“I do not think much can be expected of them": John Reynolds and the Pennsylvania Militia in the Maryland Campaign

On the morning of September 17, 1862, two brigades of the Pennsylvania Reserve division anxiously gripped their muskets and rifles behind the northern fence of D. R. Miller’s cornfield. Hordes of panicked Union soldiers passed through their ranks. Confederate flags bobbed above the battle smoke, heading their way. The Rebel yell amplified. Suddenly, these Pennsylvanians, with their backs to their home state, found themselves in the middle of America’s bloodiest single day. 

“I tell you the old cannon balls flew around my head worse than the devil and the musket balls went zip zip around my ears,” wrote Private Sylvester Hower. “I thought they would take me, but they all missed me.”(1) Many Confederate shots found their marks in the Pennsylvanians. By the campaign’s end, the division lost 965 between South Mountain and Antietam.

Even before those battles, the division suffered one of its greatest losses during the campaign: its commander, Brigadier General John Reynolds. The Confederate movement into Pennsylvania in early September 1862 sparked widespread fear among Pennsylvanians that their state would be the next to “welcome” the heels of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. “Our homes were threatened—the horrors of desolating war seemed likely to be brought to our very doors,” said Lewis Richards.(2) To protect his state and its people, Governor Andrew Curtin called for the state’s men to enroll in local militia outfits and to rendezvous at Harrisburg before being sent to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border to repel the invader.

Curtin continually alerted the authorities in Washington about the information his ring of spies and scouts gathered. He hoped to get something in exchange for his state’s dedication to the Federal war effort: veteran soldiers from the Army of the Potomac to come to the state’s aid. President Abraham Lincoln refused. Curtin and other prominent Pennsylvanians settled for a consolation prize: a competent officer–a Pennsylvanian–to lead the Keystone State’s defense. On September 12, 1862, Curtin got his wish. General-in-Chief Henry Halleck ordered Reynolds to report to Harrisburg. Despite objections from army commander George B. McClellan and Reynolds’ corps commander Joseph Hooker, they did not defy Halleck’s decision and Curtin’s panic. Reynolds would go.

John F. Reynolds

Alfred Pleasonton's Intelligence Contributions to the Battle of South Mountain

Alfred Pleasonton

Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton is rarely thought of as an able intelligence officer. But like any Civil War officer, his share of bad days were occasionally intermixed with good ones. The evening of September 13, 1862 and the morning of the next day was one of his better performances in gathering and effectively utilizing intelligence.

In the hours before dusk of September 13, Pleasonton's cavalrymen drove Confederate cavalry from Hagan's Gap in Catoctin Mountain west of Frederick and then likewise secured Middletown from the gray horsemen. Pleasonton requested support from Ambrose Burnside in his rear. In the meantime, he pushed his troopers to the base of Turner's Gap in South Mountain itself.

At the crossroads town of Bolivar, Pleasonton dismounted some of his cavalry and pushed them up South Mountain north of the National Road. This movement produced minor skirmishing. Standing at the base of Turner's Gap, where the National Road crossed South Mountain, Pleasonton recognized the strength of the position and the difficulty any Federal force would have seizing it. Thus, Pleasonton also authorized reconnaissance efforts while in the area, from which he learned that two roads, one north of and one south of Turner's Gap, reentered the National Road on the west side of South Mountain behind the gap. Pleasonton believed these roads "would assist us materially in turning the enemy's position on both flanks."

Book Review: The Cornfield, Antietam's Bloody Turning Point, by David A. Welker

Alongside Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle and Shiloh’s Hornet’s Nest, the fighting in David Miller’s Cornfield on the Antietam battlefield ranks as one of the toughest Civil War landscapes to make any sense of. It should then come as no surprise that it has taken over 150 years since the Battle of Antietam for a micro tactical work detailing the Miller’s Cornfield fighting to be published.

David Welker’s The Cornfield seeks to make sense of the back-and-forth actions that swept across the Miller farm on September 17, 1862, and stake its importance in shaping the outcome of the Battle of Antietam. The book briefly recounts the events of the Maryland Campaign leading up to the Battle of Antietam before giving the Cornfield action of September 16 and 17, 1862 a detailed tactical treatment. Despite the depth of the fighting which the book delves into, Welker brings the intense combat and tragedy of the Cornfield to a personal level by interspersing the text with various human interest stories.

Aside from utilizing the usual suspect of sources to craft his tactical narrative, such as the Official Records, Welker made good use of Joseph Hooker’s military papers and some of the thousands of letters that veterans wrote to Antietam’s “Historical Expert” Ezra Carman and the Antietam Battlefield Board.

"The Rebels Would Eat Me Up": Attempting to Read Joseph Hooker's Mind on September 16

   

     George B. McClellan's movement of Joseph Hooker's First Corps across Antietam Creek on the afternoon of September 16 is a fascinating move to me, perhaps the most fascinating of the entire Maryland Campaign. Hooker's corps of roughly 9,000 men sent across the creek alone to face the whole Army of Northern Virginia is a gutsy decision.
     Hooker himself expressed some displeasure with his situation to McClellan in person. "If re-enforcements [sic] were not forwarded promptly, or if another attack was not made on the enemy's right, the rebels would eat me up," wrote Hooker. Clearly, Hooker was nervous about his and his corps' situation on September 16. Despite that, he attacked the enemy in his front the next morning with the Federal Twelfth Corps backing him up.