Taken at the Flood

Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862

Joseph L. Harsh

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1996
• eBook ISBN: 9781612772066
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Complementing Confederate Tide Rising, which covers the origins of the Maryland campaign, Taken at the Flood is a detailed account of the military campaign itself. It focuses on military policy and strategy and the context necessary to understand that strategy. A fair appraisal of the campaign requires a full appraisal of the circumstances under which the two commanders, Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan, labored. Harsh attempts to discover what they believed their responsibilities were and what they tried to accomplish; to evaluate the human and logistical resources at their disposal; and to determine what they knew and when the learned it.

Antietam has languished in the long, obscuring shadow cast by Gettysburg. Harsh advocates rethinking the Maryland campaign and promotes the argument that Antietam was one of the most interesting, critical, and potentially enlightening episodes in U.S. history.

REPRISE

“From the interior to the frontier”

Lee Reaches the Potomac,
September 1, 1862

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, dawned clear and warm. The first morning of a new and momentous month in Confederate history promised to be a typical summer’s day and offered no premonition of the savage thunderstorm already building behind the Blue Ridge Mountains. In northern Virginia, on the border between Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, one-half of Robert E. Lee’s army was on the march to interpose itself between the retreating Federal army of John Pope and the forts of Washington, D.C. Lee was determined to inflict maximum damage upon Pope and to reap the greatest results from the victory at Second Manassas. Unable to attack the Federals at Centreville, where Pope had sought refuge in the entrenchments the Confederates had built the previous year, Lee had the day before sent Stonewall Jackson on a turning movement to reach the enemy’s rear.

At an early hour on the 1st, Jackson resumed his march eastward down the Little River Turnpike with his divisions in reverse order from the preceding day. Jackson’s division (under Starke) led the way, followed by Ewell (under Lawton), and last came A. P. Hill. Stonewall had heard nothing from the cavalry about what lay ahead, and necessarily the column moved slowly and cautiously. By late morning he had covered a scant four miles to Chantilly plantation, where he was joined by Jeb Stuart, who had just returned from a ride to Frying Pan.¹

Stuart could tell Jackson that nothing but Pope’s wagontrain and its guards lay ahead, but the information was old and apparently did not satisfy Stonewall, who wisely directed the cavalry to undertake a fresh scout of the ground up to Fairfax Court House. While sending Fitz Lee’s brigade directly east to Ox Hill, Stuart accompanied Robertson’s brigade in a sweep south of the Little River Turnpike. Although most of Pope’s army was now strung out along the Warrenton Turnpike—which because of its acute angle brought the enemy within two miles of Ox Hill—Stuart reported he found “no force but a small one of cavalry was to be found nearer than Centreville.”²

The sun had long since been cast over with clouds by the time the cavalry chief joined Robertson’s brigade at Ox Hill. Here he waited until Jackson covered the two miles from Chantilly and arrived with the van of the infantry at about four o’clock. As towering thunderheads topped the horizon, Stonewall ordered Stuart to push skirmishers ahead to Fairfax Court House. When the Confederate horsemen had advanced about two miles and reached the headwaters of Difficult Run, just west of Jermantown and a mile short of Fairfax Court House, they encountered “wooded ridges… firmly held by infantry and artillery,” which “plainly indicated” the enemy intended to “make a stand.” Jackson deployed the four brigades of the Stonewall division under William Starke, and then he decided—or at least so was Stuart’s understanding—that he would wait for the arrival of Longstreet’s men before pushing forward. In the meantime, Stuart set out for Flint Hill with Fitz Lee’s brigade to uncover and, if possible, turn the Federal flank to the north.³

John Pope, forewarned by the capture of his cavalry patrols and the shelling of his trains on the previous day, acted in a timely fashion to counter the threat to his rear and right flank. He ordered Joseph Hooker with elements of McDowell’s and Franklin’s corps into line at Jermantown to cover the retreat to Fairfax Court House. At two o’clock Pope had also ordered Reno’s corps to move northward from the Warrenton Turnpike to take an advanced position at Ox Hill.

Shortly after Jackson’s arrival at Ox Hill at four o’clock, Confederate scouts reported an enemy force (Reno) was approaching on the Confederate right flank from the south.⁴ Thus, Stonewall was forced to shift his attention from Hooker in his front to the new threat on his right side, and Lee’s offensive to turn Pope’s position became a defensive battle to protect the exposed flank of the attacking column.

Jackson drew two brigades from his rear division under A. P. Hill and threw them into the thick woods south of the Little River Turnpike. Before they had advanced more than several hundred yards, skirmishers from the brigades of Branch and Field (Brockenbrough) encountered the advancing skirmishers of Isaac Stevens’s small division of Reno’s corps near the Reid farmhouse. It was a classic meeting engagement in which the two sides discovered each other by running into one another. The battle that ensued was confused and desperate. Eventually all twelve regiments of Reno’s small command became engaged, and Jackson committed brigade after brigade of his own until nearly all of his three divisions formed an arc south of the turnpike.

At five o’clock the skies finally gave way and torrents of water drenched the armies. Violent winds drove the rain into the soldiers’ faces, while lightning rent the gloomy woods and thunder louder than the artillery shook the trees.⁵ At the start of the battle, Jackson outnumbered his foe nearly ten to one; yet due to fatigue and the storm, it was nearly six o’clock before his men began to press Reno from the field. Philip Kearny’s division of the Third Corps arrived in time to stabilize the Federal line, and when darkness came early to the stormy field both sides were back approximately to where they had begun. The Union lost both of its major generals, Stevens and Kearny, killed in the vicious little fight. The Confederates suffered approximately 700 casualties out of 15,000 on the field, while the Federals lost 500 out of 6,000.⁶

In the last half-hour of twilight, the head of Longstreet’s column approached Ox Hill on the Little River Turnpike, and Old Peter offered his lead brigades to join the fray. He also had the gall to comment to Jackson, “General, your men don’t appear to work well today.” Considering the extra share of work Jackson’s men had shouldered since August 25, Stonewall might have been forgiven a sharp reply. Instead, he said simply, “No, but I hope it will prove a victory in the morning” and declined to commit any further forces to the waning battle.⁷ Although Longstreet’s barb was ungenerous, it struck close to the truth. As Dorsey Pender, brigade commander in A. P. Hill’s division, would confess in a letter to his wife the next day, “None of us seemed anxious for the fight or did ourselves much credit.”⁸

Lee’s movements on September 1 are not well chronicled. Likely he was in great pain from the accident of the previous day, when he had fallen and sprained both hands and broken bones in his right one. He may have spent the forenoon confined to his tent. Nonetheless, around midday he set out before Longstreet and arrived by ambulance sometime before the battle to establish headquarters in a small farmhouse along the Little River Turnpike between Chantilly and Ox Hill. Here he first discovered the extent to which his injured hands restricted his capacity to command. On foot he was unable to find a vantage from which he could see much or get a feel for the tactical situation.⁹ After the fighting started he made no apparent attempt to influence the action. Indeed, untypically he allowed his mind to drift to other matters.

Around five o’clock, Lee summoned Col. Thomas Munford of the 2d Virginia Cavalry to headquarters for a special assignment. The Confederate commander showed Munford a letter that had just arrived from an old friend in Leesburg. John Janney who as president of the Virginia Secession Convention had conferred on Lee the command of the Virginia state forces the previous spring, had written asking for protection. The Loudoun Rangers, a company of Union loyalists under Capt. Sam Means, were in the town threatening to arrest and carry away prominent Confederates on the next day. “We must crush out those people,” Lee told Munford, ordering him to leave behind his wagons so he might travel quickly. “I shall expect to have a good report from you tomorrow.” As an afterthought revealing his concern over his dwindling food supply, Lee added that upon returning Munford should help the commissary department “to collect beef cattle for this army.”¹⁰

About 6:30, as an early darkness descended on the water-logged field, the rain settled into steady drizzle, the temperature began to drop, and the fighting gradually ceased. Both sides broke off the contest and withdrew a short distance to reform. Jackson returned Starke’s division to the Little River Turnpike to face east, while the divisions of Ewell and A. P. Hill lay on their arms in the soggy woods south of the road in anticipation of renewing the struggle on the morrow.¹¹ Stuart in the meantime had ridden north with Fitz Lee’s brigade in search of the Federal right flank only to find it firmly anchored at Flint Hill two miles away. When word of these developments reached army headquarters, the commanding general had to acknowledge that his turning movement had failed. Pope had found time to form a strong defensive line that stretched in a four-mile arc across the front of Fairfax Court House from the Warrenton Turnpike to Flint Hill.

The battle at Ox Hill—named Chantilly by the North—proved the fighting capacity of the Federal army was at least equal to that of the bone-tired Confederates. It also suggested that a frontal assault the following day would be bloody and perhaps useless. Wisdom—as well as Lee’s long-standing strategic policy—dictated the Confederates should probe the Federal flank at Flint Hill in the morning. Yet, Lee was rapidly running out of room for another turning movement, for seven miles behind Flint Hill lay Fort Buffalo and the perimeter of the forts that encircled Washington. On the cold, wet, dreary night of September 1, Lee might have begun to sense the strategic dilemma into which the very magnitude of his successes had carried him. It should not have come as a total surprise, since it was the logical outcome of a victory gained at Manassas.

Lee was now within twenty miles of Washington. He was as near to the Northern capital as McClellan at Harrison’s Landing had been to Richmond. “The war was thus transferred,” he would later observe in his report, “from the interior to the frontier.”¹²

Masked behind the staid prose lay miles of dusty roads, many moments of high anxiety, and excruciatingly large casualties that had in the end yielded final triumph from innumerable uncertainties. Lee must have sensed the even greater opportunity that was unfolding as the summer lengthened. Through chance, risk, and much bloodshed, he and the Army of Northern Virginia were cobbling together the series of rapid victories that might lead to Northern demoralization and Confederate independence.

Yet Lee must also have known he was not going to get much closer to Washington. Even if the morrow should bring the opportunity to deal Pope’s army a final blow, what could be accomplished on the day after next? Was he not fast approaching on the Potomac the stalemate he had faced on the James? Were his very victories to render him impotent again? On the other hand, was not the plain lesson of Chantilly that his tired army needed rest?

Heavy decisions lay on the horizon for September 2.

CHAPTER ONE

“We cannot afford to be idle”

Lee’s Strategic Dilemma,
September 2–3, 1862

WITH A BRIGHT sun rising in a cloudless sky, a sodden dawn broke glistening over the spongy meadows and dripping forests of Fairfax. Weary, hungry soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia awoke expecting another fight. It would have been the fifth day out of the last six spent in battle—a record to match the week of incessant struggle along the banks of the Chickahominy. But Tuesday, September 2, was not to be a day of combat. There would be rest for all save the cavalry, and there would be food for the fortunate. Still, “idle” would ill-depict one of the most momentous days in Confederate history. By noon Lee would end his fortnight’s campaign against John Pope. But ere the sun had set, he would start another. And it would be the most ambitious of his career thus far.¹

Pope Escapes, September 2

There can be no doubt that Robert E. Lee awoke on the morning of the 2d determined to strike Pope a blow that would wring even greater advantage from the Confederate victory. At an early hour the Army of Northern Virginia stood under arms in column of march ready for pursuit.² Concurring misfortunes had stymied Lee’s first attempt to expand success. Jeb Stuart’s casual disclosure of Confederate whereabouts, when combined with the battle fatigue of Stonewall Jackson’s troops and the surprising resilience of the enemy, had foiled the fourth turning movement of the summer. Still, the Confederate commander was not ready to admit the campaign was over. He might yet be able to deliver a coup de grace to the fleeing Federal regiments. It was a question of time and maneuvering space.

Stuart put his troopers in the saddle at daybreak to probe the enemy position. Unfortunately, Jeb had only Fitz Lee’s brigade at hand for the work, since Robertson’s brigade (by a “misapprehension” of orders) had returned to the vicinity of Chantilly in the rear of the Confederate army. Scouts soon reported the Federals had withdrawn from the Ox Hill battlefield and from Centreville, but the enemy remained in a strong defensive line behind Difficult Creek, which ran south from Flint Hill to the Little River Turnpike. Pope’s compact front covering the western face of Fairfax Court House did not invite assault. At this timely juncture, Wade Hampton’s brigade of cavalry arrived on the field after its long journey from Richmond and reported to the cavalry chief. Stuart immediately took the fresh regiments of horse along with two pieces of Pelham’s flying artillery to try to turn the Federal flank at Flint Hill. But, as had been true the previous evening, Stuart could find no soft spot in the enemy’s position. And by midmorning the two sides fell into desultory skirmishing.³

To Lee, who spent the morning near Ox Hill conferring with Longstreet and Jackson and receiving frequent reports from the cavalry, it may have seemed for a brief moment as if the frustrating stalemate on the Rappahannock was to reemerge in northern Virginia.⁴ But the precedent was to be the Rapidan and not the Rappahannock, for once again John Pope had lost the will to defend a strong position. In spite of the presence of five fresh divisions in Sumner’s Second and Franklin’s Sixth Corps, Pope decided early in the morning he must abandon the field and retire to Washington.⁵ Lee’s continued aggressiveness had shaken him, and, lacking faith in many of his subordinates—especially those from McClellan’s Army of the Potomac—the Federal commander decided he could only pull his shattered army together within the capital’s defenses.

At 7:30 in the morning, Pope wired Halleck that his men had gotten “an intense idea among them that they must get behind the intrenchments.” He characterized the enemy as “in very heavy force,” and he urged Halleck to ride to the front to see the situation for himself. He correctly divined that the Confederates would again try to turn his right flank; and then he ended darkly, “You had best look out well for your communications. The enemy from the beginning has been throwing his rear toward the north, and every movement shows that he means to make trouble i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Introduction. “On such a full sea…”
• Reprise. “From the interior to the frontier”: Lee Reaches the Potomac, September 1, 1862
• 1. “We cannot afford to be idle”: Lee’s Strategic Dilemma, September 2—3, 1862
• 2. “More fully persuaded”: Lee Crosses the Potomac, September 4—6,1862
• 3. “In this I was disappointed”: Lee Revises His Strategy, September 7-9, 1862
• 4. “Intercept such as may attempt escape”: Lee’s Best-Laid Plans, September 10—12, 1862
• 5. “More rapidly than convenient”: Lee’s Plans Unravel, September 13, 1862
• 6. “The day has gone against us “: Lee Stands at the Mountain Gaps, September 14, 1862
• 7. “We will make our stand on these hills”: Lee’s Hope Renewed, September 15, 1862
• 8. “All will be right”: Lee’s Last Chance for Maneuver, September 16, 1862
• 9. “A hard day’s work before us”: Lee’s Bloodiest Day, September 17, 1862
• 10. “Until none but heroes are left”: Antietam Endgame, September 18-21, 1862, and After
• Finale. “We have tried the utmost”: Lee’s Ventures Risked and Lost
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index