* First contact between the armies of Lee and McClellan took place on 14 September, in the passes over South Mountain in western Maryland. The Confederates managed to stave off Union attacks -- and also capture Harper's Ferry -- to then fall back west to the town of Sharpsburg, where they camped and prepared for battle come the next morning.
* General McClellan was not taken unaware by the Confederate assault on Harper's Ferry. Union signalmen had reported the sounds of fighting on Saturday afternoon, 13 September, while McClellan was planning an attack of his own.
McClellan's overestimates of Confederate strength made him cautious as usual. Geography worked against the Federals, to no surprise, since the advantages the terrain offered an invader had figured greatly in Lee's calculations in going North in the first place.
The National Road ran through Frederick in a direction roughly parallel to the Potomac, about a dozen miles away. It cut through a ridge named Catoctin Mountain about 6 miles (10 kilometers) to the west, and then cut through the more formidable ridge of South Mountain at a place called Turner's Gap, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) beyond to the west. The city of Boonsboro, where McClellan assumed the bulk of Lee's forces were waiting for him, was just beyond Turner's Gap.
South Mountain is a very long ridge, running 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Potomac to Pennsylvania. It presented a barrier to troops moving to the aid of the besieged men in Harper's Ferry, just on the far side of the ridge. There was another pass over the ridge to the south, named Crampton's Gap, about halfway between Turner's Gap and the Potomac, that provided the quickest route for marching to the defense of the town.
The multiple elements of Lee's command were scattered, with D.H. Hill in Boonsboro; Lee and Longstreet directly to the north in Hagerstown; and McLaws', Walker's, and Jackson's commands closing in on Harper's Ferry to the southwest. The Confederate forces formed a shallow triangle, with the base running from Harper's Ferry to Hagerstown. Along the base of this triangle, to the west of Boonsboro, was the town of Sharpsburg, nestled between the Potomac and a stream named Antietam Creek.
McClellan issued his marching orders on the evening of 13 September. The bulk of the army would advance up the National Road towards Turner's Gap. 18,000 men, under Major General William Franklin, would move to relieve Harper's Ferry through Crampton's Gap. Infuriatingly, McClellan saw no need for haste. The army would get a good night's sleep and depart in the morning to its assigned objectives. Unfortunately, the grand advantage that McClellan had obtained over the enemy could not last indefinitely, and in fact it was already starting to unravel.
Jeb Stuart's cavalrymen were very good at their task of gathering intelligence, and that evening Stuart sent two dispatches to Lee in Hagerstown. The first reported how a Southern-leaning citizen of Frederick, who had been with the delegation that had been visiting with McClellan when the lost order arrived, had noticed the excitement among the Union generals and had concluded something was up. The second reported the presence of hundreds of campfires not far away from Turner's Gap. Lee immediately sent orders to McLaws and Jackson at Harper's Ferry warning them of Federal movements in their direction, and telling them to hurry. He also informed Stuart and D.H. Hill that Turner's Gap was to be held "at all hazards", and that Longstreet would join them with most of his troops in the morning.
Longstreet objected vigorously. His men, he felt, would be in no condition to carry on a serious fight after a forced march. He proposed as an alternative that his and Hill's forces fall back to Sharpsburg, where they could organize a defense and wait for the other elements to get back from Harper's Ferry. If all else failed, they could ford the nearby Potomac and escape. Lee was not considering escape, and overruled Longstreet.
As an odd footnote to all this excitement, while McClellan had been writing up the orders for his own men, he remembered that the local authorities in Pennsylvania had been throwing together a force to resist the Confederates moving towards their border. While no scratch force of untrained militia was likely to do more than slow Lee down a little should it come to a fight, they could at least distract him, and so on general principles McClellan sent a wire to Chambersburg, just north of Hagerstown across the Pennsylvania state line, informing "the commander of US forces at Chambersburg" to concentrate and obstruct Lee's advance. The commander of US forces there was an influential Pennsylvania newspaper editor and politician named Alexander K. McClure, who had been in Washington when the current emergency began; he had been given a major's rank, and orders to go home and raise troops. All he could find were 20 home guardsmen. Lacking anything else to do, he set them to patrolling the roads.
The news of this military endeavor was relayed to Governor Curtin in the state capitol, Harrisburg. By chance, Congressman Thad Stevens -- one of the Radical Republicans, vehement in the prosecution of the war -- was with him and observed: "Well, McClure will do something. If he can't do better, he'll instruct the toll-gate keeper not to permit Lee's army to pass through." Then Stevens added: "But as to McClellan, God only knows what he'll do."
* The morning of Sunday, 14 September, came bright and warm as the Federals moved out to their objectives in three columns, the main column advancing on Turner's gap appearing to an onlooker as "a monstrous, crawling, blue-black snake, miles long." McClellan rode among them on Dan Webster, to the resounding cheers of the soldiers, who even in some cases hugged the legs of the horse.
The lead element in the advance column was a 3,000-man division of Ohio and West Virginia men under the command of Brigadier General Jacob Cox, along with cavalry elements under Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton. Things went quietly enough in the early morning, and then Cox ran into Colonel Augustus Moor, who had been captured when the Federals moved into Frederick, two days before. Moor had been paroled and was making his way back to the army. When Cox told him that his division was on the way to Turner's Gap, Moor exclaimed: "My God! Be careful!" He would say no more, however, since the terms of his parole stated that he should not provide any intelligence to his comrades.
Cox and Pleasonton became more cautious, and when they reached the base of South Mountain they decided not to go up the main road. They went up a side road to the south up to another pass named Fox's Gap instead, hoping to flank any Confederate defenders who might be there. They almost made it to the crest when they ran into a 1,000-man brigade of D.H. Hill's infantry, North Carolinans under Brigadier General Samuel Garland JR, supported by 200 cavalry. The rebels were waiting behind a stone wall and started firing on the Federals.
It was about 9:00 AM. The fighting became intense, and an Ohio regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, a future US president, circled around to flank out the rebels. Although Hayes was wounded in the arm, the Yankees did turn the Confederate flank and poured fire down on them. The rebels resisted furiously, but the Federals in front of them came in over the stone wall and attacked them with bayonets and rifle butts. Garland was killed, other officers were shot down, and the rebels finally broke and ran. The Union soldiers collected about 200 prisoners, with the rest of the North Carolinans scattered and taken off the playing board.
By this time, it was 11:00 AM. At Turner's Gap, D.H. Hill found himself in a dangerous position. He had only managed to get two brigades up South Mountain to face the Yankees, and now one of them was in disarray, while his other three brigades were still on the march from Boonsboro. Worse, although Turner's Gap sounded like a defensible position, it was easily flanked from both sides -- there being were good roads all over the area that the Yankees had failed to notice. Hill was an aggressive general, to put it lightly, but on earlier observing the huge columns of Federals approaching him he had understood the Biblical poet who spoke of the awe-inspiring as "terrible as an army with banners". He thought it "a grand and glorious spectacle, and it was impossible to look at it without admiration." He said that he never experienced a greater loneliness than he did in that pass, waiting for the blow to fall.
It had now fallen, and Hill reacted. To slow down Cox's advance, he sent out a pair of guns and set up a line consisting of teamsters, cooks, couriers, and anyone else he could scrape up in order to at least give an appearance of strength. The two guns fired canister at the Federals and managed to slow them down sufficiently to allow one of Hill's reinforcing brigades to arrive and add some real strength to the defense. By noon, Cox had given up the advance and had fallen back to wait for reinforcements.
The fighting flared up again about 2:00 PM when a division of Federal reinforcements reached Cox's men at Fox's Gap. The fresh troops, though green, threw themselves into the fight enthusiastically, and in an hour Hill's men were on the edge of collapse. However, Hill had finally got his other three brigades up the mountain, and the advance elements of Lee and Longstreet's command began to file in to bolster the Confederate line. They had marched 13 miles (21 kilometers) over hard terrain since sunup and were tired, but were still looking for a fight. Lee was mounted on his horse Traveler, even though his hands were still in splints; an aide occasionally took the reins to lead the horse. As Lee passed Hood's division of Texans, they took up the chant: "Hood! Hood! Give us Hood!"
Lee raised his hat to them and said: "You shall have him, gentlemen!" When Hood came up with the tail of the column, Lee said to him: "General, here I am just on the eve of entering into battle, and with one of my best officers under arrest. If you merely say that you regret this occurrence" -- meaning the quarrel that had led to his arrest -- "I will release you and restore you to the command of your division." Hood shook his head and said that he could not consistently do so. Lee urged him again, Hood refused again, and Lee, likely swallowing his exasperation at a man who put his personal pride ahead of duty, told him: "Well, I will suspend your arrest until the impending battle is decided." As Hood rode up to his troops, he was greeted with shouts and cheers. With the Texans to back them up, Confederate resistance at Fox's Gap stiffened and held.
Bafflingly, while the fighting raged on at Fox's Gap, McClellan was unable or unwilling to press the rebels at other points. It wasn't until about 4:00 PM that he had most of 1 Corps -- under Major General Joseph Hooker -- moved to the north of Turner's Gap to flank the rebels. Hooker sent two divisions, one under Brigadier General John Hatch, another under Brigadier General George Gordon Meade, to engage a brigade of Alabaman soldiers under Brigadier General Robert Rodes who were holding the line along the ridge of the mountain. Rodes was completely outnumbered and hard pressed; the most he could hope to do was buy time.
In the meantime, back at Turner's Gap, John Gibbon's Iron Brigade attacked by themselves straight up the National Turnpike. Gibbon set up a pair of 12-pounder (5.4-kilogram) Napoleans for support and sent his men forward. They jumped from rocks to logs to fences, moving persistently up the slope in the face of enemy fire.
* As the shadows grew long, fighting flared and sputtered all along the line. At Fox's Gap to the south, the Federals were becoming frustrated in their repeated attempts to break the Confederates' reinforced line. About sundown, Major General Jesse Reno was scouting around to find an opportunity when he came under fire and was hit. His soldiers carried him back from the firing line. When he saw a friend, Brigadier General Samuel Sturgis, Reno called out to him in a loud and cheerful voice: "Hallo, Sam, I'm dead!" -- as though it were a joke. Sturgis replied that it couldn't be as bad as all that, Reno assured him it was, and died a few moments later to prove the point. He was 39 years old. Darkness eventually put an end to the fighting.
To the north, Hatch's division of Yankees had thrown back Rodes' advance skirmishers and moved up quickly, only to get into a firefight at a cornfield. Hatch was seriously wounded, with Brigadier General Abner Doubleday taking his place. Doubleday had his men fall back and then lie down. When the Confederates counterattacked, thinking the Yankees were retreating, the hidden Union soldiers cut them down and then rushed them, throwing them back. Similarly Meade's division, to the north of Hatch's, made strong progress against the rebels, though the Confederates gave ground stubbornly. As they fell back, three of Longstreet's brigades moved up to support them, but they were also hard pressed and forced to give ground. Darkness eventually brought a halt to the fight, giving the Confederates the relief they desperately needed.
In the center, Gibbon's Black Hats managed to push up the turnpike to the Confederate's main line of defense by dusk, where they formed up a line of battle and charged repeatedly. The fighting went on until it was so dark that the only way to shoot was to aim at the muzzle flashes of the enemy. The rebels held, losing about 100 men to over 300 of the Federals, about a quarter of Gibbon's strength.
Lee considered his situation and found it grim. If night hadn't fallen, his army would have been surely overwhelmed. The rebels had lost about 2,700 men, the Federals about 1,800. If Lee remained on the mountain, the Yankees would crush him and his men when the sun came up. Lee gave the order to withdraw towards Sharpsburg, and concluded he would have to give up the campaign and get his army back to Virginia immediately.
Both sides had lost a general that day. D.H. Hill grieved at the loss of Samuel Garland, a man with "no superiors and few equals in the service," but gloated over the death of Jesse Reno, calling him "a renegade Virginian, killed by a happy shot from the 23rd North Carolina."
BACK_TO_TOP* While the fighting had been rising and falling around Turner's Gap that afternoon, a similar battle in a smaller scale had been going on at Crampton's Gap to the south.
Franklin had arrived at Burkittsville, just east of the gap, at about noon with two of his divisions. His third division had got lost, and Franklin had wasted too much time trying to find it. There were only a few Confederate regiments defending the gap, men from Lafayette McLaws' command who had been sent hastily that morning. The rebels were hopelessly outnumbered, but in the style which was almost a custom in the Army of the Potomac, Franklin took until 3:00 PM to organize his attack.
The Federals rolled the rebels back swiftly in sharp and nasty fighting, with confused skirmishes taking place up the slope. During one such fight, two Confederates, one of them wounded, were firing from behind a rail fence, only to find themselves stranded when a Yankee rush drove their comrades off. The pair were trapped while the Union soldiers fired over their heads from the far side of the fence, while the retreating Confederates sent back a rain of bullets to which the two helpless men were completely exposed. One of them held up a handkerchief on a ramrod while the wounded fellow expected a Confederate bullet to send him "into another world", but the Federals stopped firing over the men, to pull them to safety and captivity.
During another fight, a Vermont soldier slipped and fell into a crevice, only to nearly land on a Confederate soldier who had fallen in himself. After a tense moment, the rebel laughed. The two men came to an agreement to sit out the fight, and see which side won and which of them would be a prisoner.
There was no doubt who was winning the battle. The Confederates tried to make a stand at the crest of the ridge, but they were attacked by a New Jersey regiment, one of the late Phil Kearny's units. The Federals were in a rage over the killing of their leader and hit the rebels hard while shouting out: "KEARNY! KEARNY!" -- as a battle cry. The Confederates broke and ran down the western slope.
Howell Cobb's brigade coming up to reinforce them got caught up in the panic and dissolved along with them, despite all attempts of their officers to rally them. "That I should live to experience such a disaster!" Cobb cried out, unstrung, when met by McLaws and Stuart a short time later. "What can be done? What can save us?" The New Jersey troops, who had been carrying smoothbores, recovered enough abandoned Confederate rifles to completely re-equip their regiment, along with the colors of two rebel regiments that had been abandoned in the field. The rebels lost about 750 men to 500 Federals.
McLaws had hurried up from Maryland Heights with seven regiments to meet the threat, and managed to rally the fleeing troops to form up a line of defense in Pleasant Valley, about a mile or so below the crest. Had Franklin pushed, he would have almost certainly broken McLaws' line, but it was getting dark and Franklin felt his men had fought hard enough for the day -- he was as lacking in aggressiveness as McClellan, possibly even less so. After a little probing, he ordered his men to bed down for the night.
* Six miles (ten kilometers) away, the defenders of Harper's Ferry were waiting for relief. The rebels had been busily completing their encirclement of the town and had been lobbing shells into the place for most of the afternoon. Matters seemed grim, and none of the Federals there believed they could hold out much longer. They did not know that McLaws had been forced to take most of his force off Maryland Heights to meet the threat at Crampton's Gap, and only one regiment remained there to oppose a breakout.
Colonel Miles, in fact, was so paralyzed that a regimental commander suggested to his colleagues that they mutiny and relieve Miles of command. That was too drastic for them, but one officer, Colonel Benjamin Franklin "Grimes" Davis of the 8th New York Cavalry, decided that he and his men were not simply going to sit there and wait to be swept up. Grimes Davis was almost unique in the US Army -- born in Alabama, raised in Mississippi, and said to be one of the only two Mississippians in the regular army who had remained loyal to the old flag. Despite the fact that he wore Union blue, he had a considerable amount of the dash of the Confederacy's cavalry officers. Davis went to Miles and told him that he was going to lead his cavalrymen out of Harper's Ferry after dark.
Miles loudly objected, calling the idea "wild and impractical". Davis made it clear that he didn't care much if Miles liked the idea or not, and Miles, realizing that Davis was going to leave in any case, reluctantly agreed to it.
Davis collected his men, the 8th New York Cavalry, the 12th Illinois Cavalry, and smaller units of Maryland and Rhode Island cavalry, and lined them up in two columns after dark. He had found two men who knew the area to act as scouts and lead the way. Other soldiers in the besieged town wanted to join the breakout, but Colonel Miles was adamant that they stay and hold out to the last. The garrison's sutlers, who had a reputation for exploiting soldiers, surprised the cavalrymen by handing out pouches of tobacco as the men waited for the order to move out. The sutlers would lose everything when the Confederates came in the morning, and they felt they might as well buy some good will for the future -- better the Union troops had it than the Confederates, anyway.
The twin columns set out about 9:00 PM across the pontoon bridge over the Potomac, and then, with Colonel Davis galloping with the two guides, turned west on a road towards Sharpsburg, taking a roundabout way to avoid the rebels Davis figured were concentrated between him and McClellan's army. Davis was astonished to find the road unguarded. He did not know that McLaws had much more serious worries at the moment than the possible escape of a few Federals.
The cavalrymen moved quickly, in almost dead blackness. It was so dark that the only thing most of them could see were the sparks struck by horseshoes on the stones in the road. They occasionally got lost while evading Confederate pickets and columns of troops moving in the darkness. Towards morning, as they neared Sharpsburg, they encountered encampments of rebels retreating from the fighting at Turner's Gap and had to thread their way quietly between them.
Just before dawn, they came on a Confederate wagon train moving down the road from Hagerstown. Davis decided he didn't feel like running any more and went forward in the dark to halt the lead wagon. He told them in his best Mississippi drawl that there was Federal cavalry ahead and that they needed to make a detour. They obeyed and turned onto a road that, unknown to them, would take them back north, to Pennsylvania.
There was an escort of Confederate cavalry at the rear of the wagon train. When the escort came up, Davis ordered his Illinois cavalry to rush them, scattering them in confusion. The rebel drivers suspected nothing; if they noticed the ruckus, they likely thought it was due to the Federals they had been warned about, and in a way they would have been right. It soon became light, however, and they started to realize something was wrong. A driver asked Private Henry Norton what unit he was with, and Norton replied: "The 8th New York." The startled driver replied: "The hell you say!" Some of the rebels tried to jump off the wagons and unhitch their horses, but the cavalrymen drew pistols and ordered them back to their seats.
About 9:00 AM the column arrived at Greencastle, Pennsylvania, where Davis took stock of what he had captured. It turned out to be General Longstreet's reserve ammunition train, over 40 wagons drawn by six mules each, and the Yankees had picked up 200 prisoners along with it. Davis secured his prizes and let his men get some rest in a field. The locals came out with baskets of food and drink. It was a pleasant adventure in soldiering, and one of the first times Federal cavalry had a chance to get some of the glory the rebel cavalry had been piling on themselves, even though they needed a little Southern help to do it. Davis had given Jackson and his colleagues the slip, captured supplies the rebels needed, and done it without losing a man. Private Norton later said: "The boys thought soldiering wasn't so bad after all."
BACK_TO_TOP* By that time, unfortunately, all their colleagues back in Harper's Ferry were prisoners of the rebels. The Confederates had lined the heights with over 50 guns, and when the morning came on Monday, 15 September, they began firing so ferociously that a Union officer wrote there was "not a place you could lay the palm of your hand and say it was safe." At about 8:00 AM, Miles called together his officers and, noting they were almost out of ammunition and that reinforcements were nowhere to be seen, said they would have to surrender. The officers reluctantly agreed. White flags went up, and Miles sent an officer over to Confederate lines to convey the surrender. The officer, dressed in his best uniform, met Stonewall Jackson and, in the words of Jackson's aide, "must have been somewhat astonished to find in General Jackson the worst dressed, worst mounted, most faded and dingy looking general he had ever seen anyone surrender to."
However, the Confederates didn't stop firing all at once, and a shell all but tore Miles' leg off. He died the next day. His men were so bitter at his bumbling leadership that they thought him a traitor, and wondered if the shell hadn't actually been fired by a Union gunner. When the Confederates finally arrived to take them prisoner, one Union soldier watched Stonewall Jackson ride by and said: "Boys, he is not much for looks, but if he had been in command of us we would not have been caught in this trap."
As the sutlers had expected, they were picked clean by greedy rebel soldiers, who grabbed everything they could get their hands on. In terms of military resources, the Confederates seized over 70 artillery pieces, 13,000 small arms, and 12,500 men; it would be the biggest surrender of Union forces for the entire war. The Union men were quickly paroled, but it did little to erase their humiliation. The only sour note for the rebels was the fact that the cavalry had escaped. Stuart's men had been hoping to get fresh mounts and new equipment, and the overnight disappearance of the lot was, as one of Stuart's men said, "enough to vex a saint."
The Confederates still had done well for themselves, but they had no time to gloat. They had orders to march as fast as possible for Sharpsburg, where Lee planned to regroup his scattered army. They left quickly, with McLaws holding the rear guard against an advance by Franklin's corps, still quietly facing the rebel line in Pleasant Valley. Franklin did nothing to hinder the Confederate withdrawal. In fact, Franklin had earlier reported to McClellan that the enemy outnumbered him "two to one", and never thought of taking after them.
* Lee had originally planned to simply give up the campaign, collect his army, and return to Virginia, but he had changed his mind during the night on hearing news that the Federals had failed to press their advantage against his forces around Harper's Ferry. He decided to make a stand at Sharpsburg, on the western side of Antietam Creek, and on that Monday morning began forming up his army there.
He chose it because it was a good, if hardly impregnable, defensive position, with high ground on the west side of the creek and open country on the east side that provided clear fields of fire. The major limitation was that the Potomac was only about a mile to their rear, and if the Confederate line were broken, the rebels would be forced into the river. Much worse, until the rebel forces besieging Harper's Ferry returned to the fold, Lee had only 18,000 men. They would be outnumbered over 4 to 1. Even if and when they were reunited, he would still only have 40,000 men. Lee could have run but did not, preferring to stand his ground even when he knew the odds were bad. The only possible reason for doing so was that he thought he could win. He had staked everything on moving north of the Potomac, and wasn't going to give up the game until it was lost beyond all doubt.
Two divisions of Federals showed up that afternoon, but the rest of the Army of the Potomac and their commander did not show up until dusk. Lee had told one of his officers that McClellan would not attack them that Monday or even the next day, and his assessment of McClellan proved accurate.
The news of McClellan's victory at South Mountain filtered back to Washington that day, though, like Barbara Frietche's heroism, it became somewhat exaggerated. McClellan spoke of "15,000 rebel casualties", which admittedly was consistent with his normal tendency to overestimate the Confederates, and said they had been "shockingly whipped". Rumors had it that Lee himself had been wounded. Gideon Welles noted in his diary with his commonsense skepticism that a "tale like this from Pope would have been classed with one of his lies." McClellan's report that even "General Lee admits they are badly whipped" made Welles wonder how such a statement had reached McClellan's ears so quickly.
Among the citizenry, though, "McClellan stock went up generally," as one observer put it, with public places filled by happy Unionists. When one fellow whose thinking ran more along the lines of Gideon Welles' expressed skepticism at the news, saying: "McClellan was no more reliable than Pope." -- he was simultaneously struck on both sides of his head by two bystanders. One of the two, an Irishman, commented: "Devil take the man who would say a word against McClellan after hearing such news!" President Lincoln wired the general:
GOD BLESS YOU AND ALL WITH YOU. DESTROY THE REBEL ARMY IF POSSIBLE.
McClellan was elated but, true to form, was still in no rush, and spent the next day -- Tuesday, 16 September 1862 -- moving his forces into position at a relaxed pace. "Nobody seemed to be in a hurry," one of McClellan's staff lieutenants said, suggesting that it seemed more like preparations for a "grand review", not a battle. The Federals made little effort to conduct reconnaissance or otherwise gather intelligence.
On the other side, Lee was attempting to refit his men in the breathing space he had been granted, trying to find out how many shoes had been captured at Harper's Ferry to fit his many barefoot soldiers, and sending out details to scrounge up food. A Sharpsburg woman said: "They nearly worried us to death asking for something to eat. They were half famished and they looked like tramps."
There were a few scattershot artillery duels, but the day was mostly idle, the relative quiet only broken when two Federal officers decided to have a cross-country horseback race. They dashed over the countryside, leaping over obstacles, past Federal pickets and toward Confederate lines; the rebel pickets found the race exciting as well, and cheered the two men on.
By 2:00 PM, McClellan had completed his plan of attack and began sending out orders. The battle would begin the next morning. By this time, Stonewall Jackson had arrived. Lee had correctly estimated that McClellan would give him the time to raise the odds.
By that evening, news of the fall of Harper's Ferry had got out to the public in Washington, souring the elation brought earlier by the victory at South Mountain. To be sure, nobody could reasonably blame the fiasco on McClellan, who had wanted to get the garrison out to begin with -- though he had hardly overexerted himself to rescue them once they were besieged. The matter was so embarrassing that the War Department cut the actual numbers of soldiers captured in half in the announcement to the public.
Without a transatlantic cable, news took about two weeks to travel over the ocean. That day, the TIMES OF LONDON published an editorial glowing in its praise for Confederate achievements, and the next day British Foreign Secretary Lord Russell would suggest to Prime Minister Palmerston that it was time to consider recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation.
* The lay of the land around Sharpsburg where the two opposing armies faced each other was straightforward. The Federals were grouped around Antietam Creek, which snaked north to south, while the Confederates were arranged in the vicinity of the Hagerstown Turnpike, which ran roughly parallel to the creek and about a mile to the west. The positions ran about four miles (six kilometers) from north to south.
Sharpsburg itself was just behind the middle of the Confederate line of battle, with the Hagerstown Turnpike running across its eastern edge. The road from Boonsboro cut crossways east-west through the middle of the two opposing armies, over a bridge and through the town.
To the south were hills facing a stone bridge over the creek, while just northeast of the town was a sunken road that arced from the Boonsboro Road northwest to the Hagerstown turnpike. The road was also lined with fences that the rebels had dismantled to make breastworks, and made an excellent defensive position. It would become elevated by events to be formally known as the Sunken Road.
At the northern end of the Confederate line on the west side of the Hagerstown Turnpike, just above the junction with the sunken road, was a small white church belonging to a Baptist sect that practiced baptism by total immersion, and so were known as Dunkers. The Dunker Church stood on the edge of a low plateau, and whoever controlled that plateau controlled the battlefield.
North of the Dunker Church were farmlands, including open pasture and a cornfield belonging to David R. Miller, bracketed by woods on the east and west, which would be as events unfolded in turn dignified as the Cornfield, the East Woods, and the West Woods. Miller's farmhouse was just north of the Cornfield in turn, to the east of the Hagerstown Turnpike, which separated the Cornfield from the West Woods, and Miller's barnyard was to the west.
After subtracting various noncombatants, McClellan had a little over 70,000 men and some 300 artillery pieces with which to attack Lee's army, which had less than half that number of guns. As usual, however, McClellan considered himself outnumbered, and gave his plan of attack cautious thought.
The stone bridge in the south seemed like too hard a nut to crack due to the high ground beyond it, and the bridge straight into town was well-covered by rebel artillery. However, there was a bridge north of the town that was not dominated by the Confederates. McClellan planned to funnel troops over this bridge and direct his assault on the area around the Dunker Church, with two corps leading the charge and two more in support.
McClellan ordered a smaller assault towards the stone bridge in the south. Whether the movement was intended as a diversion or a serious attack was never made clear, and it possibly wasn't clear in McClellan's mind, either. If his dual attacks made headway, he intended to follow them up by sending his reserves toward the center.
The plan was reasonable, but McClellan decided to revise his command structure at the same time, breaking down his three wings back into six separate corps commands. This move that would hinder coordination between the elements of his army, all the more so because the terrain was sufficiently irregular to isolate his units to begin with.
Major General Joe Hooker would lead the I Corps in the attack. The 47-year-old Hooker was handsome, vain, self-serving, brazenly ambitious, and extremely courageous, willing to lead his men personally into the worst fighting; he was a logical choice for the mission. At about 4:00 PM on that Tuesday, he led his men across the upper Antietam towards the jumping-off point, where they would begin the assault when the sun came up in the morning. However, there were Confederates hiding in the East Woods, some of Hood's Texans, and as the Union columns passed by at sundown, the rebels opened fire. A nasty and noisy rifle-and-artillery duel followed, killing and wounding a few handfuls of men until it grew too dark to seriously fight any longer.
Hooker's I Corps then settled down into the fields of a farm belonging to Mr. Samuel Poffenberger, directly north of the Confederate positions, for a fitful night's rest. They didn't get much sleep. A cold drizzle began to fall about 9:00 PM, and the firing flared up in an incoherent fashion at intervals all night long, with regiments jumping to the alert over false alarms.
The commanders on both sides made final preparations for the next morning. Lee sent off couriers to speed the march of the divisions of Lafayette McLaws and A.P. Hill, whose arrest was currently under suspension by Stonewall Jackson, much as was Hood's by Lee. Lee also shifted his forces to meet the Federals massing to his northeast, while McClellan ordered Major General Joseph Mansfield to move his XII Corps to back up Hooker, and sent messengers to tell Franklin down in Pleasant Valley to get his VI Corps on the road to Antietam in the morning.
Hood's rebels were tired from their fight with Hooker's soldiers that evening, all the more so because they hadn't had a decent meal in days. Hood found Jackson asleep under a tree and got permission from him to pull them back behind the Dunker Church so they could cook a good breakfast in the morning. They would, of course, be required to move out instantly if the word came that they should do so.
The residents of Sharpsburg made their own preparations for the battle, securing their belongings -- then fleeing, hiding in their cellars, or seeking shelter in a large cave down by the Potomac.
Mansfield's XII Corps made their march in the dark and then set down to the east of Hooker's men to get some rest, but the night march in the rain and the tension of the coming battle kept them awake, and many of them chatted among themselves excitedly. Mansfield -- 58 years old, elderly by Army standards -- had been in charge of the Washington defenses a few days before but had pleaded to get a field command and help chase the rebels away. He came over and kindly suggested to them, not at all like a major general as one of the soldiers said later, they talk in a whisper so their fellows could get some sleep.
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