Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle

By John Michael Priest and Jay Luvaas

“The best battlefield first-person compilation I have read . . . Here it all is—the tactics, the movement, the truth about warfare.” —The Civil War Times

In Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle—September 16, 17, and 18, 1862—Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his “head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone.”

Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps—which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904—together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940669519

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© 1989, 2014 John Michael Priest

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle, by John Michael Priest. (Originally published by White Mane Publishing Company, Inc., Shippensburg, PA, 1989.)

Includes bibliographic references and end notes

Digital First Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-940669-51-9

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To My Family with Love

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

As I Understand the Battle—The Author’s Perspectives Years Later

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Note about the Chapter Titles

CHAPTER ONE

Many bulls have compassed me . . .

CHAPTER TWO

They gaped upon me . . . as a ravening and a roaring lion.

CHAPTER THREE

My heart. . . is melted in the midst of my bowels.

CHAPTER FOUR

. . . thou hast brought me unto the dust of death.

CHAPTER FIVE

The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me.

CHAPTER SIX

Deliver my soul from the sword. . .

CHAPTER SEVEN

. . . Be not far from me for trouble is near . . .

CHAPTER EIGHT

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

CHAPTER NINE

Oh my God, I cry in the daytime but thou hearest not. . .

CHAPTER TEN

. . . be thou not far from me, O Lord.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

O my strength, haste thee to help me.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

All they that see me laugh me to scorn . . .

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

They cried unto thee and were delivered.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Why art thou so far from helping me . . .

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I am poured out like water . . .

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They look and stare upon me.

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

C Company, 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry

Sergeant William Potts, F Co., 124th Pennsylvania

Colonel William DeRossett, 3rd North Carolina

Bugler John Cook, Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery

Colonel George Beal, 10th Maine

Captain Norris Yarnell, D Co., 124th Pennsylvania

Brigadier General William Barksdale, ANV

Brigadier General Joseph Kershaw, ANV

Captain John Pelham, Stuart's Horse Artillery

Brigadier General Robert Rodes, ANV

The Bloody Lane

Colonel John B. Gordon, 6th Alabama

Colonel Charles C. Tew, 2nd North Carolina

Private Edward Spangler, K Co., 130th Pennsylvania

Private John D. Hemminger, E Co., 130th Pennsylvania

Adjutant Frederick L. Hitchcock, 132nd Pennsylvania

Adjutant Walter Clark, 35th North Carolina

Colonel John R. Cooke, 27th North Carolina

Captain James A. Graham, G Co., 27th North Carolina

The 7th West Virginia Regiment

Major Thomas Hyde, 7th Maine

Captain David G. Maxwell, H Co., 35th North Carolina

Acting Major Thomas Huling, 49th Pennsylvania

Lieutenant Charles Tanner, H Co., 1st Delaware

Lieutenant Thomas Livermore, K Co., 5th New Hampshire

Colonel William Irwin, brigade C.O., VI Corps

Colonel Edward Ferrero, brigade C.O., IX Corps

Brigadier General James Kemper, ANV

Colonel Montgomery Corse, 17th Virginia

Leonard G. Morrill, G Co., 16th Connecticut

Captain Newton Manross, K Co., 16th Connecticut

Major G. Moxley Sorrel, ANV

Brigadier General L. O'Brien Branch, ANV

Adjutant Nathaniel Wales, 35th Massachusetts

Captain Jacob Haas, G Co., 96th Pennsylvania

Lieutenant Lyman Shorey, F Co., 7th Maine

Brigadier General Roger Pryor, ANV

MAPS

For the sake of clarity, only troops essential to the understanding of the tactical situation depicted are shown on the maps. The scale appears in (100) one hundred-yard increments to the left, top, or the lower left of the map number, which is circled in the lower right-hand corner of each map. The caption is on the southern end of each map.

Map 1: September 16, 1862

Position of the Irish Brigade and Kimball’s Brigade of the II Corps at the Middle Bridge

Map 2: Afternoon, September 16, 1862

The advance of Companies C, H, and I, 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry at the Upper Bridge

Map 3: Afternoon, September 16, 1862

C Company, 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry, opens the fighting in the East Woods

Map 4: Afternoon, September 16, 1862

The drive of the 1st Pennsylvania Rifles (13th Reserves) against Law’s Brigade south of the Martin Line farm

Map 5: September 16, 1862

The struggle for the East Woods before 8:00 p.m

Map 6: Evening, September 16, 1862

The end of the East Woods fight

Map 7: September 16 to 17, 1862

Position of troops on the northern end of the field from midnight to dawn

Map 8: Dawn to 6:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The Confederate troop disposition on the northern end of the field before the first Federal infantry assault

Map 9: Dawn to 6:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The deployment of Gibbon’s Brigade in the North Woods

Map 10: Dawn to 6:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The Federal positions around D. R. Miller’s farm

Map 11: Dawn to 6:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The initial fighting in the Cornfield

Map 12: 6:25 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Lawton and Hays attempt to turn Gibbon’s left flank

Map 13: 6:25 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Christian’s Brigade stalls Ripley and the 21st Georgia

Map 14: 6:25 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Hartsuff’s Brigade saves Gibbon and Phelps in the Cornfield

Map 15: 6:25 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Phelps and Gibbon try to take the West Woods

Map 16: 6:25 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Hood’s Division thwarts the Federal charge from the Cornfield

Map 17: 7:00 a.m. to 7:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The Texas Brigade rushes into the Cornfield

Map 18: 7:00 a.m. to 7:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The Pennsylvania Reserves halt Hood’s offensive in the Cornfield

Map 19: 7:00 a.m. to 7:20 a.m., September 17, 1862

The decimation of the Texas Brigade in the Cornfield

Map 20: 7:20 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Crawford’s Brigade pushes into the East Woods

Map 21: 7:20 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Ripley’s counterthrust against the 19th Indiana and the 7th Wisconsin

Map 22: 8:00 a.m. to 8:40 a.m., September 17, 1862

The final Confederate push against the Cornfield

Map 23: 8:00 a.m. to 8:40 a.m., September 17, 1862

The 125th Pennsylvania cleans out the East Woods

Map 24: 8:00 a.m. to 8:40 a.m., September 17, 1862

The XII Corps secures the East Woods

Map 25: 8:40 a.m., September 17, 1862

A temporary respite in the West Woods sector

Map 26: 8:40 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

The 125th Pennsylvania temporarily secures the West Woods

Map 27: 8:40 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Sedgwick’s Division begins its advance against the West Woods

Map 28: 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

The Federals’ desperate attempt to hold the Dunker Church

Map 29: 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

Sedgwick penetrates the West Woods

Map 30: 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

The collapse of the Dunker Church and the envelopment of Sedgwick’s flank

Map 31: 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

The rout of the Federal right wing in the West Woods

Map 32: 9:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

The difficult withdrawal of the 1st Minnesota and the 19th Massachusetts from the West Woods

Map 33: 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

The first Federal repulse at the Bloody Lane

Map 34: 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

Tyndale and Stainbrook hurl back Manning’s assault

Map 35: 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

Tyndale and Stainbrook gain a foothold around the Dunker Church

Map 36: 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

The Confederates thwart the second Federal assault upon the Bloody Lane

Map 37: 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., September 17, 1862

Posey and Wright reinforce Anderson’s North Carolinians in the Bloody Lane

Map 38: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

The Irish Brigade stabilizes the Federal left along the Bloody Lane

Map 39: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Hancock’s Brigade reinforces the Federal line in the East Woods

Map 40: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Ransom and Cooke throw Tyndale’s Brigade out of the West Woods

Map 41: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The Irish Brigade retires from the Bloody Lane

Map 42: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Barlow’s 61st/64th New York keeps the Confederates in the Bloody Lane in check

Map 43: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The Bloody Lane collapses

Map 44: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Cooke and Cobb pressure the Federal right in Roulette’s lane

Map 45: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Irwin’s Brigade, VI Corps, flanks Cooke and Cobb in Mumma’s swale

Map 46: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Irwin’s Brigade, VI Corps, drives Cooke and Cobb from the field

Map 47: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Stalemate near the Dunker Church

Map 48: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The Confederates hold their own in Piper’s swale

Map 49: Middle Bridge, September 17, 1862

Lieutenant Thomas Evans’ two companies hold the ground west of the Middle Bridge

Map 50: 9:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

Two companies of the 11th Ohio make a halfhearted foray against the Lower Bridge

Map 51: 10:00 a.m., September 17, 1862

The 11th Connecticut loses heavily in its try for the Lower Bridge

Map 52: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

Nagle’s Brigade prepares to attack the Lower Bridge

Map 53: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

Colonel Duryea leads the 2nd Maryland into the fray

Map 54: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

The 2nd Maryland and the 6th New Hampshire assault the Lower Bridge for the first time

Map 55: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

Nagle’s Brigade becomes fully committed to the battle

Map 56: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

The 2nd Maryland and the 6th New Hampshire fail in their second charge against the Lower Bridge

Map 57: 10:30 a.m. to Noon, September 17, 1862

Ferrero’s Brigade gets into the fighting

Map 58: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The 51st Pennsylvania and the 51st New York gain a foothold at the Lower Bridge

Map 59: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The 51st Pennsylvania and the 51st New York force a crossing at the Lower Bridge

Map 60: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The rest of Nagle’s and Ferrero’s Brigades close on the Lower Bridge

Map 61: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

The 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry and the Federal horse artillery go into action at the Middle Bridge

Map 62: Noon to 1:00p.m., September 17, 1862

Benning’s Georgians regroup on the western edge of the 40-acre Cornfield

Map 63: 1:00p.m. to 4:20p.m., September 17, 1862

The 9th New York pressures the Confederate right

Map 64: 1:00p.m. to 4:20p.m., September 17, 1862

Jones’ Division buckles under increased pressure

Map 65: 1:00p.m. to 4:20p.m., September 17, 1862

The IX Corps halts to cheer itself for its conquests

Map 66: 1:00p.m. to 4:20p.m., September 17, 1862

The IX Corps moves against D. R. Jones’ Division

Map 67: 4:20p.m. to Dark, September 17, 1862

Benning and Gregg launch their counterattacks

Map 68: 4:20p.m. to Dark, September 17, 1862

Benning and Gregg roll up the Federal left wing

Map 69: 4:20p.m. to Dark, September 17, 1862

The 30th Ohio attempts to save the IX Corps’ left flank

Map 70: 4:20p.m. to Dark, September 17, 1862

The 35th Massachusetts shows its mettle

Map 71: 4:20p.m. to Dark, September 17, 1862

The final disposition of the U.S. Regulars at the Middle Bridge

Map 72: 4:20p.m. to Dark, September 17, 1862

The 7th Maine makes a desperate charge into Piper’s swale

AS I UNDERSTAND THE BATTLE—THE AUTHOR'S PERSPECTIVES YEARS LATER

The following is not intended as the final word on the battle. Rather it is a rambling soliloquy about my personal observations about what I learned from this experience. There are no endnotes. Written literally from the top of my head without notes, it merely recounts my Ahas, as we teachers like to say in educationese, and nothing more. The final word has not been written yet about this terribly costly day in United States history.

Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia headed to Antietam and marched directly into the realm of legend. In invading Maryland in September 1862, Lee, the gambler, shifted the course of the war from one of Southern defense into one of Southern aggression. The move cost him, initially, a large portion of his army. Men who strongly advocated defending their homeland joined the stragglers, the sick, and the wounded, and did not cross the Potomac with their comrades.

Outnumbered and being slowly pursued by the much larger Army of the Potomac, Lee failed to rally Marylanders to the Confederate cause and he failed to liberate them as well. He lost the gaps along South Mountain, and, for the first time in his career, had to retreat after losing a battle to an army that he held in contempt.

He made a stand at Sharpsburg because he knew that if he went back into Virginia without making a last-ditch attempt at victory, he would not be able to pick up the soldiers who had remained on Southern soil. The army that followed him to the banks of the river had been run into the ground since Lee took command in June 1862 at Seven Pines. Sick, exhausted, underfed, and, as many of them saw it, nearly bled to death, a considerable portion of the Army of Northern Virginia simply did not know if they wanted to continue to follow Granny Lee.

While Lee technically lost the battle at Sharpsburg because he had to retreat, he won the tactical battle by fighting the larger, better-equipped Army of the Potomac to a stalemate in a hostile state, far from his base of supply. In the process he had caused the surrender of the largest number of Federal soldiers in the history of the United States.

That did not go unnoticed by the men in the ranks. The diehards who survived the battle placed him on a pedestal from which he never fell. He became Marse Robert, their general, and they became his army. He and they emerged from Antietam as an army of heroes—the ill-clad, evil smelling dirty, stinking rebels of history—the valiant defenders of the Lost Cause. Lee’s reputation from the battle brought the men who had not followed him back into the ranks. From there he went on to further victories.

Antietam also illustrated the very different command styles of the two armies. In George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, commands and, in turn, individual initiative came from the top down.

Little Mac recreated his Army of the Potomac, which fought at Antietam, while on the march from Washington, D.C., in pursuit of Lee. Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia literally disappeared in the shuffle. Franz Sigel’s I Corps became part of the ill-fated XI Corps and Sigel found himself being reassigned. Nathaniel P. Banks lost his II Corps to the newly constituted XII Corps under the aging but relatively inexperienced Joseph K. Mansfield. Irvin McDowell’s III Corps went to Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac’s I Corps.

The bloodied III Corps, Army of the Potomac, remained in Washington, D.C., to refit. The IV Corps stayed there too, too late to participate in the Battle of Antietam. McClellan retained his crony, Fitz John Porter and his V Corps with his field troops, as well as Jesse Reno’s well-trained IX Corps, which had just picked up the mostly Ohioan Kanawha Division. Another of his favorites, William B. Franklin, retained command of the VI Corps, and the hardheaded Edwin Vose Sumner kept the II Corps.

An ardent student of Napoleon, with whom he closely identified, McClellan divided the Army of the Potomac into three parts—the Right, the Center, and the Left Wings. He entrusted the Right Wing (the I and IX Corps) to his personal friend and a proven divisional commander, Ambrose E. Burnside. Edwin Vose Sumner controlled the center, which was comprised of the II and the XII Corps. The cautious William B. Franklin and his VI Corps with Darius Couch’s absent Division of the IV Corps constituted the Left Wing. The V Corps remained an independent unit, apparently as McClellan’s reserve. Alfred Pleasonton’s Cavalry Division would be the eyes and ears of the Army of the Potomac.

On paper, the Little Napoleon had created his own Grande Armée. The organization deteriorated in actual combat. When the battle opened, McClellan inexplicably split his Right Wing. Hooker’s I Corps began the morning assault from the north. Later in the morning, the IX Corps, with Ambrose Burnside, moved onto the field from the south in the vicinity of the Lower Bridge.

The XII Corps came onto the field without its commander, Joseph Mansfield. Hooker deployed them in the Cornfield and in the East Woods. An hour and a half later, Edwin V Sumner, having retained command of the II Corps, personally led John Sedgwick’s Division in an east to west assault against the West Woods. His remaining two divisions lagged behind and, without any direct contact with him, deployed south against the Bloody Lane.

The VI Corps arrived without Couch’s Division, which was still en route, and committed one division to the battle at the Dunker Church and the Bloody Lane before a very rattled Sumner advised Franklin not to risk his corps in suicidal assaults.

McClellan spread the V Corps along the eastern side of the Antietam Creek from the Upper to the Lower Bridges to protect his army from a counterattack from the allegedly larger Confederate army.

McClellan’s caution spread throughout the officer corps. Orders came from the top down. The commanding general did not encourage his corps and division officers to exercise their personal initiative. Consequently, they did not train their subordinate officers to exercise independent initiative.

Once a Federal regiment was broken, it generally did not return to the field. Regimental officers did not move without orders. In general Federal regiments did not function well once their lines lost their cohesiveness. With the exception of the charge against the Hagerstown Pike during the Cornfield fight, the evidence suggest that, as a rule, Union soldiers did not fight in the action independent of their own units.

The Army of the Potomac, despite being well equipped, well trained, and very well disciplined, was not flexible. Hooker had to personally order Gordon’s Brigade of the XII Corps into action because Gordon did not want to take directives from an orderly from a different corps. When Thomas Meagher pleaded with Francis Barlow to come and relieve his men at the Bloody Lane, he received the reply, We don’t have orders.

The class system and strict adherence to the chain of command permeated the Army of the Potomac. State governors appointed officers and approved commissions. The officers, by custom segregated themselves from the rank and file. They had their own messes and servants. Enlisted men had to get permission to address an officer. It was a system that reinforced McClellan’s ego and that perpetuated the ironclad top down the chain of command.

In the Army of Northern Virginia, the men still elected their officers. Only a few days before the Battle of Fox’s Gap, Captain Shugan Snow of the 12th North Carolina (92 men) had been a private and not the regimental commander. Since their positions depended upon the support of the men they commanded, Confederate officers, at least on the regimental level, had to earn the respect and the trust of their men to effectively command. The Army of Northern Virginia was the common man’s army in a very real sense of the word. The rank and file, generally, had strong allegiances to their states and to their regiments (as did many of the Federal soldiers to their own commands).

Unlike their Union counterparts, however, the Confederate infantryman tended to be more independent minded. He could walk up to and speak with his colonel without getting permission first. He could go so far as to touch him as well—a foreign concept in the Army of the Potomac. Officers did socialize at times with the rank and file. Many of them carried long arms in battle as well and fought side by side with their men without fear of censure.

Due to the diminished sizes of the regiments at Antietam, Confederate tactics, of necessity, evolved as well. Regiments at the West Woods and at the Lower Bridge fought in open order, with six feet between the men in the ranks and over ten feet between the ranks. It was a tactic that served them well in the tangles of the Wilderness in 1864. When Confederate units were driven from the field, they were usually redeployed to another sector to fight again. The Texas Brigade fought in the Cornfield and at the Piper farm yard, and Parker’s Virginia battery saw action across from the Dunker Church and then went into battery along the Boonsboro Pike. In one instance several men from Garland’s Brigade along the western end of the Bloody Lane got separated from the brigade and fought with the Confederates in the West Woods. In cases like that the detached soldiers would get excused notes from the commanding officer where they fought to return to their original regiments.

Many officers, particularly on regimental and brigade level, often took the initiative when the situation demanded it, rather than wait for orders from above. Colonel John Cooke with the 27th North Carolina and the 3rd Arkansas flanked the 8th Ohio at the Bloody Lane by conducting an unauthorized charge. Harry Hays’ Louisiana Brigade punched a hole in the eastern end of the Union line and surged west between the Army of the Potomac’s first and second lines without orders to do so. Jubal Early, on his own initiative, drove the Federals away from the Dunker Church. It’s easier to be forgiven than to ask permission. At Antietam, failed initiatives on the field did not leave enough survivors to chastise.

Robert E. Lee personally placed troops on the firing line. His two commands under Thomas J. Jackson and James Longstreet worked well together. Brigades under Longstreet supported Jackson’s men in the West Woods, and A. P. Hill’s Division saved the right under Longstreet at the Lower Bridge. They worked as coordinated units in the field. Not once in my research did I find a time at Antietam when a subordinate refused to obey a command from an officer under whom he did not serve.

The proclaimed Federal victory at Antietam cost McClellan the love of the army he so masterfully created and trained. With the exception of his pets in the V Corps, the average line soldier had severed his ties with the general. Nearly every account of the battle contains bitter regrets that the Army of Potomac did not push the advantages the corps gained when they needed to do so and that McClellan’s lack of aggression cost them the real battle and needlessly prolonged the war. In 1864, the army overwhelmingly voted for Lincoln and not for McClellan and his Peace Democrats.

Above all, Antietam was the soldiers’ battle. They did the bleeding and the crying. They left for posterity their vivid recollections of that single day, which for so many of them, changed their lives forever. Wars do not end when the shooting stops. They live on in the memories and the nightmares of the men who fought them. Recently, a large number of historians have asserted that veterans’ memoirs and recollections, many of which were published long after the war, must be treated with suspicion and be generally not used in Civil War research. They say that too many of them are distorted or deliberately falsified accounts of the war.

I disagree. I am suspicious of their personal assessments of how important a role they or their regiment played in the war. Those containing long explanations of grand strategy and battle plans are virtually useless and often indicate the author was not present at that particular engagement. What cannot be discounted are the statements in which they basically said, This is what I saw. This is what I said. It is the historian’s job to verify whether or not the author was in that particular regiment. It is the author’s job to sort the truth from the fiction. If all Civil War literature written twenty years after the war had to be discarded because it was written too long after the conflict to be accurate, there would be a horrendous void in Civil War material.

If the soldiers’ accounts are too old to be used by historians, why is USAMHI still recording the memories of World War II and Korean War veterans? I know from personal experience from having been raised by and around World War II veterans that many of them could not talk about the war until many years later and that when they did discuss it, the distant expressions upon their faces told me that they were not lying. As Siegfried Sassoon wrote, Pray that you may never know the Hell where youth and laughter go. Again, it is the historians’ role to discern which sources he or she will not use. There is no magical timeline that can determine whether a piece of information is accurate or not.

Read Bill Mauldin’s timeless Up Front to understand what it was like to be a front line soldier. Delve into Erny Pyle’s Brave Men. Devour Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and understand how soldiers’ remembrances transcend time. The weapons and the tactics have changed, but the horrors, the fears, and the trauma have not. They bled the same red in 1860 as we do today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (1989)

I feel very much like the high-school student who walked out of his history class and blurted, We coulda gotten through the Civil War quicker if we’d o’ lived it. For eight years I have researched the Battle of Antietam, the end product of which is before you now. I claim authorship only because of the assistance from some very special institutions, their staffs, and, as the psychologists would add, some very significant others. They are listed below, not in order of importance, but as they come to mind.

My special thanks to the staffs of the Manuscript Departments and Divisions of the Library of Congress, Duke University Library, the University of North Carolina Library (Chapel Hill), the University of Virginia Library, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Museum of the Confederacy for their tremendous help and cooperation. In particular, I want to commend the staff at Perkins Library at Duke who so kindly showed my wife and two teenagers how to look up and cross-reference material in their Manuscript Department. It was a first experience that my family will long remember.

I cannot fail to mention Dr. Richard Sommers and his excellent staff of the Manuscript Division, USAMHI, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Dr. Sommers treated me with the greatest warmth and he taught me how to work in an archives. It was my first archival experience.

The staff at Antietam National Battlefield, in particular, Betty Otto, who has since retired, Paul Chiles, and Ted Alexander opened their files and their resource center without reservation. They have steadfastly encouraged me in this work. Betty possesses a wealth of knowledge about local history. Paul clarified my misstatements about artillery and the different types of projectiles. Ted, who refers to himself, quite rightfully, as the Devil’s Advocate, kept goading me to resurrect obscure documents from every repository I could reach. I am indebted to him for his persistence.

John and Dennis Frye, who operate the Western Maryland Room at the Washington County Free Library, Hagerstown, Maryland, assisted me greatly. They answered questions I had about local history. Dennis made the David Lilley file available to me and John introduced me to the Southern Historical Society Papers.

Mrs. Phyllis Hill at the Internal Resource Center, Board of Education of Washington County, continually advised me of the new Civil War literature in the Board’s library. She also showed me the Benjamin Franklin Clarkson Memoirs, which became my first published work.

Without Tom Renner’s help, and the permission from the Parks and History Association to use the map (which they sell at Antietam for $1.00), I could never have gotten the many small unit maps done on time. Tom’s timely assistance and professional expertise with the map preparation will insure the value of the book as historical reference. He is an irreplaceable asset to the Washington County school system.

Bill Hilton, my friend and colleague, never ceased to encourage me. His prodding to make the book readable and thorough guided me throughout the many years of study. He started me on the research by loaning me copies of published recollections and reminiscences from his personal library. They formed the nucleus around which this book was started. He is an avid reader and a very good critic. If he did not like what I wrote, he told me and gave me a reason.

My deepest appreciation goes to Tom Hicks, a former colleague. He opened his collection of family letters to me and loaned me a couple of very interesting stories that were published during the 125th Anniversary of the battle. Tom also read and critiqued the first copy of the manuscript. His friendly support acted like a catalyst to help me refine my writing skills.

A final and, admittedly, inadequate Thank you goes to my family. Rhonda, my wife, Douglas, my eldest, Jennifer, and Kimberly have tolerated my obsession with this project with Biblical patience. They have sacrificed their time for years while I dragged them from one library to another, or spent entire weekends typing text or drawing maps.

They volunteered to finish my research at Duke while I worked at the University of North Carolina. Rhonda insisted that I regiment myself to a work schedule with long and short-term goals. She helped me balance my rabid drive to do research with our precious family life. To them all, my love. Their warfare is accomplished.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about battle. More especially, it is a book about the human dimension in a battle, before generals could rationalize actions, historians could impose order upon chaos, the army could build a tower and lay out the battle lines— and the National Park Service could transform the whole into something approaching a pastoral setting. As a modern English historian who has written a similar study of Waterloo has observed, The more thoroughly you analyse a battle, in the light of after-knowledge, the harder it becomes to remember what it felt like to the people who were in it.¹

Perhaps it is true, as David Howarth has claimed, that the Napoleonic Wars were the first in which it is still possible to see a battle from the soldier’s ground-level, smoke shrouded point of view because a number of junior officers, sergeants, and a few privates wrote reminiscences or letters, but another English historian who analyzed Waterloo from the vantage point of the common soldier contends that not until the First World War can we hear the voice of the common man, even though infant murmurs can be detected during the American Civil War.² It is unfortunate that John Keegan did not include a chapter on Antietam in his pioneer work The Face of Battle, for in fact the Civil War was the first conflict fought by armies that contained large numbers who could read and write. During the Napoleonic Wars most of the rank and file were illiterate. A few stirring memoirs came out of these campaigns, but in Napoleonic France the primary schools could accommodate no more than one child in eight, while in England, even after the Education Act of 1870, there remained many soldiers whose attainments did not extend much further than a moderate power of reading and the ability to sign their names.³

Nor is it a coincidence that the Civil War was the first to produce monuments in public squares and on the battlefields to the common soldier and his regiment.⁴ Monuments from earlier wars nearly all portray officers who had commanded troops in some military encounter, but at Antietam—to cite a relevant example—all statues feature the common soldier; the only monuments to general officers are some half a dozen upright cannon barrels indicating where a particular brigade or division commander became a fatal casualty. This emphasis upon the common soldier was uniquely American at the time, for in Europe soldiers were still regarded pretty much as the dregs of society—except in Prussia, where conscription had produced a Nation in Arms—and officers (with some exceptions in the technical branches of engineers and artillery) continued to come almost exclusively from the aristocracy.

* * *

Foreign officers who spent time with the American armies were almost universally of the opinion that these volunteer armies contained good soldier material, but were critical of the dearth of trained officers and the absence of any replacement system. A few weeks before Antietam an English Member of Parliament with an interest in military affairs visited the Union army and described a regiment of New York Volunteers:

A very fine-looking lot of men indeed, mostly farmers and country people from Western New York . . . They seemed very jolly and in good spirits, but they had had no drill whatever, and I don’t see who is to give it to them. The sentry at the Colonel’s tent was sitting on a campstool and reading the newspaper. I believe a few of the officers have been in other volunteer regiments, but I could not make out that they had a single regular officer among them. It seems a great pity that such fine material should be thrown away, as they very likely may be, by having utterly incompetent officers.⁵

And yet such regiments fought well at Antietam: one of them—the 132d Pennsylvania Infantry—which had been organized for less than a month, lost 364 out of 740 men before the Bloody Lane and yet held its position. How did they do it?

Even veteran regiments, in the eyes of foreign military observers, displayed serious shortcomings when compared to European regulars. A British officer who spent some time with McClellan’s army a few weeks after the battle commented:

Neither side can be manoeuvred under fire . . . The men on either side can be brought under fire, and when there will stand well: but they are not good enough either in morale of field movements to advance, change position, or retire.—The moment they have to manoeuvre, they get into confusion and break, this their own officers admit and also that the charges either of Cavalry or Infantry are purely imaginary; they . . . have occasionally made a rush; but never get within 300 yards of one another; but normally wavered, halted, and fired irregularly and when one side or the other get tired first bolts, led by their officers almost invariably on the Northern side.

What was needed, this Royal Engineer captain decided, was competent leadership.⁶

A Swiss colonel recorded in his official report of his visit that the Army of the Potomac suffered leadership problems because the officers had been elected by the rank and file, often for no better reason than having known how to entice a few recruits to inns or clubs, and because of the influence of politics in the selection of higher officers.

For two good officers taken thus from the ranks of the orators, or from the magistracy, there are five or six of them completely incapable in the face of the enemy.... The ties of relationship, of friendship, of party, considerations of speculation even, cause to be named for very important positions men totally incapable of filling them.... Owing to the intrigues of parties, and the compliance of the press, it is often difficult... for the Government and the superior offices to ascertain whether such an officer is a pretender, an adroit actor, or a man of merit.⁷

This was less true of the Confederate army at Antietam, and of course there were many conspicuous exceptions in the Union army as well; in any case this particular observer, who had been attached to McClellan’s staff as a voluntary aide-de-camp, had returned to Europe soon after the fall of Yorktown that spring, and many unfit officers had since left the service while others had acquired practical experience. There remains, however, the bizarre case of Colonel William A. Christian, who went to pieces in the East Wood, shouted a lot of irrelevant commands, and then rapidly disappeared to the rear.⁸

General William T. Sherman put his finger on the problem. The greatest mistake made in our civil war, he contended,

was in the mode of recruitment and promotion. When a regiment became reduced by the necessary wear and tear of service, instead of being filled up at the bottom, and the vacancies among the officers filled from the best non-commissioned officers and men, the habit was to raise new regiments, with new colonels, captains, and men, leaving the old and experienced battalions to dwindle away into mere skeleton organizations.⁹

At Antietam many regiments were so depleted that they could scarcely function as such, while new and essentially untrained regiments, especially in the Union army, were thrown into their first battle largely unprepared.

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Scarcely one hundred years before Antietam, Frederick the Great had written that soldiers could be governed only with sternness and severity and can be held in check only through fear. So long as the Prussian soldier feared his officers more than the enemy, Frederick contended, he would move forward. The Duke of Wellington, victor at Waterloo, saw discipline as the key to controlling his men, whom he once described as the scum of the earth.¹⁰

But during the 19th century professional soldiers began to demonstrate an interest in the human dimension in combat. The Prussian General von Clausewitz, who had first experienced war as a 13-year-old infantry ensign and served throughout the Napoleonic wars as a commander and staff officer, was perhaps the first to address the problem of danger in war.

Let us accompany the novice to the battlefield. As we approach, the thunder of the cannon becoming plainer is soon accompanied by the howling of shot, which now attracts the attention of the inexperienced. Balls begin to strike the ground close to us. . . . We hasten to the hill where stands the general and his numerous Staff. Here the close striking of the cannon balls and the bursting of shells are so frequent that the seriousness of life forces itself through the youthful picture of imagination. Suddenly someone we know falls. A shell strikes amongst the crowd and causes some involuntary movements; we begin to feel that we are no longer perfectly at ease and collected, and even the bravest is at least to some degree distracted. Now, a step farther into the battle . . . to the nearest general of division. Here . . . the noise of our own guns increases the confusion. From the general of division to the brigadier. He, a man of acknowledged bravery, keeps carefully, behind a hill, a house, or some trees—a sure sign of increasing danger. Grape rattles on the roofs of the houses and in the fields; cannonballs roar in all directions over us, and already there is a frequent whistling of musket balls. A step farther toward the troops, to that sturdy infantry which has been for hours holding its ground under fire with indescribable steadiness. Here the air is filled with the hissing of balls, which announce their proximity by a short sharp noise as they pass within an inch of the ear. . . .

To add to all this, compassion strikes the beating heart with pity at the sight of the maimed and fallen. . . . He must, indeed, be a very extraordinary man who, under the stress of these first impressions, does not lose the capacity of making a prompt decision. . . . Habit soon blunts these impressions; in half an hour we begin to be more indifferent in greater or less degree to everything that is going on around us: but the ordinary never attains complete coolness and the natural elasticity of mind. . . . Ordinary qualities will not suffice. . . ."¹¹

At Antietam, as this book makes clear, the picture changes only in detail. If brigade and division commanders were not farther forward—as the death of one corps commander, three division commanders, and three brigade commanders might suggest—the increased ranges and accuracy of weapons since the Napoleonic Wars had significantly widened the killing zone. Napoleonic formations had been modified somewhat, but basically the armies deployed and maneuvered in battle in much the same way at Antietam as Napoleon’s Grande Armée had at Austerlitz 57 years previously. Indeed, many of the illustrations of particular maneuvers in Civil War drill manuals are identical with plates in the 1791 edition of the Reglement that prescribed the evolutions of Napoleon’s battalions.

Antietam was the last battle fought in the East without one side or the other resorting to field fortifications, although the famed Sunken Road and the quarry holes above the Burnside Bridge functioned—and in Union after-action reports were so described—as rifle pits. At Fredericksburg several of Longstreet’s divisions fought behind breastworks and at Chancellorsville both armies constructed hasty fortifications at every opportunity.

In his classic analysis of men in modern combat Colonel Ardant du Picq, a French officer killed in battle five years after the Civil War, contributes to our understanding of battles like Antietam. The Americans, he declared,

have shown us what happens in modern battle to large armies without cohesion. With them the lack of discipline and organization has had the inevitable result. . . . In this American War, the melees of Agincourt are said to have reappeared, which merely means a melee of fugitives. But less than ever has there been close combat. . . . The less mobile the troops, the deadlier are battles. . . . Modern arms require open order. . . . Modern weapons have a terrible effect and are almost unbearable by the nervous system. . . . Discipline in battle becomes the more necessary as the ranks become more open, and the material cohesion of the ranks not giving confidence, it must spring from a knowledge of comrades, and a trust in officers. . . . Today the artillery is effective at great distance [du Picq was killed by a Prussian shell before Metz in 1870]. . . . The apparent liaison between arms is lessened. This has its influence on morale.

This moral effect must be a terrible thing. A body advances to meet another. The defender has only to remain calm, ready to aim, each man pitted against a man before him. The attacking body comes within deadly range. Whether or not it halts to fire, it will be a target for the other body which awaits it, clam, ready, sure of its effect. The whole first rank of the assailant falls, smashed. The remainder, little encouraged by their reception, disperse automatically or before the least indication of an advance on them.¹²

The smallest detail taken from an incident in war was more instructive to du Picq than the most celebrated campaign histories. There are numerous questions that he would have asked of this book.

What were the dispositions taken to meet the enemy?

What becomes of it upon arriving within the range of the guns?

How did the fight start? How about the firing? How did the men adapt themselves?

At what distance did the charge fall back before the fire of the enemy?

The behavior, i.e., the order, the disorder, the shouts, the silence, the confusion, the calmness of the officers and men . . . before, during, and after the combat? How has the soldier been controlled and directed during the action?

At what instant has he had a tendency to quit the line in order to remain behind or to rush ahead?

At what moment, if the control were escaping from the leader’s hands, has it no longer been possible to exercise it? At what instant has this control escaped from the battalion commander . . . the captain . . . the squad leader?

At what time . . . was there but a disordered impulse, whether to the front or to the rear carrying along pell-mell with it both the leaders and men?

Where and when did the halt take place . . . [and] were the leaders able to resume control of the men?¹³

From answers to these and a dozen kindred questions, du Picq hoped to utilize experience—and history—to better equip men for modern combat, for despite all industrial and scientific progress, one thing does not change—the heart of man.¹⁴

It was answers to questions like these, asked of men who had just staggered out of combat in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, that likewise enabled the late General S. L. A. Marshall to arrive at his conclusions—some of them startling in their implications—about men in modern battle. Marshall’s task as he described it was to analyze our infantry line and its methods under pressure, to estimate whether troops are good or bad, to see what is wrong or right in our tactics and to recommend such corrects as are indicated.¹⁵

* * *

Modern officers who visit Antietam and other Civil War battlefields are concerned about similar kinds of questions, but perhaps for somewhat different reasons. How did they get men to stand in line like that? How did the officers exercise command and control? Why were there no night attacks? I remember particularly one major, recently returned from Vietnam, who stood silently on the ridge overlooking the Sunken Road where French’s Union division lost 40 percent in about three hours and wondered aloud, Who wrote the family when there was a death in the ranks? And what soldier has ever stood on Burnside’s Bridge and failed to imagine the feelings of men ordered to capture the heights beyond it? A guy would have to be crazy to attempt a thing like that! Of course, to a modern soldier it would be unnecessary.

Modern tourists see a different battle, for it is as true of battlefields as it is of history itself—answers come only in response to specific questions.

This book asks the participants primarily one question: what was it like? The answers, like the sources, tend to be uneven in perception and accuracy, for as Gerald E. Linderman’s recent Embattled Courage reminds us, the memory of the veterans quickly became selective because of a strong psychological propensity to suppress the painful.¹⁶ One has only to compare Henry Kyd Douglas’ somber description of what it looked like in the West Woods the night of the battle, written immediately after the end of the war from diaries and notes and when his memory was fresh and youthful, and John B. Gordon’s filtered recollections of what happened in the Bloody Lane, composed 40 years after the event, to appreciate how battle is filtered through the minds of participants.¹⁷

If one were to consult the cache of letters in the National Archives written by participants to the U.S. Commissioners responsible for laying out and marking the battlefield in the 1890s, this would quickly become apparent. Some of the old soldiers could not read a modern map.