Antietam - 150 Years Ago

Ambrose Burnside

Whenever I look at a photograph of Ambrose Everett Burnside, two images come to mind.  One is of a doting grandfather, perhaps bouncing a giggling child on his knee.  The other is of a cigar puffing, brandy swilling, portly tycoon with flowing whiskers and a rumbling laugh.  He appears a satisfied man with burly arms wrapped around the world.  The crow’s feet radiating outward from his laughing eyes, carved by endless squinting in the sunlit outdoors, belie the guilt tearing at him as he took in the ghastly carnage of his battlefields.  Those unbearable glimpses persecuted his soul.  For the body in which it resided was criminally liable for the sanguinary panoramas drawn by his artless hand. 

Burnside was anything but an indolent man.   In fact, the illusory visage of him as an industrialist is not so far from the one professional niche he carved for himself.  But, that occupational diversion was at a pause in a military career.  He attended West Point and, after graduation, served inconspicuously in garrison in the Mexican War.  After a short hitch and a mediocre tenure in the artillery, he resigned his regular army commission in 1853, eight years before the Civil War began.  During the hiatus from the life of a soldier, he kept busy by designing and patenting a carbine.  That useful implement was made even more so by a made-to-fit, breech loading brass cartridge.  With a workable new rifle and packaged ammunition on the production line, he set out to make his fortune selling them to the army.  The carbine was widely used in the upcoming war and came in handy cementing Burnside and his reputation as a vital cog in the army’s bureaucracy.  Those who trusted his untested martial instincts were soon to learn that a man who makes a good rifle is not necessarily a capable fighter.

Not contented with commercial distractions, he delved into politics and took an unsuccessful run at a seat in Congress.  It would have been a blessing to quite a few soldiers if he had been elected and stayed active in civil service.  Actually, for their sake, any career which would have made permanent his retirement from the military would have sufficed.  But, having kept his militia credentials current during this brief interregnum and riding the wave of his carbine’s popularity, he was destined to once again don the uniform.  As the guns of war boomed, he reentered active service and was rapidly advanced. 

He started the Civil War with a flourish, doing much to ensure the North Carolina coast was blocked to Confederate commerce through a series of effective amphibious landings.  Garnering approving back slaps in Washington, he was promoted to command at the corps level in the newly forming Army of the Potomac.   

Assigned to handle the left wing of that army at a slow moving creek in Maryland called the Antietam, he proved then and there that large unit combat command was definitely not his forte.  In the late morning of September 17, 1862, Burnside was tasked with establishing a bridgehead on the opposite side of the creek and sweeping the Confederates arrayed there from the field.  He chose as his primary crossing site Rohrbach’s Bridge, a 125 foot long limestone and granite link to the other bank.   Puzzlingly, he carelessly sent regiments of his precious charges running across the confining structure.  They were easily picked off by Confederates lying covered on an adjacent and commanding wooded ridgeline.  

The Antietam battlefield and town of Sharpsburg are only a few miles from Gettysburg.  It’s easy to pop down and take in the sights if one happens to already be in southern Pennsylvania.  With a few friends alongside one mid-September day, near the anniversary of the battle in fact, we stood on the banks of the Antietam next to the infamous stone and mortar bridge that now bears Burnside’s hapless eponym.  One in our group, lacking in military expertise but intelligent nonetheless, asked, “How come he crossed here?  Why didn’t he go down a few hundred yards and send his men across the shallower part?”  The answer is that a part of his corps did indeed do that.  Stubbornly, he opted to channel the rest of his men into a stone killing zone. 

At Rohrbach’s Bridge, the Antietam is narrow and fordable.  A soldier might get wet and would have to take some precautions to keep his musket and ammunition dry, but that shouldn’t have been a deciding factor. Some argue that crossing the stream near, but not on, the bridge would have been foolish.  Such a crossing would be under fire and slowed by deep water and steep banks on either side.  The peculiarities of the creek’s bed at that location forced Burnside to his tactical selection.  There were other options.  Burnside, prior to launching his ill-conceived battle plan, could have engaged in a thorough reconnaissance up and down the stream’s length.  If he had done so he would have discovered more than just the one shallow and friendly fording site a short distance away over which he did send a part of his corps.  His malignant choice to reinforce failure at the bridge foretold of grislier decisions to come.  This man had no business leading soldiers in combat.

What’s even more unbelievable is that after his Antietam fiasco he was put in charge of the entire Army of the Potomac.  Suffering from what could only be characterized as a congenital bout of amnesia, Burnside sent divisions of men up the impregnable Confederate fortified slopes behind Fredericksburg on a chilly December day a mere three months after his error at Antietam.  There he watched, open mouthed like a carp, as roiling smoke blanketed his obedient bluecoats and Confederate lead smashed the life from them.  Midway through what was guaranteed to be the most lopsided defeat the Federals had yet to suffer in the war, Burnside, received several reports that his plan had gone disastrously awry.  He refused to halt the madness.  Waves of his army’s finest futilely attempted to seize the heights, failing each time.  The expiration of daylight, mercifully short this time of year, saved the army from annihilation.  The screams and moans of those unlucky enough not to have been killed haunted the untouched survivors throughout the long, brutal night.  Under the sharp eyes of Confederate sharpshooters above, they huddled together to stay warm.  Surreally, eerie curtains of the northern lights, almost never seen this far south, danced over the now freezing corpses.