This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [106]
Now McClellan knew where Lee was, what he was trying to do, and exactly where he proposed to go.
There was a Federal garrison of ten thousand men in Harper’s Ferry, and Lee did not wish to leave this garrison lying across his line of communications. He knew that McClellan’s army had been badly disorganized at Bull Run and that it would take a little time to pull it back into shape, and McClellan was not in the least likely to move fast anyway. It seemed to Lee that it would be safe to delay the invasion while he gobbled up the Harper’s Ferry people, and this he undertook to do, dividing his army into four parts in order to do it.
With Longstreet and Longstreet’s command, Lee himself moved up to Hagerstown, Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania border — there was some chance that Pennsylvania militia, stirred by the rising threat to the homeland, might come down to make trouble, and it was well to hold Hagerstown in some strength. One division of troops under D. H. Hill was placed at Boonsboro Gap, the principal pass through South Mountain, where the main road from Washington came west. All the rest of the army was sent down to surround and capture Harper’s Ferry, part of the men swinging back into Virginia to come on the place from the south and west, the remainder going down through Maryland in the lee of South Mountain, Stonewall Jackson in command of the lot.
The pieces of the Army of Northern Virginia, accordingly, were very badly separated. McClellan was at Frederick, Maryland, just a short march from Boonsboro Gap. He was closer to the head and the tail of Lee’s army than the head and tail were to each other — and with Lee’s orders on his desk McClellan knew all of this, and Lee did not know that he knew it. The utter destruction of Lee’s army was a definite possibility.
One thing McClellan did not know, and because he did not know it his movements would have a halting, trance-like quality. He did not know that Lee’s army was woefully, tragically understrength.
The army had fought hard and it had marched hard, and it was very close to sheer exhaustion. Thousands upon thousands of men had left the ranks, too worn down to go any farther. (The fact that many of these men had no shoes and that Maryland had hard roads on which a barefooted man could not march had a good deal to do with this.) Other thousands had innocently left the army when it crossed the Potomac, on the simple ground that they had enlisted to defend the South from invasion, not to invade the North; the idea that the homeland could be aggressively defended on northern soil was just a little too intricate for them. All in all, it is probable that Lee lost between ten and twenty thousand men from these causes in the first two weeks of September. Of enlisted infantrymen, present for duty equipped, Lee may have had fewer than forty thousand all told. His army was smaller than it was at any other time in the war until the final agonizing retreat to Appomattox.
Yet McClellan lived by the old faith. He still thought that he was outnumbered.
He was not taking as many men into Maryland as he had had on the peninsula. In the middle of September the Army of the Potomac numbered just over eighty-seven thousand, and by no means were all of these combat soldiers; nearly one fifth of the army, at this stage of the war, was occupied on various noncombatant assignments and could not be put on the firing line in battle. McClellan, of course, knew this — he always was acutely aware of his own army’s weaknesses — and he could not, for the very life of him, see