pulling back, and beyond the East Woods to his right Federal troops seemed to be massing against Ripley’s Brigade. The firing in his front was terrific, a deafening continuous roar of rifle and cannon fire. It appeared that the Federals in front of the East Woods were edging forward, perhaps preparing to storm the Dunker Church position.

Lawton had only one brigade still unengaged, the notorious Louisiana Tigers. The Tigers were raised in New Orleans, where the color line dissolved into a spectrum of tones and class lines were drawn in language and lineage. They were a mixed crew of Creoles and Cajuns, Anglos and waterfront Irish, with a reputation for bad discipline, looting, and wild fighting. They were rated a brigade, but their total strength on this day amounted to little more than that of a regiment. Their commander was forty-two-year-old General Harry Hays, a Tennessee-born Louisiana lawyer who had been a volunteer officer in the Mexican War, a “political general” who proved an able battlefield commander. Lawton ordered Hays to counterattack the Yankees who seemed to be advancing out of the East Woods, then sent riders to ask help from General Hood, whose division was in reserve at the southern end of the West Woods.

The target of Hays’s attack was Hartsuff’s brigade, on the east end of the Union battle line. If they were menacing the Dunker Church it was not because anyone had ordered it. Hartsuff himself had been shot and carried from the field, and his successor Colonel Coulter thought his men were just holding the line in front of the East Woods. The infantry may have been moving up on instinct, blinded by the smoke of their firing, edging forward step-by-step each time they loaded and aimed, trying to get out of the smoke so they could see better how to shoot. Into this steady but indeterminate advance the Louisiana Tigers charged with a yell. For a brief moment there was close-range firing, Algiers and the French Quarter against Boston and Cambridge—then the Federals backed away, still fighting, till they got the woods around them, where they again stood firm. At that point, Christian’s Brigade, which had gone astray in its march through the East Woods, joined the firing line—albeit without Colonel Christian, who had taken to his heels. The Federals were in an ideal position, protected by woods, while the Tigers and the other Confederate units that had tailed onto their charge were out in the open. One Union soldier thought, “Never did I see more rebs to fire at than at that moment presented themselves.”

The Federals cut loose, the Tigers’ charge stumbled against their fire and broke, and Hays’s men scurried back across the field to Lawton’s line. The Webster Regiment had lost two-thirds of its men, Hays lost 61 percent, and the lines stayed where they were. A corporal in the Twelfth Massachusetts stated the case for both when he wrote, “It was a hot time for us, and most all of our Regt. were used up in a very short time.”10

On the western side of the cornfield the same pattern held. Gibbon’s Iron Brigade, aided by two of Patrick’s Regiments, made their push against the West Woods and drove back the brigades of Grigsby and Starke. But the losses they took doing it brought them to a stand, while the Confederates rallied and held.

It was 7:00 AM, and the fighting had been going on for a little more than an hour. Hooker’s two lead divisions, under Ricketts and Doubleday, and the two divisions that formed Jackson’s front-line defense, had each fought the other to a standstill at horrendous cost. Now Meade’s Union division was coming up to throw more weight into the drive against the Dunker Church. On the Confederate side Hood’s Division, summoned by Lawton, came rushing up the Hagerstown Pike and formed its battle lines behind Lawton’s front.11

HOOD’S COUNTERATTACK, 7:30–8:00 AM

Hood was known as a heads-down fighter, but his assessment of the situation in front of him, as given to an aide sent by General Jackson, was clearheaded. His division would have to make a spoiling attack to disrupt the Federal offensive against the Dunker Church, but unless reinforcements could be brought forward the position was likely to fall. Hood sent that appeal to Jackson, who reached out to D. H. Hill, whose division held the next section of the line to the right of the Dunker Church.

Meanwhile Hood brought his men into line, facing northward against the Federals, who were in line across the cornfield, from the West Woods to the East. The Texas Brigade, with which Hood had earned his reputation as a fighting general, would lead the attack, with Evander Law’s Brigade in support. The Iron Brigade, on the western end of the Federal line, was facing west against the Rebels in the West Woods, exposing their flank to Hood. The Texas Brigade opened the attack by firing a massed volley that hit the Sixth Wisconsin “like a scythe running through our line.” Hood then ordered the division forward. The Texans led the charge, their battle cry the long-drawn keen of the “Rebel Yell,” with Law’s men and some from other brigades following. Momentum had turned against the Federals. However, rather than retreat back across the cornfield, parts of the Federal line broke to left and right, toward the sheltering woods. The survivors from Ricketts’s division, Hartsuff’s and Christian’s brigades, faded back into the East Woods. Gibbon’s Iron Brigade backed off fighting into the West Woods.

Hood’s assault force split in pursuit, most of the Texans and some of Law’s men swinging toward the West Woods, while the rest slanted off to the right, firing into Ricketts’s troops as they left the field. Inflamed by the excitement of the charge and the sight of Federal troops breaking in front of them, Law’s regiments rushed through a corner of the East Woods, and in the open fields beyond saw Meade’s division advancing to take Ricketts’s place in the line. Law’s troops kept firing and advancing. The Second and Eleventh Mississippi Regiments led the charge against the Pennsylvania Reserve Division, and when the Federal retreat left a battery without infantry support they charged it, despite double-shotted canister blasts. They took some of the guns, but left their dead lying in long ranks. There were too few left to hold the position.

On the left of the Mississippians, the wild men of the First Texas dashed off at an eccentric angle, beyond the control of the brigade commander. In the northwest corner of the cornfield, they ran up against a solid line of Pennsylvania Reserves, which outnumbered and outflanked them. The Texans’ upper bodies were hidden by a bank of gunsmoke, but the Pennsylvanians aimed for their legs, then cut loose with converging fire from their extended line, heavy volleys of musketry supplemented by canister from guns run right up to the edge of the cornfield. The Texans broke and those who could went back the way they had come—80 percent of the regiment were left as casualties on the field. But Law’s attack had hit Meade’s division hard enough to stop it at the northern boundary of the cornfield.

The fight in front of the West Woods was fiercer still, where the Iron Brigade was trading volleys with three of Hood’s Texas regiments, the Eighteenth Georgia and the Hampton Legion—a high-toned South Carolina outfit recruited and equipped by General Wade Hampton, a wealthy planter and political leader, who was fighting elsewhere on the field at the head of one of Stuart’s cavalry brigades. Rallied elements from Starke’s Louisiana Brigade were also returning to the fight in the West Woods itself, threatening the Iron Brigade’s flank from the south. The Confederate firing line was protected by the fence that lined the Hagers­town Pike, and the Iron Brigade was hit hard—Bloomington and Vincennes, Portage and Fond du Lac on one side, San Antonio and Nacogdoches, Charleston and Columbia on the other. “The musketry became incessant,” one Texan wrote, “and rolled out in tremendous volleys, the artillery thundered, shells exploding men yelling and hurrahing.”12 But the Iron Brigade’s own battery was up by the Miller Farm, northward up the pike, where it had a clear angle of fire into Hood’s flank. Seeing that the guns were off target, Gibbon himself rode to the battery and sighted its pieces. First single, then double, charges of canister ripped the Confederate firing line from end to end, literally tearing men apart, leaving the dead in rows along the fence.

THE TACTICAL PATTERN of this initial engagement would hold for most of the battle. An infantry attack begins, supported at the start by its own artillery, and with the energy of its initial impetus confronts the enemy line and drives it back. But as the attack goes forward it is attenuated by the friction of the battlefield, the derangement of troop organization by loss of commanders and passage over difficult terrain, and the steady drain of rifle strength to fatigue and enemy fire. Every step takes the attackers farther from their own artillery and closer to the enemy’s guns, firing charges of canister. In the end they run up against a strong and steady defensive line, or fresh reserves advancing to the fight. They come to a stand, waver, and then pull back, either on the run with broken ranks or steadily, face to the enemy. Then it is the enemy’s turn to change the momentum of the fight: the infantry charges, its ranks are winnowed by fire and disorganized by terrain and blinding smoke, it reaches the far side of the cornfield or the wood and is brought up short by the opponent’s artillery and advancing reserves—who take their turn following up the retreating foe, with the same result as before.

The process is best described as a meat grinder, in which the front-line units of offense and defense wear each other out without producing a decisive result. Hooker’s assaults on the northern front of Lee’s position had not been able to break the meat-grinder pattern, to generate the momentum that would push the Confederates back from the line of resistance. The fault was partly Hooker’s. There was little coordination between Ricketts’s attack in the cornfield and Doubleday’s advance against the West Woods. Lack of coordination was fatal on this part of the field, because the Confederate reserves were strong and posted within near supporting distance of each other. The infantry Lee had sent to Jackson on the night of the sixteenth had given the Confederates something like parity in the numbers of infantry immediately available. The artillery reinforcement he sent gave the Confederates effective superiority over Hooker’s gunners firing in support of infantry, since Hooker had to divert nearly half his artillery reserve to counter Stuart’s guns on Nicodemus Hill. The long-range fire from the east side of the Antietam had damaged the Confederate batteries near the church but had little effect on Rebel infantry. I Corps had lost a third of its infantry strength and was out of the fight until its units could be rallied and regrouped. Meade’s division was less damaged than Ricketts’s or Doubleday’s, but it had been hit hard in its brief struggle with Hood’s Division.13

Despite all that, Hooker’s troops had hit the Rebel lines with such power and determination that they had forced Jackson to call up all of his reserves and throw them into the meat grinder. By 9:00 AM both Hooker’s I Corps and Jackson’s three divisions were wrecked. Half of the men in Lawton’s Division were casualties, Lawton and one of his brigadiers wounded, another brigadier dead. Casualties were also heavy in J. R. Jones’s Division—Jones wounded and his replacement (General Starke) killed. When Hood was asked where his own division was, he replied, “Dead on the field.” In fact, some 60 percent of Hood’s force were casualties.

The best hope for breaking such a pattern lies in the use of reserves. A strong force held out of the meat grinder till attacker and/or defender has exhausted his strength, then thrown against a vulnerable point at the right moment, can turn the momentum of battle. McClellan understood the principle well enough, which was why he had built up such a large infantry reserve at the center of his position. But these reserves were too far from Hooker to provide timely reinforcement. It would take an hour and a half for troops from the center to make the roundabout march over the Upper Bridge. Hooker had a powerful reserve closer at hand in Mans­field’s XII Corps. If Hooker had brought XII Corps forward in time to support his initial wave of attacks, he could have used it, in combination with Meade’s Division, to exploit the failure of the Confederate counterattacks. But his orders to Mansfield had been vague, and Mansfield lacked the field experience that might have enabled him to act effectively on his own initiative. So at 7:30, with Hood falling back, XII Corps was just beginning to arrive at the front.

243068.jpg

XII CORPS ATTACKS, 7:30–9:00 AM

The history of XII Corps had been a tale of unending misfortune. Its nucleus was the force commanded by General Nathaniel Banks, which had been defeated by Stonewall Jackson and run out of the Shenandoah during Jackson’s Valley campaign in April and May of 1862. It had been defeated again at Cedar Mountain on August 9–10 and shared the ignominy of Pope’s defeat at Second Bull Run, although it was guarding the wagon train and had missed the actual fighting. It was a second-rate outfit, as compared with those who had fought on the Peninsula, but its soldiers were better than their record showed, and its two divisions had competent and experienced leaders. Brigadier General Alpheus Williams was a militia officer, not a professional, but he had held an active command for more than a year and had temporarily commanded XII Corps on its march up from Washington. George S. Greene was one of the oldest field generals in either army, still vigorous at sixty-one, his most striking feature a magnificent set of gray whiskers—thick mustachios flaring to the sides over a spade-shaped beard, in the style of a ­sixteenth-century monarch. Although he was a West Point graduate (Class of 1823), he had known only garrison service before resigning in 1836 to pursue a career in civil engineering. His first experience of combat command had come only two months earlier, but he proved to be a skilled and aggressive tactician. At Cedar Mountain his brigade had beaten back attacks by three times their number.

Mansfield had roused his troops early and formed his two divisions in two long columns for the march. Among the litter left in their night camp were decks of playing cards, sets of dice, and salacious or sensational literature in paper covers. Civil War soldiers usually divested themselves of the impedimenta of sin and vice on the day of battle, in case they should be called before their Maker.

But Mansfield was uncertain when to move and where to take them, so the men marched a few hundred yards and halted, waiting for instructions that never came. Some units broke ranks to boil coffee and breakfast on hardtack and salt pork while the sound of battle southward rose to a steady roar and clouds of gunsmoke began to pile up beyond the trees. With stops and starts it took them an hour and a half to march the single mile from their bivouac, until their lead elements finally approached the eastern end of the Miller Farm, gateway to the fighting in the cornfield and the East Woods. Between 7:00 and 7:30 Mansfield rode ahead to meet with Hooker at the Miller farmstead and receive his instructions. At this point in the action, Hooker was more concerned about checking Hood’s counterattack across the cornfield than renewing the assault on the Dunker Church. He ordered Mansfield to send one division to support the troops fighting in the cornfield, and the other to check the Rebels in the East Woods.

But XII Corps was not yet ready to go into action. Mansfield had marched them to the front in column, with units closed up on each other, a formation that made it easier to control troops on the march. However, it was a bad formation for troops under fire, providing a massed target for artillery—and Confederate batteries began hitting the lead division as soon as it came in sight of the East Woods. Mansfield’s veteran division commanders, Brigadier Generals Williams and Greene, therefore reformed the troops in a more open order. But when Mansfield returned he put his regiments back in column, overriding the objections of Williams and Greene. Mansfield was focused on the problem of moving his troops into position and getting them into action swiftly, and he was worried about maintaining control of his units during the approach. He had reason for concern. His corps had more than its share of untried rookie regiments, much larger than the veteran regiments whose ranks had been thinned in months of marching and fighting, but inadequately trained in battlefield maneuvers. In his preoccupation with speed Mansfield had simply formed his column by the numbers (that is, First Brigade of the First Division was first in line). As a result, the corps was led by a brigade consisting of three of these big, awkward, hard-to-maneuver units—the 124th, 125th, and 128th Pennsylvania.

Mansfield split his divisions. Greene’s troops were put in line and marched to confront the Rebel troops along the northeastern face of the East Woods, and the open ground east of the woods. Williams’s Division was to march west and form a support line across the rear of the I Corps troop fighting in the northern part of the cornfield. Mansfield decided to accompany his First Brigade, with its big rookie regiments, which had to pass around a northward projection of the East Woods to reach its desired position. The tactical situation here was confusing. Hood’s attackers were pulling back into the woods, impressed by the mass of the dark blue regiments, but they left plenty of skirmishers behind to harass the advancing Federals. But Mansfield had been told to look for Federal units here as well, troops he was supposed to support—who might be retreating before an unseen Confederate advance.

Mansfield was trying to get the 128th Pennsylvania into position when he saw the Tenth Maine of his command firing into the East Woods. He rode over to stop them, thinking they were firing into their own men. The officers of the Tenth disagreed, so Mansfield rode out ahead of their line to see for himself. “Yes, yes, you’re right,” he told his riflemen, who just then heard the hard double thump of two bullets hitting home. One struck Mansfield’s horse and the other took him square in the chest. He dismounted carefully, led his horse to the rear, then dropped to the ground. An ambulance took him to a field hospital for surgery and death. Command of XII Corps would pass to Alpheus Williams, but it was not at all certain that he could coordinate the efforts of two divisions so widely separated.

Nearly two hours after Duryee’s attack began the battle, the Federal offensive on Jackson’s front was stymied.

LEE’S HEADQUARTERS, 7:30–9:00 AM

Lee was monitoring the action from Cemetery Hill, a bulge of high ground east of Sharpsburg. He had still not recovered from the injury to his hands, but to command effectively he had to be able to move freely throughout his army’s position, so an aide was assigned to help him mount his horse, Traveller, and to lead the mount by the bridle wherever Lee needed to go. Longstreet joined him at an early hour—he was nominally in command of all units not assigned to Jackson’s front, but today all troops were at the disposal of the commanding general.

Their position was not at all a safe one. McClellan’s long-range guns kept the place under intermittent shellfire, and the single battery posted to defend Cemetery Hill lacked the range for effective counter-battery fire. From here Lee could catch glimpses of troop movement on Jackson’s front, but the rise and fall of sound was probably a better guide to the ebb and flow of the fighting—that, and the sight of disorganized troops streaming southward down the Hagerstown Pike. Lee was annoyed: “The infantry, sir, are straggling, they are straggling.” This was a misconception and an injustice. The refugees were men whose units had been broken by fire in charge or countercharge.

An hour or so after the start of fighting—about the time Hood’s Division was making its assault through the cornfield—D. H. Hill trotted his horse into the cemetery. He reported Jackson’s request for additional troops and asked permission to take his whole division to Jackson’s aid. Hill commanded five brigades. One of these (Ripley’s) had been detailed to support the Dunker Church line before the battle began. Three of D. H. Hill’s brigades were posted in an arc-shaped position, set in the natural trench of a sunken road, looking north toward the Roulette Farm buildings. This was a vital and potentially vulnerable position, the hinge of the Confederate line where it swung south to defend the front of Sharpsburg. Hill’s remaining brigade, commanded by G. B. Anderson, was stretched across the road that ran from the Middle Bridge to Sharpsburg’s central street, and constituted the first line of defense against an assault on Lee’s center.

Lee had other units he could draw on, but with his resources so limited any commitment of reserves to one sector constrained his ability to fight in another. David R. Jones’s Division held the line of the Sharpsburg plateau across the front of the town itself and southward; but this was Lee’s last line of defense against Federal columns attacking via the Middle or Lower Bridges, and it seemed advisable to hold them in place. The mobile reserve for the center and left of his line were the divisions of R. H. Anderson and McLaws, which had arrived during the night after a long, hard march. They were posted behind the town of Sharpsburg. Walker’s Division was in reserve at the extreme southern end of Lee’s infantry line, posted to support Toombs’s Brigade in defending the Lower Bridge. Before deciding which reserves to use, Lee needed to make a more direct observation of the embattled front.

With Lee’s horse led by the bridle, the generals and their staffs rode to the west side of Sharpsburg, to a high point in the ridgeline that was the apex of the Sharpsburg plateau. From here they could see Federal columns (probably XII Corps) marching toward Jackson’s front, and D. H. Hill’s battle line stretched out south and east from the Sunken Road position across the front of the plateau. As they were making their observations a shell from a Union battery cut through the group, amputating the two front legs of Hill’s horse as it passed and creating the grotesque spectacle of Hill too entangled to dismount from the horse, which was still alive with its rump in the air and its chest on the ground. The men laughed: one who was there insisted the laughter was at Hill, not the horse, as they all loved horses.14

With Jackson’s position in peril, and a Federal corps moving against the Dunker Church line, there was no time to wait for the more distant reserves to be brought forward. Lee therefore allowed D. H. Hill to send the brigades of Colquitt and Garland out of the Sunken Road to Jackson’s aid. Lee would also draw the brigade of G. T. “Tige” Anderson from D. R. Jones’s Division and send that north as well. Hill rode off to the front to take personal leadership of the brigades moving to Jackson’s support. Shortly thereafter he sent a rider to Lee with the encouraging word that if Lee could send him reinforcement he would “have the battle won by eleven o’clock.”15

But the word from Jackson himself was more dire: fresh Federal troops, coming in on the heels of Hood’s repulse, were threatening to break the line around the Dunker Church. Lee trusted Jackson’s estimate absolutely. He therefore decided to take McLaws’s Division from the army reserve behind Sharpsburg and commit it to Jackson’s front. He also made the more interesting decision to summon John Walker’s Division from the far southern end of his battle line and throw it into action on the opposite flank. R. H. Anderson’s Division was much closer to Jackson, bivouacked alongside McLaws’s Division west of Sharpsburg. By reaching for Walker, Lee lengthened the time till the reinforcement could reach Jackson. But with Hill’s brigades stripped from the army’s center, Lee needed some reserve to counter a Federal attack in that area, and R. H. Anderson’s was the force best positioned for that purpose.

However, by moving Walker’s Division, Lee also substantially weakened the force that was holding the lower crossing of the Antietam. So far the Federals had made no threats whatever against the Lower Bridge, but the day was just beginning—it was not yet 8:00 AM. Lee may have decided to run that risk in the belief that Jackson was in dire straits. But he may also have had in mind the possibility that, given an ample reserve, Jackson might not only check Hooker’s assault but mount a decisive counterattack.

Lee himself rode northward up the pike toward the Dunker Church, the aide still leading his horse, to be closer to the critical field of action and get a clearer sense of actual conditions close to the front. Shortly before 9:00 AM he was met by a battle-grimed and deeply anxious Colonel S. D. Lee, the artillery commander whose guns Lee had assigned to the defense of the Dunker Church. Colonel Lee had a message from Hood for General Lee, given just after the repulse of Hood’s attack by Meade’s Division and the Iron Brigade. “Unless reinforcements were sent at once the day was lost.” Shortly thereafter both men saw the first of McLaws’s Brigades quick-marching up the Hagerstown Pike.16

The outcome of Hooker’s and Jackson’s fight now hinged on the arrival of reinforcements rushing into the meatgrinder. D. H. Hill’s, McLaws’s and Walker’s Divisions were marching up from the south, the Union XII Corps was coming into line alongside I Corps—and McClellan was preparing to order two of Sumner’s Divisions across the Antietam to add their weight to Hooker’s drive.

MCCLELLAN’S HEADQUARTERS, 7:00–8:40 AM

General McClellan had ridden forward at dawn from his main headquarters, which were established in the little hamlet of Keedysville, two miles east of the Middle Bridge. He would view the battlefield from a forward command post at the Pry house, a two-story Georgian-style brick house on the bluffs overlooking the bridge, where Fitz-John Porter had set up V Corps’ headquarters. Several easy chairs and some tables had been brought out of the farmhouse and set in the front yard for the use of the general and his staff, but McClellan spent much of his time watching the action on Hooker’s front through a telescope mounted on a tripod. In planning his battle he had not shared his thoughts and intentions with his colleagues, and as the action unfolded he concealed his reactions by keeping even his own staff at a distance. Only Fitz-John Porter stood near him, communicating “to the commander by nods, signs, or in words so low-toned and brief that the nearest bystanders had but little benefit with them.”17

McClellan had received no reports from Hooker. He probably expected none. It was possible to communicate brief messages over some distance by signal flag, but heat haze and gunsmoke limited the usefulness of the semaphore. Clearer and more detailed messages were best carried by horseback messengers, whose intelligence or orders would be out of date by the time they were delivered, which was why McClellan had directed Hooker to act as a semi-independent wing commander. Hooker himself was immersed in the fighting, too busy managing the rapidly shifting flux of events to make sense of them for McClellan. But what McClellan saw led him to conclude that Hooker’s attack was succeeding. Perhaps he had glimpsed the Iron Brigade’s advance in the cornfield, or Hays’s Brigade breaking back across that dark and bloody ground after its repulse. Perhaps it was only the long, dark column of Mansfield’s Corps marching across open ground on its way to the front. “All goes well,” he told Fitz-John Porter. “Hooker is driving them.”

At around 7:30 AM in the cornfield Hood was mounting his spoiling attack, while in the Sharpsburg cemetery, D. H. Hill was meeting with Lee.

The proper and necessary next move was to augment and support Hooker by putting some of the army’s reserves into action. If Hooker’s assault had forced Lee to weaken his center, McClellan might have been able to stage a successful drive across the Middle Bridge. He had two of his best combat divisions, Richardson’s veterans from II Corps and Sykes’s Regular Army brigades from V Corps, in position to cross the Middle Bridge, with Pleasonton’s cavalry for a reserve and all that heavy artillery on the heights above. But McClellan had seen no sign of troop movements away from the center, and since he rated Lee’s army as at least equal to his own, he feared a premature assault here would be bloodily repulsed. Fear of Lee’s strength in the center also constrained his willingness to use units of his reserve elsewhere on the battle line. Franklin’s VI Corps had not yet arrived from Pleasant Valley, and would not be available until after 9:00 AM. So all McClellan had in hand for his center were the three divisions of Sumner’s II Corps, two divisions of Porter’s V Corps, and Pleasonton’s cavalry division.

He therefore decided to reinforce Hooker by sending him two of Sumner’s divisions, commanded by Sedgwick and French, while retaining Richardson’s division and all of V Corps to defend his own center. He also ordered Burnside to make ready for his move against the Lower Bridge.

There were several things wrong with these decisions, and with the way they were executed. By hedging his investment in Hooker’s advance he had greatly reduced the chances that Hooker could achieve anything decisive against Jackson. Sumner could only reach Hooker by a roundabout march, north to the Upper Bridge, then south and west across the fields and woodlots to the fighting front. It would take Sumner nearly two hours to get there. Sumner’s reinforcement, of perhaps eleven thousand men, would be largely offset by the reinforcements Lee was sending, by a shorter and more direct route, to Jackson’s aid—the divisions of McLaws and Walker and D. H. Hill’s two brigades, perhaps nine thousand strong.

To make matters worse, the move was badly handled. McClellan had kept Sumner under his eye because he was rightly mistrustful of the old man’s competence in independent command. In his original orders, McClellan had assured Hooker that all forces sent to his sector would be placed under his command, and he probably intended Sumner to place himself under Hooker’s orders once he arrived at the front. Although Sumner was vastly senior to Hooker, it would not have violated protocol for Sumner to defer to the commander of the forces already engaged in battle. However, there is nothing in the record to indicate that McClellan told Sumner to place himself under Hooker’s command, nor any indication that McClellan notified Hooker that Sumner was on the way. As a result, there was no liaison between the staffs of Hooker and Sumner, no process for advising Sumner how best to approach the field or how Hooker wanted his force deployed. For his part, Sumner neglected to have his staff reconnoiter the ground to be crossed or the enemy positions that might threaten his line of advance. These errors of omission, compounded by Sumner’s incompetence as a field general, would cap Sumner’s march with a catastrophic blunder some two hours after it began.

McClellan’s excessive concern for the safety of his center may also have been responsible for his mishandling of Burnside’s part of the operation. McClellan’s battle plan had called for an attack by Burnside’s Corps against the Lower Bridge and the southern flank of Lee’s position. If this was to be a diversion in aid of Hooker, the time to make it was early in the day—if not simultaneously with Hooker’s attack then certainly within an hour or two. At 7:00 AM McClellan sent a dispatch rider to put Burnside on alert for a move against the Lower Bridge, but he did not order an immediate advance, nor specify a time for Burnside to move. He would not commit IX Corps to action until VI Corps arrived to replenish the army’s reserve.

The consequence was that every move on this front would be plagued by hesitancy and delay. Burnside received McClellan’s message but, since he was still pretending to be a wing commander, did nothing but pass the order on to Cox. Since no time of advance was specified, neither man saw any urgency about the matter. So IX Corps stayed in its nighttime position behind the sheltering ridge, at some distance from the bridge—which meant a further delay of effective action when the order to advance finally came.18

By failing to threaten an immediate attack against Lee’s center and right, McClellan left Lee free to reinforce Jackson with troops from his general reserve and strip the defense of his southern flank to the bare bones.

NORTHERN FRONT, 8:00–9:00 AM

In the wake of Hood’s assault, Jackson had reordered the defensive line in front of the Dunker Church. Ripley’s Brigade, which D. H. Hill had loaned to Jackson at the start of the day, was shifted west and formed in line of battle across the southern end of the cornfield, replacing the shattered remnants of Lawton’s Division that had defended the position. Early’s Brigade had been brought in from the left flank, where it had been protecting Stuart’s guns, and now formed line on Ripley’s left, defending the southern end of the West Woods. That part of Hood’s Division which had been fighting against the Iron Brigade along the Hagerstown Pike had been pulled back to form a reserve behind Ripley. What was left of the other half of Hood’s Division still held out in the northern end of the East Woods.

On the Union side, some of I Corps still maintained a defensive line fronting the West Woods and across the Pike north of the cornfield. But most of the units that had been fighting for the past two hours were in the rear reorganizing, and none were fit to resume the offensive. Williams’s division of XII had been moving up to take their place in line when Mans­field was shot. At that point the division’s advance was thrown into confusion. The rookie 128th Pennsylvania, which Mansfield had been trying to square away, was milling in confusion in the northeast corner of the cornfield—its numbers so large that it effectively blocked the next brigade from advancing. For a horrible interval, XII Corps was paralyzed with shellfire and case-shot blasting its ranks.

Finally Williams and his brigadiers took control and got the division moving forward into the corn. To its left and rear, Greene’s Division came forward against the northeastern face of the East Woods, pressuring the remnants of Hood’s Division that held out there. The crossing of the cornfield was a passage through horror. The corn was trampled, and dead men lay in crisscrossed windrows to mark where battle lines had stood to take and give fire. Wounded men tried to crawl aside, or snatched at the legs of the advancing infantry, cried out for aid, for water, for God, for a bullet to put them out of intolerable suffering.

However, by this time the first wave of Confederate reinforcements was arriving, the brigades of Colquitt and Garland led by D. H. Hill himself. As always, the presence of a ready reserve created the possibility not only of repulsing the assault but of turning the momentum of battle back against the attacker. It was probably at this moment that Hill sent Lee his enthusiastic assertion that with a bit more reinforcement, he would “have the battle won by eleven o’clock.”

Colquitt’s Georgia regiments arrived first, and Hill put them in to buttress Ripley’s defensive line. Williams’s lead brigade in the cornfield was brought to a stand by fire from the infantry line in front of the Dunker Church, and by its supporting artillery. The Federals refused to back off farther than the northern side of the field, and once again there was an intense firefight in the cornfield, where the stalks by now had been cut to the nubs and the furrows were thickly strewn with dead and wounded men. At the height of the action, Hill’s other brigade, North Carolina Regiments officially Garland’s but commanded by Colonel McRae, came up double-quick from the rear. Hill formed them for a charge and ordered them forward into the cornfield.

But Garland’s Brigade was in no condition for such an assignment. Its ranks had been decimated at South Mountain, where it had been driven from the field and seen its commander killed. Its regiments also had a significant number of conscripted troops, the first fruits of Jefferson Davis’s military draft. Such units had the same kinds of problems maneuvering and fighting on the battlefield that afflicted the big rookie regiments in XII Corps, although the Confederate army mitigated the problem by mixing the conscripts into established units rather than using them to form new regiments. Colonel McRae led his brigade forward, slanting across the cornfield from southeast to northwest corner, and as they forged ahead someone saw what appeared to be a whole Federal brigade massing to hit them in the right flank and rear. The North Carolinians remembered South Mountain all too well. At the cry “We’re flanked” the brigade dissolved and ran back the way it came. Some of its elements fled through the East Woods, carrying away with them units that had been supporting Hood’s survivors in their firefight with Greene’s Division of XII Corps. The last of Hood’s units joined the retreat, and Greene’s Brigades swept into the East Woods and around its eastern edge. They hit Colquitt’s Brigade with fire and drove it from the field as well.

By 8:45 AM Hill was trying to rally his men behind Ripley and Col­quitt’s defensive line, and Hooker was helping Williams reorganize XII Corps for a concerted drive to capture the Dunker Church position. The Confederate defense was down to D. H. Hill’s shaken brigades and Colonel S. D. Lee’s artillerymen, holding the Federal infantry off with blasts of canister. Greene’s drive had actually forced the Confederates to reorient the defense in front of the church. At the start of the battle the Confederate defense line ran west to east across the southern boundary of the cornfield. That line had been turned by Greene’s conquest, so the Confederate defense was now aligned facing northeast from the church. Greene’s Brigades had swept through the East Woods and on to a piece of rising ground beyond it, from which divisional artillery firing at short range could pound S. D. Lee’s cannoneers at the church.

Then Hooker was shot, with a sharpshooter’s bullet through the foot, and he was carried to the rear half-unconscious from loss of blood. Command of the field should probably have passed to General Meade, the senior division commander on the scene. But with Hooker’s wounding, Meade had also succeeded to command of I Corps, and he had all he could do to rally and reorganize its exhausted brigades. Alpheus Williams was the senior officer on the current battlefront—a brigadier general who had briefly acted as XII Corps commander while they waited for Mansfield’s arrival. In the course of an hour, he had succeeded first to corps command and then, in effect, to Hooker’s wing command. He was out of his depth and faced with responsibilities beyond his pay grade. The quickest way to communicate with McClellan was by semaphore. At about 9:00 AM signal flags flashed the message that Mansfield was “dangerously” and Hooker “severely” wounded. Williams added that “Genl Sumner is advancing,” with the implication that Sumner would soon be in command, though we do not know whether he viewed that possibility with relief or apprehension. Finally he informed McClellan, “We hold the field at present. . . . Please give us all the aid you can.” Whatever plan there had been for a drive against the Dunker Church was put on hold when Hooker fell.19

07%20The%20Dunker%20Church.tif

The Dunker Church (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

MCCLELLAN’S HEADQUARTERS, 9:00–10:00 AM

McClellan was now faced with a double crisis. It appeared that the attack by Hooker’s wing could achieve nothing more without substantial reinforcement, but there was little McClellan could provide. The two divisions led by Sumner, dispatched an hour and a half earlier, would just be reaching the battlefront at 9:00 AM. McClellan still declined to aid his assault force by making a diversionary attack across the Middle Bridge with V Corps, despite the fact that Franklin’s VI Corps divisions were beginning to arrive from Pleasant Valley. Nevertheless, he now felt able to release Richardson’s division to rejoin Sumner’s command. Richardson would take a shorter route to the action, crossing his infantry at Pry’s Ford about midway between the Middle and Upper bridges. Even so, Richardson could not rejoin II Corps until 10:30 AM. His three artillery batteries had to use the more roundabout route via the Upper Bridge—which carried them into the Dunker Church zone of battle, where they would be coopted for the support of XII Corps, leaving Richardson without artillery suited to the close support of his infantry.

The other crisis was the certainty that with Hooker and Mansfield down, Sumner would assume command of the right wing and responsibility for organizing a new offensive by II and XII Corps and whatever elements of I Corps were fit to join in. McClellan rightly considered Sumner unfit for a large and independent command, and he had tried to prevent such an outcome by keeping Sumner under his eye, and issuing orders that gave Hooker control of all units sent across the Antietam. He might have remedied the situation by riding to the scene himself, as Lee had done earlier. Instead, he chose to stay at the Pry house and let events play out as they would on the other side of the river.

After some further thought, McClellan also decided it might be time to bring Burnside’s Corps into play. While Richardson’s command was moving out, McClellan dispatched an aide to Burnside with orders for him to advance his corps and seize the Lower Bridge over the Antietam. Once Burnside had carried the bridge, McClellan would order a supporting attack across the Middle Bridge, which would enable Burnside to press in on Lee’s right or southern flank. Burnside got the order at 10:00 AM and, still performing his “wing commander” charade, passed the order to Cox. IX Corps had barely started moving when the battle across the Antietam reached a new crisis.20

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!