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McClellan's dealing with the division of the army into wings was part of the same persistent method of thwarting the purpose of the administration while ostensibly keeping the letter. It was perfectly easy to advance from South Mountain upon Sharpsburg, keeping Sumner's and Burnside's commands intact.
The enemy were not lacking in bold efforts to take advantage of the check we had received, but were repulsed with severe punishment, and as the day declined were content to entrench themselves along the line of the road leading from Sharpsburg to the Potomac at the mouth of the Antietam, half a mile in our front.
Lee met it with a narrow grey sea not thirty thousand men, for A. P. Hill was yet upon the road from Harper's Ferry. In Berserker madness, torrent and uproar, clashed the two colours. There was a small white Dunkard church with a background of dark woods. It was north of Sharpsburg, near the Hagerstown turnpike, and it marked the Confederate left. Stonewall Jackson held the left.
The enemy's position was revealed, and he was evidently in force on both sides of the turnpike in front of Sharpsburg, covered by the undulations of the rolling ground which hid his infantry from our sight. The examination of the enemy's position and the discussion of it continued till near the close of the day.
Before him was Fighting Joe Hooker with Meade and Doubleday and Ricketts. From a knoll behind Sharpsburg the commander-in-chief looked from Longstreet on the right to D. H. Hill, and from Hill to Jackson. He looked to the Harper's Ferry Road, but he did not see what he wished to see A. P. Hill's red battle shirt. "Artillery Hell" had begun. There was enormous thunder, enormous drifting murk.
We arrived at Shepherdstown before dawn, and while halting in the road for half an hour Henry Lewis, driver at my gun, overcome with sleep, fell sprawling from his horse, rousing those about him from a similar condition. Half a mile below the town we forded the Potomac for the third time, and by the middle of the afternoon were on the outskirts of Sharpsburg, four miles from the river.
Jackson's weary men took fresh heart; that great commander promptly assumed the offensive, and, advancing his whole line, drove the enemy before him until he reoccupied the ground from which General Sumner had forced him to retire. From the ground thus occupied, the Federal forces were unable to dislodge him, and the great struggle of "the left at Sharpsburg" was over.
Thirty guns on the heights above Boteler's Ford guarded its rear, and Jeb Stuart and his cavalry watched from the northern bank at Williamsport. McClellan pushed out from Sharpsburg a heavy reconnoissance, and on his side of the river planted guns. Fitz John Porter, in command, crossed during the night a considerable body of troops.
This was one hundred and fifty thousand on the Chickahominy, of whom one hundred and fifteen thousand were effective; about one hundred thousand, it would seem, under General Pope, at the second battle of Manassas; eighty-seven thousand actually engaged at the battle of Sharpsburg; and at Fredericksburg from one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty thousand.
Lee therefore ordered McLaws to obstruct Franklin's movement as much as he could, whilst he himself concentrated the rest of Longstreet's corps at Sharpsburg, behind the Antietam. If McClellan's force should prove overwhelming, the past experience of the Confederate general encouraged him to believe that our advance would not be so enterprising that he could not make a safe retreat into Virginia.
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