A Fierce Glory

CHAPTER 1

HELL COMES TO SHARPSBURG

It was the small hours of a late-summer night. Light drizzle was falling. Cloud cover blotted out the moon and stars. Facing each other, separated only by a short stretch of utter darkness, were two hushed armies.

Soldiers from both sides lay upon the hard ground, out in the open, without tents. Already, they were arranged in tight battle formation. That’s how they slept—those who managed sleep—shoes off, uniform on, or at least partially so, loaded muskets tucked at easy reach beside them, prepared to spring into action at daybreak. Some were lucky enough to have bedrolls, providing modest cover against the elements. Others stretched out on the damp earth.

Because a campfire is a deadly giveaway, none burned. A scattered few had been lit at nightfall by Confederate soldiers in fortunate positions, on the lee side of little knolls, shielded from the enemy. By this late hour, though, the last embers of these fires had died out. The world had been whittled down, leaving only this: a pair of fearful and recumbent armies in a night so black that, as one soldier marveled, “you could make a hole in the darkness with your finger.”

Hunger was a given. Earlier in the evening, many of the troops had eaten modest uncooked dinners—apples and corn the standard Rebel fare, and for Federals, salted beef and hardtack, a biscuit as stale as it was bland. One Union regiment had been reduced to a meal of dry coffee grounds and sugar, taken in small pinches like chewing tobacco. Some Rebels had eaten less than that.

The damp air conveyed the smell of clover trampled underfoot—a home scent that should have brought comfort. But the sense of foreboding hung too heavy. Earlier, there had been none of the usual camp jollity, no antics or sing-alongs or stories spun out in leisure. Soldiers had used the final glimmerings of daylight to write letters to parents and sweethearts. With nightfall, the men clung to their last sightings of the enemy—much too close. In the darkness, crouched officers moved from soldier to soldier, seeking out green recruits and those they’d identified as potential problems. The officers whispered reassurance, but also, through clenched teeth, hissed stern commands: Do not bolt from the ranks tomorrow! Don’t you dare let down your fellow soldiers!

An entire Union division marched to the ammo wagons in the middle of the night to pick up eighty rounds. That was twice the normal allotment, doled out with a telling somberness. This was no ordinary night of campaigning. For the veterans, it bore little relation to previous eves of battle. Some soldiers had fallen into fitful sleep, while others lay awake, minds racing. “When was the fight to begin? How long would it last? Who would win?” wondered Thomas Livermore of the 5th New Hampshire. “Was I to be killed, to be torn with a shell, or pierced with a bullet? What was death? How quickly should I be in the other world if I were killed?”

The night was filled with odd sounds and unexplained happenings—portents maybe. A Union soldier tripped over a pet dog sleeping beside its owner, then lurched into a stand of muskets. The stand collapsed with a clatter. It was like a stone hitting the calm surface of a pond, as ripples of anxiety traveled outward then outward. For both sides, there was such a palpable sense of presence, as if untold thousands of enemy soldiers had merged in the darkness into a single hulking entity, breathing, watchful, and horrifyingly aware.

In the small hours, a dreamy sense of unreality set in. Entire combat corps arrived from god-knows-where and tromped in columns among the reclining soldiers, searching out their spots in the next day’s battle scheme. These late arrivals had been instructed to muffle their canteens and other metal objects to avoid making noise. No matter: amid the quiet, thousands of marching footfalls sufficed, creating the din of a rolling avalanche. Yet the uneasy stillness always returned. Soon the pickets, standing watch in forward positions, could once again hear the enemy’s whispers, even make out the words. Sometimes the tension grew too great. A picket would open fire, muzzle flashing. A shot might be fired in return. But these little exchanges quickly died out. There was no sense shooting into pitch blackness.

Deep into the night—so deep that no one could even place the hour with certainty—some Rebel horses grew spooked and broke free from their ropes. The animals stomped and whinnied, then ran in maddened circles as soldiers tried to corral them, before breaking for the rear and galloping off across the darkened countryside.

And then—all too soon—the first faint hint of daylight appeared. It was roughly 5:45 A.M. A Rebel artillery team at Nicodemus Heights used the paltry glow to home in on a Federal position, then sent a cannon shell arcing across the dawn sky.

The two opposing armies, it turns out, were arrayed against each other in a broad and beautiful valley. The location was Western Maryland: incredibly, Confederates had undertaken an invasion of the North. The valley was about twenty miles in width, its western border formed by Appalachian peaks, obscure in the distance. Nearer loomed the valley’s other border, South Mountain, a purplish hump in the hazy dawn. From here, the land sloped gradually down, moving through gentle undulations, forming little hollows and hillocks, as if South Mountain was melting across the valley floor. The morning was cool, about 65 degrees, although the temperature would rise by about 10 degrees as the day drew on. The air was moist and close, thanks to the previous night’s drizzle. Little wisps of fog gathered in the low-lying areas.

Meandering through the landscape was the Antietam, still anonymous for another few hours, just a simple creek blessedly free of any larger significance or associations. Its water assumed a deep green hue in the overcast dawn; its movement seemed languid, though this could be deceptive. “Antietam” means “swift flowing water” in the language of the Delaware Indians. Its banks, rising in some spots at a severe pitch, were thickly grown with silver maple, sycamore, and witch hazel. The Antietam wended across the valley floor, spanned by a series of stone bridges, before emptying into the Potomac, which formed the border between Maryland and Virginia.

This was farm country, some of the finest on the continent. In geological terms, the valley is what’s known as a karst, a stretch of land undergirded by eroding limestone and shot through with subterranean springs. In practical terms, this meant a ready water supply, nutrient-rich soil, and crops growing in near-biblical abundance. Large stone houses, home to prosperous farmers, dotted the countryside, their spreads staked out by wooden zigzag fences. On this September morning, the wheat had been harvested and the fields lay in stubble. Some of the corn had been harvested, too, while select fields stood man-high and nearly ripe. Most farmers set aside an acre or so as orchards, furnishing peaches for preserves and apples for cider. These fruits were plump and ready to pick. Crisscrossing the countryside were turnpikes and farm lanes, including the remnants of the Great Wagon Road, which had stretched during the early 1700s from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia. The presence of good roads, necessary in peacetime to transport the region’s agricultural bounty to market, was one of the reasons that in wartime, two armies had converged in the area.

Situated on a plateau about halfway between Antietam Creek and the Potomac was Sharpsburg, also enjoying its final moments of being unknown to a larger world. The town was ninety-nine years old, founded before the Revolution, and named after Horatio Sharpe, a governor of colonial Maryland. During its earliest days, Sharpsburg had entertained dreams of grandeur. In 1790, the town fathers wrote a couple letters to President Washington, touting the six good springs and twenty-one wells, making it ideally suited to serve as capital of the fledgling nation. More recently, the biggest diversion was a public examination of Sunday school students, held each winter. Sharpsburg was laid out in a simple grid, consisting of eight streets, including Main Street, High Street, and one with no name at all. Its 1,300 residents included masons, millers, potters, broom makers, and glassblowers.

The citizens of this section of Western Maryland (both the Sharpsburg townfolk and the farmers in the surrounding countryside) were of varied heritages, with ancestors hailing from England, Scotland, France, and Switzerland. Irish workers had built a stretch of the C&O Canal near Sharpsburg, and many had decided to settle in the area after the job was done. A number of the farmers were of German stock. Among them were some belonging to a religious sect called the German Baptist Brethren, also known as Dunkers. The name stemmed from their belief in total-immersion baptism, a practice that had invited persecution in the Old Country, driving them to emigrate in search of religious freedom. The Dunkers were modest in dress, abstemious in habits; they refused all alcohol, opposed slavery, and were unwavering pacifists. In the New World, they conducted their full-on baptisms in Antietam Creek without incident.

For all the diversity, however, the citizens shared one thing in common. Almost none were present on this Wednesday morning. The previous Sunday, there had been fighting in the passes that run through South Mountain. During services, the boom of cannon had rattled church walls and shaken the congregations. Then, over the past few days, residents had looked on fearfully as the two huge armies staked out positions in their valley. This had served as fair warning. As the countryside had filled up with soldiers, it had emptied of civilians. Almost everyone had fled to safer spots.

Samuel Poffenberger, owner of eight horses, had wrapped feed sacks around their hoofs, the better to muffle their footfalls, then hidden them away in his cellar. Joseph and Sarah Sherrick had hidden $3,000 worth of gold in a stone wall on their land. Then, these and other farmers had made arrangements to wait out the battle in other locations. The Mumma family, husband Samuel, wife Elizabeth, and ten children, sought refuge in a church about five miles north of Sharpsburg. Left behind, their chickens, hogs, and sheep had free run of their 186-acre farm. A number of residents were hiding out in the Killiansburg Cave near the C&O Canal.

Still, a handful of people, for whatever reason, decided to stay put. An old couple who had lived in Sharpsburg all their lives concluded they had no place else to go. If they were to die here, so be it. The morning found the Kretzer family, with five children, huddled in the basement of their large house on Main Street, along with a number of their neighbors.

Even as that inaugural Rebel shell continued on its path, a Union artillery team sent its opening salvo arcing through the dawn sky.

From high in the air, from a shell’s-eye view, it would have been possible to get a fuller picture of the two opposing armies. As a consequence of having a larger force, about 55,000 men, the Union front was longer, arrayed north to south over the countryside for about three miles. (By midday, an additional 16,000 Federals would arrive on the battlefield.) The Confederate force was considerably smaller, roughly 35,000, and these men were arranged along a front that also stretched north to south, for about two miles. Because the Union force was larger, it curved around the Rebel front, pressing down on it, threatening.

From the air, the two armies would have looked a bit like a pair of upside-down J’s, the smaller one representing the Rebels.

The troop placement represented the strategic cerebrations of the opposing commanding generals, the Union’s George McClellan, and for the Confederates, Robert Lee. Newspapers had only just started using his middle initial, a practice he never much cared for. It was still early in the war, and the two men hadn’t yet hardened in the public imagination into the myth-bound figures that they would become.

Over the preceding days and hours, McClellan and Lee had arranged their combat units with obsessive care. Although the reality of battle was about to shatter their every plan and assumption, here at the outset a kind of balance had been achieved. The Rebels were the invaders, yet they were in a defensive position. They possessed the smaller force, yet it was more experienced; more than half of Lee’s men had been in at least three major battles, while McClellan’s army brimmed with green recruits. Lee, drawing on his engineering experience, had also staked out the superior higher ground, along the ridges running to the east of Sharpsburg. Over much of the field, winding Antietam Creek lay before the Confederates, providing a barrier to Yankee attack. Several miles to the rear was a spot for fording across the Potomac, an exit route back into Virginia if needed.