This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [108]
There never was another day like Antietam. It was sheer concentrated violence, unleavened by generalship. It had all of the insane fury of the Shiloh fight, with this difference: at Shiloh the troops were green and many of them ran away at the first shock, while those who remained fought blindly, by instinct. At Antietam the men were veterans and they knew what they were about. Few men cut and ran until they had been fought out, their formations blown apart by merciless gunfire; and those who did not run at all fought with battle-trained skill, so that the dawn-to-dusk fight above Antietam Creek finally went into the records as the most murderous single day of the entire war.
It began with a Federal attack on the Confederate left, under Stonewall Jackson, posted in a cornfield and two woodlots in front of a whitewashed Dunker church. Joe Hooker, the handsome, profane, hard-drinking and hard-fighting commander of McClellan’s right wing, smashed the cornfield and its occupants with the concentrated fire of three dozen fieldpieces and then sent his army corps swinging straight up toward the Dunker church, which marked the high ground that anchored this end of the Confederate line. Some of the Confederate units here were mangled almost beyond repair, but just as Hooker’s men neared the little church Jackson brought up reinforcements — John B. Hood’s Texas brigade and three tough little brigades from D. H. Hill’s division — and the Federals were driven back to their starting point, a good fourth of their number shot down, half of the remainder driven off in disorganized flight.
All of this took about an hour, or perhaps a little longer, and accomplished nothing at all except the creation once more of an appalling list of casualties. Now McClellan sent in another army corps, the men who had followed Banks on his luckless adventurings in the Shenandoah Valley and who had fought so stoutly at Cedar Mountain. (Banks was no longer with them; he had been replaced by an old regular, Joseph K. F. Mansfield, a red-faced soldier who wore a pleasing fringe of white hair and whiskers.) The cornfield and part of the woods were regained and then largely lost again; Mansfield was killed, Hooker was wounded, two army corps had been used up, another hour had passed, and the casualty list was substantially longer.
Now McClellan sent in a third corps, the largest in the army, eighteen thousand men or thereabouts under old Edwin Sumner, who had been an army officer since 1819, possessed a great roaring voice that could carry the length of an active battle line, and was known by his troops as the Bull of the Woods, or just Old Bull. He was a simple, straightforward sort of war horse; forty years in the regular army had harrowed out all of his complexities, leaving nothing but a devotion to duty and an everlasting respect for the military hierarchy and its system of discipline. He would never get used to the volunteer army; would stare, shake his head, and swear in utter disbelief when he saw some stripling in his early twenties wearing a major’s shoulder straps — in the pre-war army, field officers were invariably gray-haired.
This morning Sumner was to take his three divisions and crush the Rebel left. He rode with the leading division, led by John Sedgwick, and forgot about the other two, which as a result came into action too late. Sedgwick and Sumner rode across the ground that had been so terribly fought over, got into the farthest fringe of woods, and seemed to have the Dunker church plateau firmly in their possession — and then were hit in the flank and rear by a fresh Confederate division that had just finished the long hike up from Harper’s Ferry and whose attack now took them completely by surprise. Sedgwick was wounded, more than a third of his men were shot, the rest were driven off in complete disorder, and the triumphant Confederates swept back across the cornfield and the scarred little woodlots until the long line of Federal guns — fifty or more of them, drawn up in a solid rank to support McClellan