Mr Lincoln's Army (38 page)

As McClellan faced the mountain range he
would be striking at Turner's Gap with his right hand and at Crampton's Gap
with his left. Conveniently placed to act as his left hand were some eighteen
thousand good men under General William B. Franklin, a solid, highly respected
soldier who commanded the VI Corps and who had with him his own two divisions
and a third one temporarily attached. They would be a force ample to open the
gap, crush Lafayette McLaws, and rescue the Harper's Ferry people. Franklin
was ordered to get going—to do a lot of banging away with his artillery, even
if he didn't have anything to shoot at, so that the commander at the Ferry
would hear and know that help was on the way. Meanwhile the rest of the army,
some seventy thousand men, would be the right hand and would go straight through
Turner's Gap.

While
all of this was going on, McClellan reflected, it would be helpful if somebody
could come down on Lee from the north. Governor Curtin was frantically
assembling Pennsylvania state troops, and General Reynolds had been detached
from the army to help him; and while they probably had nothing that could stand
up to Lee's veterans in an open fight, Lee might be bothered and delayed a good
deal if a sufficient swarm of these home guards and militia could come edging
in on him. So McClellan, having inspected the map, sent off a wire to "the
commander of U.S. forces at Chambersburg" to concentrate all available
troops and obstruct Lee's march until the Army of the Potomac could come up and
make a real fight out of it. He didn't know who was commanding at
Chambers-burg, but it seemed likely that somebody was there, and the card
looked like a good, inexpensive one to play.

As it turned out, this had no effect on the
campaign, but it did give a bad forty-eight hours to that eminent Pennsylvania editor-politician,
Alexander K. McClure. McClure had been in Washington when Lee marched north,
and when Governor Curtin began building up the home guards it seemed wise to
have a few of the state's leading citizens on hand to help, so McClure had been
hastily given a major's commission and sent north to lend a hand. When
McClellan's wire came in, McClure, uncomfortable but game in his new role as
army officer, and accompanied by no troops whatever, was posted at
Chambersburg. He gulped when he got the wire; combed the town and managed to
round up about twenty home-guard cavalry, which were all the "U.S.
forces" within reach. With these McClure began patrolling the roads
valiantly, preparing to ward off the Army of Northern Virginia if by chance it
came his way. Tough old Thad Stevens happened to be in Governor Curtin's office
at Harrisburg when the wire came through. The thought of the unmilitary McClure
and his twenty men standing between Pennsylvania and invasion tickled the grim
abolitionist, and he chuckled. "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, reflectively: "But as to McClellan, God only
knows what he'll do."
³

McClellan rode through Frederick to make sure
that the advance guard of the army was put in motion properly. A little outside
of town he overtook the head of General Jesse Reno's IX Corps, which had the
advance. Reno's leading division, two brigades of Ohio troops, under General
Cox, was moving along, and McClellan stopped to talk a moment with Cox, who had
been one of his assistants back in the springtime of the war, when McClellan
was out in Columbus trying to get Ohio's first troops housed, uniformed, and
drilled. Cox's men had done practically all of their fighting in western
Virginia, having come east just within the last month, and they were happy to
be with the Army of the Potomac. They had heard that it was far ahead of all
other Union armies in drill, discipline, and marching ability, and its record
seemed to make their own service in the mountains look commonplace, and they
were anxious to make a good impression. There was a subtle difference between
them and the rest of the army. They were more informal in bearing and
discipline, and it was noticed that they marched with a longer, freer stride;
the Army of the Potomac had been rigorously drilled to the regulation pace of
twenty-eight inches, while the Westerners had been allowed to set their own
gait. Incidentally, the Ohioans were already remarking that the men in these
crack Eastern regiments straggled much more than did the mountain brigades. . .
. McClellan gave Cox some last-minute instructions and went back to
headquarters.

Pretty soon Reno himself came along. He was
feeling good just now; had gone south on the Roanoke Island expedition as a
brigadier under Burnside, had done well, and now held a corps command, and
things seemed to be opening up for him in fine style. While the army was in
Frederick, Reno had heard the Barbara Frietchie story, which seems to have been
circulating freely among the Federals long before Whittier made a propaganda
poem out of it, and he had gone around to the old lady's house to see her. As
nearly as can be learned, at this distance, Barbara Frietchie had indeed waved
a flag from her window, but she had waved it in welcome to the Union troops,
not in defiance to Jackson's "Rebel horde." Some other woman in Frederick
did wave a United States flag at Jackson, but he never saw it or her, and there
was no blast of rifle fire to rip that or any other Union banner. The stories
got all mixed up and added to, and old Barbara became the center and heroine of
a garbled blend. Anyway, Reno had gone to her house that morning and offered to
buy the famous flag. She wouldn't sell it to him—couldn't, very well, since the
flag he wanted to buy didn't really exist—but she did give him a flag she had
around the house, and the general had ridden off, well content.
⁴

By dark Reno had pushed Cox's division across
the Catoctin range, a low ridge that runs north and south halfway between Frederick
and South Mountain; and the Ohioans went into bivouac near the tiny village of
Middletown, while Rebel outposts on South Mountain saw the ridge to the east
blossom out with campfires as darkness came down, and sent word back to D. H.
Hill in Boonsboro that quite a lot of Yankees seemed to be coming up to
Turner's Gap. Yankee cavalry skirmished with Confederate patrols in the valley
and on the lower slopes of South Mountain and sent back their own reports: as
far as they could find out, there was nothing in front of Turner's Gap except
cavalry.

McClellan, meanwhile, was working on the
orders for the rest of the army. The most important was the order for Franklin,
and McClellan got it off a little after six that evening. Franklin was down at
a place called Buckeystown, six miles south of Frederick and about twelve miles
due east of the summit at Crampton's Gap, and McClellan gave him the picture
in detail, telling him about the finding of Special Orders No. 191 and
explaining the positions of Lee's troops. Cox was at Middletown, he said, and
would be off first thing next morning, followed by the rest of the army, to get
through Turner's Gap and land on Lee at Boonsboro. Franklin was to move
"at daybreak in the morning" for Crampton's Gap. Once through the
gap, his first duty was "to cut off, destroy or capture McLaws' command"
and relieve the Union troops at Harper's Ferry, after which, depending on
events, he would either rejoin the main army at Boonsboro or move west to
Sharpsburg to cut off Lee's retreat. In order that it might be perfectly clear
to him, McClellan added: "My general idea is to cut the enemy in two and
beat him in detail."

All fine, so far. But as the courier galloped
south with that order the first thin mist of what would soon be a serious cloud
was beginning to rise across the gleaming face of McClellan's good fortune.
McClellan's order was clear and precise, and it gave Franklin a perfect
picture of the situation, but it was defective in just one respect: nowhere in
it was there any hint of the extreme urgency of the moment.

For
it was no ordinary strategic advantage McClellan was reaching for; he had it
within his power to destroy Lee's army and end the war within the next few
days, and every minute might count. South Mountain was still a screen, and
there was no way to know how far or how fast Lee's troops might be moving, off
on the other side. Franklin's troops were rested, they had not fought since the
battles on the peninsula back in June, and presumably they were quite capable
of a little extra exertion now, with the outcome of the whole war hanging in
the balance.

Reflecting on this order, which lays out a
job of work and breathes the very spirit of unhurried calm, one is conscious of
that queer feeling of exasperation which, even at this distance, McClellan's
acts occasionally inspire. With everything in the world at stake, both for the
country and for McClellan personally, why couldn't the man have taken fire just
once? To have Franklin march "at daybreak in the morning" was
good—but to have him march that same evening, driving for that door through
the mountains without giving the enemy an extra minute to repair his faulty
dispositions, would have been infinitely better. The roads were good and the
weather was clear, and a night march was perfectly feasible; making it,
Franklin would be able to go through the gap first thing in the morning. In a
great many ways the history of the country (to say nothing of McClellan's own
place in it) could have been a good deal different if Franklin's eighteen
thousand men had been put on the road that night under the stars.

But Franklin didn't move. McClellan didn't
tell him to, and Franklin was no man to exceed the letter of his instructions.
To be sure, McClellan had closed his letter by saying that he now asked of
Franklin "all your intellect and the utmost activity that a general can
exercise," which might have given him the hint; but McClellan was a
courtly man who used that kind of language as the small change of polite
correspondence, and Franklin was one more of those Union generals who were
loyal and capable and conscientious but who utterly lacked that priceless
little extra spark. He could drive his men just as hard as he himself was
driven, but no harder: a first-rate soldier, in the ordinary way, but lacking
the power to be first-rate in an extraordinary way.

So
McClellan and Franklin and Franklin's eighteen thousand men got (one supposes)
a good sleep that night, and any clock that headquarters might have possessed
ticked on, unhurried but inexorable. On the morning of September 14 Franklin's
corps broke camp and got off to a good early start, precisely as ordered, and
set out on the twelve-mile hike to Crampton's Gap, with the cavalry trotting on
ahead and stirring up hedge-hopping fights with Stuart's outposts.

Beyond South Mountain, where Crampton's Gap
cuts through, there is an open space two or three miles wide bearing the neatly
descriptive name of Pleasant Valley; and on the far side of Pleasant Valley is
the humpbacked ridge of Elk Mountain, whose southern end is named Maryland
Heights and looks down on the town of Harper's Ferry. Lafayette McLaws, a
Confederate general who was almost exactly like the Union's General
Franklin—solid, capable, unimaginative-had been dutifully industrious. He had
chased the last Yankees off Maryland Heights, and he was putting in the morning
getting his artillery up on top so that he could bombard the Yankee garrison in
Harper's Ferry. It wasn't easy, the sides of Elk Mountain being very steep and
the roads being sketchy, and in the end he had to put two hundred men on each
gun and wrestle the ponderous weapons up by sheer muscle. Stuart warned him
sometime during the morning that the Federals were coming up to Crampton's Gap,
in his rear, and McLaws eventually sent a few regiments back to hold the pass.
They didn't get there until midday had gone, and until then the little road
over the mountain was guarded by nothing but Stuart's cavalry; but they arrived
well ahead of Franklin and they found a good position at the eastern base of
the ridge, behind a long stone fence. There they lined up, with dismounted
cavalry on either flank.

Those Southerners were good men, but there
were not nearly enough of them to keep the Federals out of the pass, and
Franklin did not have to put half of his men into action. He planted a row of
guns on the left, sent the 27th New York and the 96th Pennsylvania ahead as a
heavy skirmish line, and backed them up with the 5th Maine and the 16th New
York. The Rebels were well protected behind their stone wall, and there was a
brisk fight for a while. McLaws was warned that a real push was on, and some
more Southern regiments came up to extend the line, but Franklin sent a
brigade of New Jersey troops in on a charge, and the Confederates were driven
away from the stone wall and went scrambling back up the mountainside, firing
as they went. For a couple of hours after that it was an

Indian
fight, the Rebels too few to make a stand but giving ground slowly, Rebels and
Yankees shooting at each other from behind trees, the Northerners coming on
doggedly.

A private from a Vermont regiment, scrambling
up the mountainside, slipped and fell, and went sliding off downhill to land,
all in a heap, in a little hollow among the rocks, face to face with a Confederate
private who somehow hadn't retreated when the others had. The two soldiers
glared at each other for a moment, gripping their rifles; then they agreed that
it would be foolish for them to carry on a personal, two-man extension of the
war there in the hollow. They would wait where they were, suspending
hostilities while everybody else fought, and at the end of the day they would
see how the battle had gone. If the Federals got licked and retreated, then the
Vermonter was a prisoner, but if the Confederates retreated, then the Reb was a
prisoner. So they laid their rifles down and shared tobacco, leaning back among
the rocks, and waited for the two armies to settle their fate for them.