[Section III. THE CRUCIBLE OF COMMAND]
4) Three Cigars and a Battle Order:
Antietam
Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home.
–George B. McClellan
In one sense Bobby Lee's long summer of triumph had put him in an odd fix. The Federals had retreated behind the defenses of Washington, which was then becoming perhaps the most fortified city on the planet. The Army of Northern Virgnia, outnumbered two-to-one, could hardly strike there. Nor was it really possible to remain where it was at Manassas. Men and horses both were worn to gristle and bone, and the hard hand of war had stripped the northern Virginia countryside of the food and forage that might sustain them. Lee could either return to Richmond, resting and watching, or take the war across the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania, whose fields and factories could supply him.After consulting with Jefferson Davis, Lee took the gambler's chance: he would invade the North. Indeed, a great deal might be achieved by success north of the Potomac. Great Britain might recognize the Confederacy and break the blockade. Then, too, a Rebel army on the Susquehanna River might help elect enough Peace Democrats in November to break Republican control in Congress. A war-weary people persuaded of the hopelessness of conquering a peace might press the Lincoln government to negotiate one. At the very least an invasion would take the Yankees out of Virginia long enough for her farmers to get their crops in. In any event, if Lee was going to strike, now was the time. The Federal armies, Lee believed, were demoralized by a steady diet of defeat in the East, and their successes in the West seemed to have gone for nought now that Confederates were on the march again in Kentucky and Tennessee. Perhaps also Lee was thinking of Stonewall Jackson's conviction: repeated success will make an army invincible.
Reinforced by three divisions from Richmond, Lee's army, 55,000 strong, splashed across the Potomac at White's Ford on September 4. They were toughened veterans of successful campaigns and they were ably led. They also looked like so many scarecrows. The description of one soldier can stand for thousands: "My costume consisted of a ragged pair of trousers, a stained, dirty jacket; an old slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn; a begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a cartridge box full, and a musket. I was bare-footed and had a stone bruise on each foot." Even a corps commander, Stonewall Jackson, wore a battered cap which, one journalist wrote, "any northern beggar would consider an insult to have offered him." A Maryland woman remembered them on the march: "This body of men moving along with no order, their guns carried in every fashion, no two dressed alike, their officers hardly distinguishable from the privates... were these the men that had driven back again and again our splendid legions?" These armed ragamuffins were now marching into Maryland at the route step, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-shod, but confident and in high spirits. Marse Robert was going to take them to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River, tear up some railroads, and terrify the North.
On September 6, they marched into Frederick singing "Maryland, My Maryland." Lee had hoped that one consequence of an invasion would be to bring thousands of Marylanders to the Confederate colors. Maryland was after all a slave-holding state and generally Southern in its sympathies. Lee even issued, on Jefferson Davis' instructions, a proclamation to the people of Maryland. His army had come, he wrote, to right "the wrongs that have been inflicted on the citizens of a commonwealth allied to the States of the South by the strongest social, political, and commercial ties... [and] to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of free men." Marylanders remained unmoved. Most simply watched warily as Lee's ragged files marched by. None were enthusiastic about selling their goods for inflated Confederate paper money.
4a) Across South Mountain
As Lee continued his march northwest toward the South Mountain gaps, a logistical problem arose. Once he crossed South Mountain his line of supply would run through the Shenandoah Valley. Threatening that line was the Union garrison at Harper's Ferry where the Shenandoah flowed into the Potomac. The main purpose of the 12,000-man "railroad brigade" was to keep the Baltimore and Ohio line open, but Lee's invasion had already cut it to the east. McClellan was probably right when he urged Halleck to send the garrison to the Army of the Potomac then in pursuit of Lee. They were serving no purpose where they were, and the place itself, surrounded by high bluffs, would be difficult to defend in any case. But Old Brains thought not, so they remained where they were.
If they were to remain, Robert E. Lee would have to go after them. Three columns would fall on Harper's Ferry–Jackson coming down from the northwest, Lafayette McClaws from the northeast, and John Walker from the east. In those three columns was half of Lee's army; the Rebel commander had again divided his force in the face of a larger enemy. It was a move that worried some on Lee's staff, for it gave McClellan an opportunity to strike widely separated elements in detail. Lee responded calmly: "Are you acquainted with General McClellan? He is an able general but a very cautious one.... His army is in a very demoralized and chaotic condition, and will not be prepared for offensive operations–or he will not think it so–for three or four weeks. Before that time I hope to be on the Susquehanna." It was a remarkably acute analysis. Jackson would snatch Harper's Ferry and hurry north to join Lee at Hagerstown; then united they would march for the Susquehanna.
Lee and Jackson had every chance of doing precisely that–except for the oddest trick of chance. On September 12, the 27th Indiana was camped in a meadow outside Frederick, boiling their coffee and taking it easy. One Corporal Barton W. Mitchell noticed a piece of paper wrapped around three cigars. Grateful for the cigars, he idly read the paper. It was headed "Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia" and contained "Special Orders No. 191." It had been on its way from Lee to D. H. Hill when it was dropped in that Maryland meadow. Lee's orders–giving the disposition of his entire army–had fallen into McClellan's hands like an extravagant gift of fate, so extravagant that he feared it might be a ruse. He handed it to his staff for their consideration. One of his officers recognized the handwriting as that of a friend from the old army. It belonged to R. H. Chilton, now Lee's assistant adjutant general. George Brinton McClellan had the paper with which to whip Bobby Lee.
What Special Orders No. 191 gave McClellan was probably the single greatest opportunity of the war. First, it told McClellan precisely where the four elements of Lee's army were, and second, it told him that those elements were acutely vulnerable. With Lee and Jackson separated by a full twenty miles, McClellan with his 70,000 could force the gaps of South Mountain and destroy the Army of Northern Virginia in detail. Had he done so immediately and aggressively, he would no doubt have put down the rebellion then and there. Lee and Longstreet were all the way to Hagerstown, and Jackson, Walker, and McLaws' separated commands were still on the march to Harper's Ferry. Only Jeb Stuart's cavalry and one Confederate division, D. H. Hill's, were in position to defend the two critical passes through South Mountain, while McClellan was in a position to drive through them with three entire corps. But just then, when it was most crucial to act, McClellan hesitated. Still haunted by the idea that Lee's army was 120,000 strong, McClellan sat down to cast cautious and careful plans. The plans were clear and sound, but they did not put the army in motion until daylight of September 14, eighteen hours after the discovery of Lee's orders. Such luck as Lee would have was first McClellan's gift of eighteen hours.
Lee's second stroke of luck was the gift of a sympathetic Marylander who passed on to Jeb Stuart news of the lost orders. Thus, by the night of September 13, Lee was aware of his predicament and could plan to concentrate the scattered pieces of his army. Whether that could be done at all, of course, depended on how quickly McClellan forced the South Mountain passes–Turner's Gap, through which the National Road ran to Hagerstown, and Crampton's Gap, six miles to the south and only a brief hike to Harper's Ferry. The defense of the north pass fell to D. H. Hill's division; to the south were a handful of cavalry and a few regiments of McLaws. On the Union side facing Crampton's Gap were William Franklin's two divisions with a third on loan. These represented the left of McClellan's advance, and their orders were quite clear: force the gap, "cut off, destroy or capture McLaws' command," and relieve the garrison at Harper's Ferry. After a long, hot fight up steep slopes, Franklin pushed through the gap, but McLaws and Stuart refused to be stampeded. McLaws got reinforcements up and formed a new line in a little valley just west of the mountain. The line looked formidable to Franklin, a capable but stolid commander, and as night drew on he called a halt–a decision the garrison in Harper's Ferry would have cause to regret. To the north at Turner's Gap was McClellan himself with the bulk of the Army of the Potomac, but he threw it piece-meal against Hill, whose men fought fiercely on the wooded mountainside. Late in the day help from Longstreet arrived and D. H. Hill still held the spine of South Mountain when darkness halted the fight. The next morning the Rebels were gone, but the Battle of South Mountain had given Lee a third gift: another twenty-four hours to pull his army together.
Although D. H. Hill had won a day's reprieve, Lee's army remained in mortal danger. Half of it was still well north of the Potomac in and around Hagerstown, the other half was down on the Potomac at Harper's Ferry and the better part of those troops were south of the river. One thing Lee could count on was that McClellan, however cautious, would get the whole of his army through the passes and west of South Mountain the next morning. Further, if Franklin, his corps already through the south pass, moved decisively down to the Ferry, he could come in behind McLaws' division, break it up, and relieve the garrison. Perhaps the most prudent move for Lee would simply be to get all the pieces of his army on the road and withdraw up the Valley, looking for a better opportunity on a better day. But in the end it was Franklin who was prudent. He never made the night march that might have saved Harper's Ferry.
Sometime late on September 14 Lee learned that Jackson with Walker and McLaws were now on the heights surrounding the Ferry, prepared to seize the place the next morning. Just a fragment of that doomed garrison would escape the prison camps. That night a Mississippi West Pointer, Grimes Davis, led four regiments of cavalry out in the dark on a road that ran under the crest of Maryland Heights. Their path to safety happened to be the road John Brown came down in 1859 brooding about the bloodshed that would purge this guilty land. As for Lee, sure now of the fall of Harper's Ferry, he ordered a concentration on Sharpsburg, just north of the Potomac and just west of brown and sluggish Antietam Creek. He hadn't come all this way to go home without giving battle. His troops north of the river would have to quick-march south, and those in front the Ferry would have to hurry north as soon as it was taken. The next morning McClellan would get his army in motion over South Mountain and hike for Sharpsburg also. At dawn thousands upon thousands, in blue and grey and butternut-brown, were all marching toward the bloodiest day in the American experience.
On September 15, Lee and Longstreet were already in Sharpsburg on a rise of ground running roughly north to south with Antietam Creek on their front and the Potomac River a mile or so in their rear. As D. H. Hill came in from the defense of Turner's Gap, Lee had about half his army in line–about 25,000 muskets in all. At the same time the Army of the Potomac was arriving east of the creek, and by the next day nearly its full weight would be up–60,000 in line with 15,000 more just behind. Fate had been generous to George McClellan on the twelfth when it handed him Lee's battle order, but McClellan had hesitated and that first great opportunity had slipped away. Now, on the sixteenth, events were giving him a second chance to destroy the Army of Virginia in detail. Little Mac had a three-to-one superiority. One weighty blow with his whole force could buckle Lee's line and drive it toward the Potomac with a single ford to safety. Lee would never get his army away intact. But again, when the occasion called for action, McClellan hesitated. He would plan his attack carefully. While McClellan was planning, however, the first elements of Jackson's command were coming up from Harper's Ferry, two divisions late in the afternoon and more coming up in the dark. At sundown as the opportunity to strike with overwhelming numbers was slipping away, McClellan pushed two corps across the creek to feel for Lee's left. They provoked a sharp skirmish which died out in the dark without accomplishing much except to tell Lee to look well to his left.