This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [109]
With one division wrecked, Bull Sumner went back to put the rest of his corps into action. He sent his men up out of the creek valley some distance south of the cornfield and the Dunker church, and they ran into a Confederate battle line posted in a sunken lane that zigzagged along the reverse slope of a long ridge. As the fighting in the Dunker church area burned itself out, this sunken road became a new cockpit. The Confederates here were as secure as the Federals had been in that other sunken lane at Shiloh, and Federals who tried vainly to drive them out wrote afterward that they met here the heaviest fire they saw in all the war.
Sumner’s two remaining divisions came in in disjointed fashion, one at a time. (Thousands of men were shot that day because McClellan could not, from first to last, put on one co-ordinated offensive.) The first one to attack the sunken road was led by William French, a stout, choleric man who was a doughty head-down fighter but nothing more. His battle line got to the crest of the ridge, drove off the Confederate skirmishers who held the place, paused briefly for breath, and then went rolling on to attack the sunken road; and the Rebels hunkered down behind their natural breastwork, let them come in close, and then broke them and drove them back with tremendous rolling volleys of musketry. French’s men re-formed, tried it again, broke again, tried once more, and then lay on the ground and kept up such fire as they could while they waited for the other division to come up.
This one was commanded by a stout fighter, Israel B. Richardson, a Mexican War veteran who seems to have patterned himself after old Zachary Taylor, cultivating a rough-and-ready air and disdaining to wear anything resembling a proper uniform. He led his men in person, stalking along on foot with a naked sword in his hand, using the point of it to drive skulkers out from behind haystacks and outhouses, blaspheming them in a voice that rose above the din of battle. A house was on fire at one end of the ridge, and the smoke from its burning mingled with the heavy battle smoke, and the men climbed the ridge in a choking fog. Richardson finally got an Irish brigade and some New Englanders up on high ground where they could enfilade part of the sunken road, some of the Confederates broke and ran for it, and at last the whole line caved in. The sunken lane was taken — it it was so full of corpses that for the rest of the war veterans referred to it simply as “Bloody Lane” — and the whole center of Lee’s line was a frazzled thread, so worn that Longstreet and his staff were helping exhausted gunners work a battery, while D. H. Hill took up a musket and rallied a handful of stragglers for an abortive counterattack.
Lee’s army could have been broken then and there, but Richardson went down with a mortal wound — this was a bad day for general officers — and he was the only driver on this part of the field. McClellan had two spare army corps ready and waiting, but he used one to hold the right of his line (he feared that Lee would hit him with a counterattack) and he held the other one in reserve, and the assault died out after Bloody Lane had been won.
By now it was noon, and after a time the left of McClellan’s line took up the battle. General Burnside was in command here, with four divisions, and he put them into action hesitantly, one at a time, taking long hours to win the crossings of Antietam Creek and get to the high ground overlooking Sharpsburg. By midafternoon, however, despite all the delays, the high ground was taken, and once more utter defeat for Lee’s army was in immediate prospect. But, once more, Confederate reinforcements came up just in time — A. P. Hill’s division, brought up from Harper’s Ferry in a man-killing forced march that left half of the men gasping by the roadside, too dead-beat to march another step, but that brought the other half in on Burnside’s flank just in time to stave off defeat. Burnside reacted nervously