‘The Most Desperate Battle Ever Fought’

By Nicole Etcheson

September 18, 2012

The men of the 27th Indiana Volunteer Regiment had been in only a few small battles when they reached the cornfield near a Maryland creek named Antietam. The battle that followed, changed not only the course of their lives, but the course of the Civil War itself.

The importance of the fighting was obvious; despite their relative inexperience, the Hoosiers knew immediately they had survived an extraordinary battle. George T. Chapin wrote his older brother the very next day that Antietam “is the bloodiest one of the war, it raged from morning light till dark.” It was, Simpson Hamrick told his father, “the most Desperate Battle ever fought on this continent.”

Within the space of a few hours, the 27th Indiana lost three-quarters of its men: 17 died that morning, and nearly 200 were wounded, many so gravely that they would not survive. Of the combined Union and Confederate armies at Antietam, an estimated 4,300 men perished that day; and another 2,000 later succumbed to their wounds. No other day in United States history — not even Sept. 11, 2001 — has been as bloody as Sept. 17, 1862.

The 27th Indiana was an observer or participant in many of the preliminary engagements leading up to the cataclysm. After Robert E. Lee crossed into Maryland on Sept. 4, the unit was part of the Union force that pursued him. And it was a corporal in the 27th Indiana, Barton Mitchell, who found a copy of Lee’s orders to split up his forces, wrapped around some cigars, lying in a field.

The 27th did not participate in the Battle of South Mountain, by which the Union cleared Lee’s men out of the mountain passes, but they saw abandoned equipment and “a large number of dead rebels,” as they passed through Turner’s Gap, leading them to conclude “that the flight of the enemy had been precipitous.” The Confederate army fell back towards Sharpsburg, Md., where Lee decided to consolidate his army and make his stand.

Lee’s army had its back to the Potomac River and its fords, as well as to the town of Sharpsburg, which lay behind the center of the Confederate line. The Army of the Potomac took its position across Antietam Creek. During the night of Sept. 16, the 27th Indiana moved quietly from its position at the Pry house, Gen. George B. McClellan’s headquarters at the center of the Union line, toward the north to serve as reserves in Gen. Joseph Hooker’s corps.

At dawn on Sept. 17, Hooker’s infantry attacked through a cornfield, cutting down the head-high corn with canister shot from the artillery, which were directed towards Confederate forces at the West Woods and a Dunker church (the Dunkers were a German Baptist denomination). Hooker advanced, was driven back, and advanced again throughout the morning, losing countless men with each wave.

The 27th Indiana was not in the initial attack. The men made coffee and ate “a soldier’s luncheon” of crackers and pork while they waited. But some could not eat, and others entrusted keepsakes or messages, intended for those at home should they not survive, with members of the ambulance corps. Others simply divested themselves of tokens of sin, like playing cards, so they wouldn’t be found on their bodies. And they watched the wounded begin to trickle towards the rear, jeered at a “skedadler” who ran by, and listened to “a succession of great waves of sound” — “the roar of cannon” and the unceasing “discharge of musketry.” After an hour of this watching and waiting, they saw their corps commander, Gen. Joseph K. Mansfield, riding towards them. They had been ordered into the fight.

Passing through the East Woods, the men of the 27th Indiana heard “a peculiar singing, humming noise in the treetops.” “Twigs and shredded leaves” sifted down on them as canister and shrapnel fired too high ripped the trees apart. As they approached the edge of the cornfield, the Hoosiers saw Union troops “retiring slowly,” yet the enemy was not following. They formed up and soon their position was “distinctly marked by the cartridge papers dropped at this time.”

When the 27th Indiana arrived at the cornfield, it was held by Confederate troops under Gen. John Bell Hood. Hood’s Texans had led the Confederate counterattack that pushed the Union troops back into the woods. The men of the 27th Indiana could see the small Dunker church, home to pacifists but the site that morning of Confederate artillery and thus the focus of the Union attack.

At first, they had a difficult time discerning the enemy “concealed among the corn,” but they soon saw the advancing Confederates. The 27th’s colonel, Silas Colgrove, believed they exchanged fire for over two hours, standing on open ground before a “withering, consuming blast.” E.R. Brown remembered, “It seems a miracle that anyone should still remain unhurt.” But the Confederates also were taking heavy casualties, and they eventually retreated. Hood reported his division as “dead on the field.”

By the time the Union drove the Confederates back, dead and wounded men lay among the cornfields’ furrows. The wounded begged advancing troops for water or a bullet to end their misery. But in the midst of such horror, there was yet the mundane. Fighting in the cornfield, Josiah Williams of the Indiana 27th observed dogs following their masters into the firing.

Lee sent reinforcements to hold the line at the church, but a bullet to Hooker’s foot took him out of the battle and prevented the Union from mounting another attack. Not until late morning would more Union troops capture the Dunker church, only to lose it to another Confederate counterattack. With Hooker unconscious from loss of blood, Gen. Edwin V. Sumner was left in command. He foolishly sent one division marching in formation past the Confederate line. While the 27th Indiana and other regiments watched from the edge of the East Woods, Sumner’s men took devastating fire. Sumner was so horrified that he refused to exploit the weakness of the Confederate forces. The 27th Indiana made itself a meal and waited for the rest of the day. Although they remained under fire all that day, their fighting was largely done.

The battle shifted toward the south. In a country lane in the middle of the Antietam battlefield, Confederate infantry occupied a natural trench created by the passage of wagon wheels. Union attackers outnumbered the Confederates, but could not advance under the fire from the road and from Confederate artillery. Finally, Union troops flanked the sunken road and their commanders organized to exploit this success, but were stopped by Confederate artillery.

When Hooker received the wound that took him out of the action, McClellan ordered Gen. Ambrose Burnside to advance on the most southern part of the battlefield. At 10 a.m. Burnside had received McClellan’s order to attack the lower bridge, later to be known as Burnside’s Bridge. It was defended by a mere 800 Georgians under the politician Robert Toombs. Unfortunately, no one on Burnside’s staff had bothered to find the ford across the Antietam before the battle. Instead, Union troops would have to cross the bridge under fire from the Georgians’ strong position.

But while Burnside pressed the attack to the south, Sumner on the north could not be persuaded to get his men back in action, and the cautious McClellan ultimately concurred with the judgment that these men were too worn down to renew the attack. E.R. Brown, of the 27th Indiana, disagreed. Brown recalled the Hoosiers as eager to make a final assault on the Dunker church and, in the regimental history he wrote later, regretted that it had not occurred.

McClellan then made the fateful decision not to throw his reserves into an attack on the center of Lee’s lines, convinced that Lee’s numbers were greater than they actually were. According to one account, when McClellan turned to Gen. Fitz-John Porter, the commander of the reserves, Porter warned his superior that he commanded the “last reserve of the last Army of the Republic.” This grandiose pronouncement reinforced McClellan’s natural caution, and he decided to stand on the defensive.

In his book “The Long Road to Antietam,” the historian Richard Slotkin calls Sept. 18 “the day when nothing happened.” Instead of renewing the attack against Lee’s depleted forces, McClellan continued to wait for Lee’s move. In his memoirs, Lee’s artillery chief, Edward Porter Alexander, remained astounded at McClellan’s hesitance: “For Common Sense was just shouting, ‘Your adversary is back against a river, with no bridge & only one ford, & that the worst one on the whole river. If you whip him now, you destroy him utterly.’” McClellan did not listen and Lee retreated that night, largely unmolested by Union forces.

The Hoosiers who made up the 27th were keenly aware that Indiana needed to redeem its martial honor on the battlefield. During the Battle of Buena Vista in the war with Mexico, Indiana troops had mistakenly pulled back under fire, opening a hole in the United States line that Mexican troops exploited. A complete rout of the United States force was averted only because Mississippi troops under Jefferson Davis, later the Confederate president, and regiments from Illinois and Indiana succeeded in filling the breach and stopping the Mexican advance. Although the Indiana troops’ error occurred because of mistaken orders, the imputation of cowardice hung over the Hoosier state. An orator from the 27th Indiana’s home county of Putnam remembered “the stain” upon Indiana’s “escutcheon” left by the U.S.-Mexican War. Indiana historian Emma Lou Thornbrough wrote that when the first volunteers from Indiana formed regiments, “their commander, Lew Wallace, made them kneel and swear … that they would avenge the disgrace visited upon Indiana by the alleged cowardice of her troops at Buena Vista.”

But by the time E.R. Brown wrote the 27th Indiana’s regimental history, he was more concerned with asserting that the battle proved the equal “fighting qualities” of Northerners and Southerners. Hoosiers had demonstrated “valor” and “gallantry.” “To know a soldier hails from the wooded vales of Indiana,” the Putnam County orator insisted, “is also to know that he is a hero.” But the men of the 27th also took great pride in having earned the respect of their eastern officers. After “the hottest of the fight was over,” Simpson Hamrick recalled, Gen. George H. Gordon, the 27th’s brigade commander, rode up to the Hoosiers and “thanked them & Said that they had made the Noblest Stand ever men Did.” “We regard [it] as quite a compliment,” Hamrick explained to his father, “for our Gen. is a Massachuts Yankey and has always acted toward us before as though he thought but little of us.”

It was not just the men from Indiana who had proven, in Hamrick’s words, “equal to the emergency.” Accompanying Hoosier farm boys like Hamrick into battle were men from Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. The Irishmen of Thomas F. Meagher’s brigade participated in the famous, bloody attack on the “sunken road.” Midwesterners, easterners and immigrants fought against Texans, Georgians and Alabamians. African-American troops were not yet officially part of the Union Army but on the Confederate side, black men were teamsters, laborers and personal servants in the Confederate Army. Women too were present on the battlefield at the field hospitals set up to care for the wounded. In short, the battle was a microcosm of mid-19th-century American society, and the greatest illustration of the war as an all-encompassing American experience.

A few days after the bloodshed at Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln announced a preliminary emancipation proclamation. George Chapin, of the 27th, had thought the war would be over before the fall of 1862, but he assured his sister, “I hope the war will last until the slave shall be free. I am in for the war until liberty be established in every part of our country: till every man shall be free.” Chapin, like many of the Union soldiers described by Chandra Manning in her award-winning book, “What This Cruel War Was Over,” had a practical reason for wishing the war not end prematurely: “We shall never have peace till this be accomplished. We have had war on the subject of slavery ever since our existence as a nation.” Slavery was the reason for this “bloodshed by the ocean.”

Manning’s soldiers had also decided that the Union would never be at peace until the institution that caused so much turmoil was extinguished. But Chapin also knew that slavery was “a barbarous, corrupt and wicked institution.” In Chapin’s hometown of Putnamville, there lived Putnam County’s only black family, Luke and Charity Townsend, former slaves from Maryland and Kentucky, and their 10 children. Luke and his oldest son, Robert, worked as farm laborers. Luke was known for his strength and his fine voice heard during church in the singing of hymns. Unlike many Hoosiers, Chapin knew former slaves personally as hard-working, Christian members of his community.

The 27th Indiana’s regimental historian, E.R. Brown, remembered Sept. 17, 1862 as “the most momentous day in the history” of the regiment. The day helped make the Civil War not just a war to save the Union, but also a war to free the slaves. Lincoln deemed the Union victory at Antietam a divine providence that God “had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” The war was not over, but as E.R. Brown concluded, “The great sacrifice of the Twenty-seventh and so many others was not in vain.”