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By Root 6648 0

it, to and fro, the waves of battle swung almost from the first.” By 10:00 A.M. the Confederates were in possession of the field that, instead of corn, contained the bodies of more than a thousand dead and wounded men.23 When the fighting shifted to the woods, Federal troops discovered to their horror that a battery of Confederate artillery had been swiftly moved to block the retreat. John Pelham, the twenty-four-year-old captain in charge of the artillery, was already something of a hero in the South. During Antietam, his unflinching precision under fire made him a legend. After the battle, Stonewall Jackson said of him, “Every army should have a Pelham on each flank.” Henry MacIver happened to be delivering a message to Pelham when Federal cavalry attacked the position. The charge was so swift that Pelham and his men had only enough time to draw their revolvers. But the Scotsman never had a chance to use his: a bullet smashed through MacIver’s mouth, taking four teeth and part of his tongue with it before exiting through the back of his neck.24

After the cornfield and the woods came a sunken road, which, over the course a terrible morning, was christened the Bloody Lane. For several hours along an eight-hundred-yard-long dirt track, a small but well-entrenched Confederate force was able to beat back each Federal charge. (The Irish Brigade lost half its men in less than twenty minutes; Brigade General Thomas Meagher, “the Prince of New York,” survived by being too drunk to ride.) But eventually they were overwhelmed and surrounded. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” recalled a private from New York.25 The break in the Confederate line offered McClellan a clear way through; he could have destroyed Lee’s center and then turned to crush each wing. Yet McClellan never called forward his reserves.

In the afternoon, the hardest part of the fighting was at Rohrbach Bridge, which spanned Antietam Creek and led directly toward the Confederate brigades under General “Old Pete” Longstreet. Ambrose Burnside, who had led the Union capture of Roanoke in February, now commanded McClellan’s IX Corps, which included both the 9th New York and the 79th Highlanders. The bridge in question was only 12 feet wide but 125 feet long. Burnside divided his corps, sending some, including the 9th, to ford the river farther down; the rest, including the 79th, he ordered to charge across the bridge. The Confederates easily repulsed each assault until the 79th ended up having to trample over the bodies of their comrades in order to reach the other side.

For three hours, various regiments made disjointed attempts to fight their way across Burnside’s Bridge, as it became known. “We had a heavy struggle crossing Antietam Creek,” George Herbert told his brother Jack. He had been in charge of the battery that was covering the ford and had watched as his friends waded through waist-deep water while bullets and shells picked them off one by one. The 9th was the first to reach the far bank. As soon as they were reunited, they were ordered to storm the Confederate position on the other side of a plowed field. It was three in the afternoon. “When the order to get up was given, I turned over quickly to look at Col. Kimball, who had given the order, thinking he had suddenly become insane,” wrote the regiment’s historian. “I was lying on my back … watching the shells explode and speculating as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off, for the very air seemed full of bullets.”26 The men around him were similarly battle-crazed. One wrote how “the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”27

The regiment managed to stagger on until they were within fifty yards of the Confederates. The two sides stared at each other and then roared into hand-to-hand combat. It was the Confederates who turned and fled toward Sharpsburg. The officers leading the 9th struggled to restrain their troops from chasing after them and finally resorted to taking out their revolvers and threatening to shoot.28 But at 4:30 P.M., the Union victors were