A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee

by John Esten Cooke

From the ground thus occupied, the Federal forces were unable to dislodge him, and the great struggle of "the left at Sharpsburg" was over. It had begun at dawn and was decided by ten or eleven o'clock, and the troops on both sides had fought as resolutely as in any other action of the war. The event had been decided by the pertinacity of the Southern troops, and by the prompt movement of reënforcements by General Lee from his right and centre. Posted near his centre, he had surveyed at one glance the whole field of action; the design of General McClellan to direct his main assault upon the Confederate left was promptly penetrated, and the rapid concentration of the Southern forces in that quarter had, by defeating this movement, decided the result of the battle.

Attacks on the Confederate centre and right followed that upon the left. In the centre a great disaster was at one time imminent. Owing to a mistake of orders, the brave General Rhodes had drawn back his brigade posted there—this was seen by the enemy—and a sudden rush was made by them with the view of piercing Lee's centre. The promptness and courage of a few officers and a small body of troops defeated this attempt. General D.H. Hill rallied a few hundred men, and opened fire with a single gun, and Colonel Cooke faced the enemy with his regiment, "standing boldly in line," says General Lee, "without a cartridge." The stand made by this small force saved the army from serious disaster; the Federal line retired, but a last assault was soon begun, this time against the Confederate right. It continued in a somewhat desultory manner until four in the evening, when, having massed a heavy column under General Burnside, opposite the bridge in front of Lee's right wing, General McClellan forced the bridge and carried the crest beyond.

The moment was critical, as the Confederate force at this point was less than three thousand men. But, fortunately, reënforcements arrived, consisting of A.P. Hill's forces from Harper's Ferry. These attacked the enemy, drove him from the hill across the Antietam again; and so threatening did the situation at that moment appear to General McClellan, that he is said to have sent General Burnside the message: "Hold your ground! If you cannot, then the bridge, to the last man. Always the bridge! If the bridge is lost, all is lost!"

The urgency of this order sufficiently indicates that the Federal commander was not without solicitude for the safety of his own left wing. Ignorant, doubtless, of the extremely small force which had thus repulsed General Burnside, in all four thousand five hundred men, he feared that General Lee would cross the bridge, assail his left, and that the hard-fought day might end in disaster to his own army. That General Lee contemplated this movement, in spite of the disproportion of numbers, is intimated in his official report. "It was nearly dark," he says, "and the Federal artillery was massed to defend the bridge, with General Porter's corps, consisting of fresh troops, behind it. Under these circumstances," he adds, "it was deemed injudicious to push our advantage further in the face of fresh troops of the enemy much exceeding our own."

The idea of an advance against the Federal left was accordingly abandoned, and a movement of Jackson's command, which Lee directed, with the view of turning the Federal right, was discontinued from the same considerations. Night had come, both sides were worn out, neither of the two great adversaries cared to risk another struggle, and the bitterly-contested battle of Sharpsburg was over.

The two armies remained facing each other throughout the following day. During the night of this day, Lee crossed with his army back into Virginia. He states his reasons for this: "As we could not look for a material increase of strength," he says, "and the enemy's force could be largely and rapidly augmented, it was not thought prudent to wait until he should be ready again to offer battle."

General McClellan does not seem to have been able to renew the struggle at that time. "The next morning," he says, referring to the day succeeding the battle, "I found that our loss had been so great, and there was so much disorganization in some of the commands, that I did not consider it proper to renew the attack that day."

This decision of General McClellan's subjected him subsequently to very harsh criticism from the Federal authorities, the theory having obtained at Washington that he had had it in his power, by renewing the battle, to cut Lee to pieces. Of the probability of such a result the reader will form his own judgment. The ground for such a conclusion seems slight. The loss and disorganization were, it would seem, even greater on the Federal than on the Confederate side, and Lee would have probably been better able to sustain an attack than General McClellan to make it. It will be seen that General Meade afterward, under circumstances more favorable still, declined to attack Lee at Williamsport. If one of the two commanders be greatly censured, the other must be also, and the world will be always apt to conclude that they knew what could be effected better than the civilians.

But General McClellan did make an attempt to "crush Lee," such as the authorities at Washington desired, and its result may possibly throw light on the point in discussion.

On the night of the 19th, Lee having crossed the Potomac on the night of the 18th, General McClellan sent a considerable force across the river near Shepherdstown, which drove off the Confederate artillery there, and at daylight formed line of battle on the south bank, protected by their cannon north of the river. Of the brief but bloody engagement which followed—an incident of the war little dwelt upon in the histories—General A.P. Hill, who was sent by Lee to repulse the enemy, gives an animated account. "The Federal artillery, to the number of seventy pieces," he says, "lined the opposite heights, and their infantry was strongly posted on the crest of the Virginia hills. When he advanced with his division, he was met by the most tremendous fire of artillery he ever saw," but the men continued to move on without wavering, and the attack resulted in the complete rout of the enemy, who were "driven pell-mell into the river," the current of which was "blue with floating bodies." General Hill chronicles this incident in terms of unwonted eloquence, and declares that, by the account of the enemy themselves, they lost "three thousand men killed and drowned from one brigade," which appears to be an exaggeration. His own loss was, in killed and wounded, two hundred and sixty-one.