Antietam

The Soldiers' Battle

John Michael Priest, Jay Luvaas

• Publisher: Savas Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780942597097
• eBook ISBN: 9781940669519
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

"The best battlefield first-person compilation I have read . . . Here it all is—the tactics, the movement, the truth about warfare." — The Civil War Times
In Antietam: The Soldiers' Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle—September 16, 17, and 18, 1862—Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his "head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone."
Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps—which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904—together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened.

CHAPTER ONE

“Many bulls have compassed me ...”

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1862

Samuel Mumma Farm

Over the three preceding days, the war had crept agonizingly closer to Samuel Mumma’s farm, which lay nestled in a swale north of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The elderly German Baptist had listened to the dull, rolling boom of cannon and the clash of small arms fire as the opposing armies wrestled for control of the passes along South Mountain. The day before, he and his rather large family—one wife and 13 children—had been ordered to leave their home for safer territory.¹ The Mummas had carried off what they could. The evacuation went smoothly despite a tense moment when one of his daughters snapped at a Rebel officer who had offered his hand to assist her in getting over a fence.² Now, his richly blessed farm lay in the wake of a nasty rear guard action. All of his labors were about to pass for naught.

Mrs. Mumma had grown concerned about the family’s present comfort. They had spent a rough night on the floor of a church without adequate covers. Samuel consented to send off two of their sons—Dan, the eldest boy, and Samuel, Jr.—and a friend to get their necessities. The three left in the afternoon. Four rough miles and thousands of soldiers were between the church and their home.³

The West Woods

Brigadier Generals Isaac R. Trimble’s and Alexander R. Lawton’s Brigades (Major General Richard Ewell’s Division, Thomas J. Jackson’s Command) were among the first Confederate troops to stagger into the West Woods on September 15. The Georgians, North Carolinians, and Alabamians of the two brigades flopped down among the fallen trees and the limestone outcroppings of the southern section of the woods. The 21st Georgia (Trimble’s Brigade) spent the night around the simple whitewashed brick church, which occupied a slight hill in the clearing between the forest and the Hagerstown Pike, south of the Smoketown Road intersection.⁴ Captain James Nisbet (H Co., 21st GA) ambled about the church grounds. No one dared to enter the church. General Robert E. Lee had issued strict orders against looting.

Since entering Maryland the men had lived off ripened corn and green apples. The heat, the diet, and the consequential onset of diarrhea had left many good men strewn along the roadside. The ranks seemed pitifully small at morning roll call. Lawton’s Brigade (13th, 26th, 31st, 60th, and 61st GA) averaged fewer than two hundred men apiece. Trimble’s Brigade (15th AL, 12th and 21st GA, 21st NC with 1st NC Bttn. attached) could muster fewer than one hundred fifty men each.⁵ James Nisbet did not like the percentages. The Federals outnumbered them three to one.⁶ The average Yankee regiment carried three hundred to four hundred muskets.

The sky seemed to become more overcast as Nisbet walked back to his men.⁷A stranger in a foreign land, the captain pulled aside a curious civilian who had meandered into the regiment’s bivouac. He had heard the fellow chatting with his soldiers about the Dunkers and their church.

“Who are the Dunkards?” Nisbet asked.

“They are the German Baptists. This is a German settlement.”⁸

The reply confused the young Georgian. He did not know that many of his men were going to die on the property of a pacifist Christian sect.

The Dunker Church Ridge

Captain William Parker, whose Virginia battery had moved into the battalion park across the road from the church, did not agree with their pacifism. A devout Methodist and an ardent secessionist, the captain had forsaken his lucrative medical practice and his young, pregnant bride to lay down his life for his state.⁹ He neither drank, nor smoked, nor cursed. Neither did he play cards or go dancing.¹⁰ This good officer demanded unquestioned obedience and devotion to duty of himself and of his men, for whom he set the example.

The battalion (Colonel Stephen D. Lee’s) had gone into bivouac on the southern slope of the curved ridge, which ran east for about four hundred yards from the Dunker Church to Mumma’s lane. A cornfield on the far side of the lane masked the right flank of the battery from any assault in that quarter.

The Smoketown Road, to the north, cut diagonally across Parker’s front, running northeast into the East Woods, which was about six hundred yards to his right front on elevated ground. Another tall cornfield, bordered by a low worm fence, dominated the right side of the Hagerstown Pike about eight hundred yards north of his position. The ground from the Smoketown Road south to the sunken lane (to his rear) dipped into a swale, where it dropped abruptly in conformity to the bend of the Dunker Church ridge. Any infantry that approached from the northeast or the east, once it reached the swale, could charge the Pike unchecked, unless the northward facing battery, on the right, cut them down.

Parker’s outfit would be lucky to crawl away under fire from the superior Federal artillery. Yankee field batteries, with their more reliable shells, would inflict their fair share of havoc, but the 20-pounders, which the Federals had planted on the far side of the Antietam, would cause them the most harm. He and his men had watched the blue-coated engineers whacking away at the trees along the eastern ridge of the creek since first light.¹¹ The captain had a great deal on his mind. He had problems about which he could do very little. Had it not been for his tremendous inner strength, he should have collapsed from the strain of it all. William Watts Parker was an exceptional individual whose firm belief in Jesus Christ and in the tremendous power of prayer bolstered him greatly.

He had a great deal to pray about. His bride—a girl who was 18 years his junior—was in her final month of pregnancy. She wrote to him constantly. The “Doctor,” as she always called him, could not be near her in her most desperate hour.¹² He had meticulously stored all of her letters in the battery chest.

He also had two very worried parents complaining to the War Department about him. In both cases, the soldiers in concern were 15-year-olds who had, as the captain insisted, enlisted of their own free will.

Kenny Richardson’s father claimed that his son had been coerced to enlist. Parker contested that the lad had signed up to serve with his older brother, Joseph, who was currently recuperating from a wound that he received a month earlier at the Second Manassas.

The widowed Mrs. Trueman argued that her son, Johnnie, had run away to fight. Parker rebutted that, despite the fact he had no written proof, Mrs. Trueman had known of and had consented to her boy’s enrollment months before he had actually signed up. Further, the captain complained, he could not and would not “unenlist” either soldier. (As it was, the captain had privately resolved to hold both boys in reserve to shield them from needless risks.) ¹³

His crews’ diet for the past three weeks of green corn (raw or improperly cooked corn) and of ripened fruit had crippled most of them. Plagued by galled crotches, bleeding and ulcerated rectums, lice, and assorted vermin, they became quite weakened and irritable. Even the stoic doctor could not conceal his personal discomfort. He penned home that he felt “so unwell.”¹⁴ Unwell or not, he had to devote his total attention to the situation at hand.

The West Woods

All morning long, troops had sought welcome reprieve from the muggy air by bivouacking in the West Woods. Jackson’s Command (Brigadier Generals William E. Starke’s, William B. Taliaferro’s, Isaac Trimble’s, and Harry T. Hays’ Brigades) and Colonels William T. Wofford’s and E. McIver Law’s Brigades of Brigadier General John B. Hood’s Division (Major General James Longstreet’s Command) had been resting some time.

Private James Steptoe Johnston, Jr. (I Co., 11th MS), Colonel McIver Law’s orderly, lost his enthusiasm for Maryland very shortly after the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the river into the state. The people had not rallied to the Southern cause as he and so many of his comrades had anticipated.

“Instead of an outburst of overflowing joy, at the sight of their deliverers,” he wrote to his future wife, “not one solitary soul had come to the River bank to see us cross or welcome us to the soil. The country looked as one might imagine Paradise did, after the expulsion. All nature looked verdant and delightful, but no one of the human family was to be seen to enoble [sic] it.”

The ladies, generally, were cold and distant to the Confederates. They talked a big fight when it came to being loyal to the Union.¹⁵ Orderly Sergeant Frank M. Mixon (E Co., 1st SC Vols.) recalled how one young lady, about 16 years old, stood with a group of other girls and women in the doorway of Hager’s store in Hagerstown and boldly waved a National flag at the Rebs as they passed. “Why don’t you fight under this flag?” she challenged them.

One of the South Carolinians shouted back, “Hagerstown, Hager’s Store, Hager’s daughter—hurrah for Hager.” At that the entire column gave the ladies a rousing Rebel Yell.¹⁶

James Johnston noted that, while the townspeople usually shut their doors and shutters to their “deliverers” long before the soldiers reached their towns, a few of the ladies along the route sold them butter and milk, though not in large quantities. “They neither one seemed surprised that a rebel could go 48 hours, without food, but thought it had become quite natural for us to starve,” he complained. “. . . we were convinced that ‘secesh’ in Maryland was as near an humbug as anything of the day.”

Sharpsburg

The small country hamlet of Sharpsburg seemed very uninviting to many of the men in Robert E. Lee’s dirty, ragged army.¹⁷ The omens pointed toward a horrendous engagement within hours. Most of Thomas J. Jackson’s weary brigades had been lounging among the limestone outcroppings of the West Woods since about daylight. Captain Michael Shuler (H Co., 33 rd VA) used the first few minutes he could get to scratch in his diary, “Sept. 16th Tuesday Reveille a little over sunup. Waded the Potomac again and are in Maryland. . . . Marched 15 miles.”¹⁸ The night march from Harpers Ferry to Sharpsburg had left over half of the “Old Stonewall” Brigade strung out wheezing along the 17 miles of country road. By the time the brigade had crossed the Potomac at Boeteler’s Ford, barely two hundred fifty men could respond to morning call.¹⁹

They nearly lost Lieutenant Ezra E. Stickley (A Co., 5th VA) in the streets of Sharpsburg. Tempted to desert, he stayed by Colonel A. J. Grigsby’s (C.O., Winder’s Brigade) side until the brigade entered the town. At that point, the lieutenant begged leave to get some food and water from a nearby house.

As he dismounted near the gate to the yard, Stickley became increasingly nauseous. He nervously helped himself to some tomatoes and a little water, and then raced after his command. It took all of his personal reserve to conquer his fear and not “disappear.”²⁰

The lieutenant was not alone in his sentiments. A large portion of Lee’s army did not care to enter Maryland. Prior to invading the state, General Robert E. Lee issued a general order that allowed barefoot men to remain in Virginia with the wagons. Second Lieutenant Robert T. Hubard (G. Co., 3rd VA Cav.) watched grimy infantrymen deliberately remove their footgear and throw them away. He had never seen so many stragglers before. The army was going into this next engagement greatly below its normal strength.

Morale was low in that part of the Army of Northern Virginia t...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• As I Understand the Battle—The Author’s Perspectives Years Later
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• A Note about the Chapter Titles
• CHAPTER ONE: “Many bulls have compassed me . . .”
• CHAPTER TWO: “They gaped upon me . . . as a ravening and a roaring lion.”
• CHAPTER THREE: “My heart . . . is melted in the midst of my bowels.”
• CHAPTER FOUR: “. . . thou hast brought me unto the dust of death.”
• CHAPTER FIVE: “The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me.”
• CHAPTER SIX: “Deliver my soul from the sword . . .”
• CHAPTER SEVEN: “. . . Be not far from me for trouble is near . . .”
• CHAPTER EIGHT: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
• CHAPTER NINE: “Oh my God, I cry in the daytime but thou hearest not . . .”
• CHAPTER TEN: “. . . be thou not far from me, O Lord.”
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: “O my strength, haste thee to help me.”
• CHAPTER TWELVE: “Strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.”
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN: “All they that see me laugh me to scorn . . .”
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN: “They cried unto thee and were delivered.”
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN: “Why art thou so far from helping me . . .”
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN: “I am poured out like water . . .”
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: “They look and stare upon me.”
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index