There has been very great misapprehension, both on the part of the enemy and many Confederates, not familiar with the facts, about the strength of General Lee's army at this battle. The whole of the troops then constituting that army bad belonged to the army which opposed McClellan in the battles around Richmond, except Evans' and Drayton 'S brigades, and such absentees as had returned, and there had been troops then belong ing to the army, which had not left Richmond, exceeding the number in the said two brigades. There had been heavy losses in the battles around Richmond; and the subsequent losses at Cedar Run, on the Rappahannock, at Manassas and in the vicinity, at Maryland Heights and in Pleasant Valley-where McLaws had been severely engaged,-and at South Mountain, had very materially weakened the strength of the army. Besides all this, since crossing the Rappahannock we had been without regular supplies of food, and had literally been living from hand to mouth. Our troops were badly shod and many of them became barefooted, and they were but indifferently clothed and without protection against the weather. Many of them had become exhausted from the fatigues of the campaign, and the long and rapid marches which they had made while living on short rations and a weakening diet-and many were foot-sore from want of shoes; so that the straggling from these causes, independent of that incident to all armies, had been frightful before we crossed the Potomac, and had continued up to the time of the battle.
Some idea of the diminution from these various causes may be found from the following facts: That Christian gentleman, and brave, accomplished soldier, General D. H. Hill, states that his division, which numbered ten thousand at the beginning of the battles around Richmond, had been reduced to less than five thousand which he had at the battle of South Mountain. Yet he had readied the army after all the fighting about Manassas, and he states that on the morning of the 17th of September he had but three thousand infantry. Ewell's division, with Lawton 's brigade, which was attached to it after the battle of Cedar Run, must have numbered, at the time they reached McClellan's right, north of the Chickahominy, eight or ten thousand, as Lawton's brigade was then a very large one, which had never been in action. Yet that division numbered less than three thousand four hundred on the morning of the 17th.
General Lee says in his report: "This great battle was fought by less than forty thousand men on our side, all of whom had undergone the greatest labors and hardships in the field and on the march." This certainly covered our entire force of all descriptions, and I am satisfied that he might have safely stated it at less than thirty thousand. There were forty brigades of infantry in all in the army, one of which, Thomas' of A. P. Hill's division, did not cross the Potomac from Harper's Ferry, and the nine brigades of Ewell's and D. H. Hill's divisions, numbering in the aggregate less than 6,400 officers and men, were fully average ones.
General D. R. Jones states that his command, consisting of his division of three brigades and three of Longstreet 's, in all six brigades, numbering on the morning of the 17th, 2,430; General J. R. Jones states that Jackson's division of four brigades numbered less than 1,600; General McLaws states that he carried into action in his four brigades, 2,893; General A. P. Hill states that his three brigades actually numbered less than 2,000; D. H. Hill's five brigades numbered 3,000; and Ewell's four brigades numbered less than 3,400; which gives 15,323 in these twenty-six brigades, leaving thirteen other brigades on the field whose strength is not stated, to-wit: the six brigades of his own division and Longstreet's brought up by General Anderson; A. P. Hill's other two brigades; Hood's two brigades, both very small; Walker's two brigades; and Evans' brigade. General Anderson was wounded, and there is no report from his division or any of his brigades, but General D. H. Hill says that Anderson came to his support, which was before Anderson's division became engaged, with some three or four hundred men, and that force consisted of five brigades, Armistead's having gone to the left. Averaging the thirteen brigades from which no estimate was given with the others and it would give a strength of 7,670, which would make our whole infantry force on the field, from the beginning to the end of the battle, twenty-three thousand at the outside. Our cavalry was not engaged, as it had merely watched the flanks, but six thousand would fully cover the whole of the cavalry and artillery which we had on that side of the river.
It is to be presumed that this estimate was made by Banks when General Jackson was figuring around Pope's rear, as he did not have a command in McClellan's army, and it is well known that Banks always saw things with very largely magnifying glasses when "Stonewall" Jackson was about.
That some of the affrighted civilians who magnifiedone small company of cavalry at the first battle of Manassas, called the Black Horse Cavalry, into 20,000, might be misled by this estimate of McClellan's, or Banks', might well be believed, but that the Major General commanding the "Grand Army of the Potomac," should have so estimated the strength of General Lee's army at Sharpsburg, is perfectly amazing.
Who commanded the "forty-six regiments not included in above," or where were the 400 guns to come from? This estimate of the relative strength of the two armies gives rise to some very curious reflections: It must be recollected that Bragg and Kirby Smith were at this time in Kentucky, moving north, and if the newly established Government at Richmond had been able to put in the field and send into Maryland from the comparatively small population of the Confederacy an army of nearly 100,000 men with 400 pieces of artillery, it showed a wonderful energy on the part of that government; while, the fact that the powerful Government at Washington, with its immense resources and its very large population to draw from, after a call for 300,000 more men, and after taking everything in the way of troops from the Ohio to the Atlantic, had been able to bring into the field, for the defence of the National Capital and to oppose the large invading army of "rebels," only a force numbering less than 90,000 men, displayed a weakness not at all flattering to the energy of the head of the War Department at Washington, or to the wisdom of the occupant of the White House, and a want of "patriotism" by no means complimentary to the people of the North.
McClellan had stated that the troops in and about Washington and on the Maryland shore of the Potomac above and below, including those in Maryland and Delaware, amounted, on the 1st of March, 1862, to 193;142 present for duty and an aggregate present and absent of 221,987. This did not include the 13,000 brought by Burnside from North Carolina, nor the troops brought by Cox from the Kanawha Valley, nor, is it presumed, the forces of Fremont under Sigel, a large part of which were probably brought from Missouri; and there had since been at least one call, if not more, for an additional levy of 300,000 men. Now the question very naturally arises, as to what had become of all that immense force, with the reinforcements and recruits, which had dwindled down to 87,164 men on the morning of the 17th of September, 1862.
It will be seen from the account previously given that on the 15th and in the early part of the day of the 16th, McClellan's large army was confronted by a very small force under Longstreet and D. H. Hill. Jackson with two divisions numbering less than 5,000 men, and Walker, with his two brigades arrived on the 16th, and it was upon the force consisting of these reinforcements and D. H. Hill's and Longstreet 's troops, including in the latter Hood's two brigades, and Evans' brigade, that McClellan's army had been hurled on the morning of the 17th. McLaws with his own and Anderson's brigades, ten in all, did not arrive until the action had been progressing for some hours. McLaws arrived at sunrise, and A. P. Hill, with his five brigades, did not come up until late in the afternoon.
The 24,982 men under Hooker and Mansfield had attacked Jackson's division and Lawton's, Trimble's and Hays' brigades of Ewell 's division, numbering in all 4,000 men. When they were compelled to retire, Hood with his two brigades supported by Ripley's, Colquit's and Garland's and D. H. Hill's division had withstood the enemy until Sumner arrived with his 18,813 men, and then Hood was also compelled to retire to the Dunkard Church. Sumner then with his corps and what was left of the other two, attacked my brigade of less than 1,000 men, a remnant of about two or three hundred of Jackson's division, and what was left of D. H. Hill's and Hood's divisions, when McLaws and Walker with their six brigades came to our assistance immediately after the arrival of McLaws upon the field. Sumner was repulsed and then Franklin with his 12,300 arrived to his support, and the attack was renewed on Hill in the centre, when Anderson with three or four hundred men and one brigade of Walker's came to his assistance. This force of 56,095 men was brought against a force which with all its reinforcements, from first to last, amounted to less than 18,000 men. How it had been served will appear from the following extract from Mc Clellan 's report. He says: ''One division of Sumner s corps, and all of Hooker's corps, on the right, had, after fighting most valiantly for several hours, been over powered by numbers, driven back in great disorder, and much scattered; so that they were for the time somewhat demoralized. In Hooker's corps, according to the return made by General Meade, commanding, there were but 6,729 men present 0n the 18th, whereas, on the morning of the 22nd, there were 13,093 present for duty in the same corps, showing that previous to and during the battle 6,364 men were separated from their command."
McClellan was not able to renew the attack on the 18th, and, according to his own showing, had to wait for reinforcements before doing so; yet he claims a great victory at Antietam, alleging that he had accomplished the object of the campaign, to-wit: "to preserve the National Capital and Baltimore, to protect Pennsylvania from invasion, and to drive the enemy out of Maryland." This was a singular claim on the part of the General who, scarce three months before, had boastingly stated that the advance of his army was within five miles of the Confederate Capital.
The truth is that the substantial victory was with us, and if our army had been in reach of reinforcements, it would have been a decisive one; but we were more than 200 miles from the point from which supplies of ammunition were to be obtained, and any reinforcements which could have been spared to us were much furtheroff, while large reinforcements were marching to McClellan's aid. We had, therefore, to recross the Potomac.
The question had been mooted as to the propriety of the campaign into Maryland, and in regard there to I will say: General Lee, on assuming command of the army at Richmond, had found that city, the seat of the Confederate Government, beleaguered by a vast army, while all Northern Virginia, including the best part of the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah, was held by the enemy. With a herculean effort, he had broken through the cordon surrounding his army, and with inferior numbers fallen upon the beleaguering enemy, and sent it cowering to the banks of the lower James. He had then moved north, and, after a series of hard fought battles, had hurled the shattered remains of the army that had been marauding through Northern Virginia, with all the reinforcements sent from the lately besieging army, into the fortifications around Washington. With the diminished columns of the army with which he accomplished all this, he had crossed the Potomac, captured an important stronghold defended by a strong force, securing a large amount of artillery, small arms, and stores of all kinds, and had fought a great battle with the newly reorganized and heavily reinforced and recruited army of the enemy, which later was so badly crippled that it was not able to resume the offensive for near two months.
He now stood defiantly on the southern banks of the Potomac, the extreme northern limit of the Confederacy, and the result of all these operations, of which the march into Maryland was an important part, had been that not only the Confederate Capital had been relieved from the presence of the besieging army, a danger to which it was not subjected again for two years; but the enemy Capital had been threatened, his territory invaded, and the base of operations for a new movement on Richmond had been transferred to the north banks of the Potomac at Harper's Ferry, from which there was an overland route of more than two hundred miles. When that movement did take place, General Lee was in a position to interpose his army, and inflict a new defeat on the enemy, as was verified by subsequent events.
The following extracts from McClellan's report will give some idea of the results obtained. Speaking, as of the morning of the 18th, he says: "At that moment-Virginia lost, Washington menaced, Maryland invaded-the national cause could afford no risks of defeat. Our battle lost, and almost all would have been lost." And he subsequently says: "The movement from Washington into Maryland, which culminated in the battles of South Mountain and Antietam, was not a part of an offensive campaign, with the object of the invasion of the enemy's territory, and an attack on his capital, but was defensive in its purposes, although offensive in its character, and would be technically called a defensive-offensive campaign."
"It was undertaken at a time when our army bad experienced seven defeats, and its object was to preserve the national capital and Baltimore, to protect Pennsylvania, and to drive the enemy out of Maryland. These purposes were fully and finally accomplished by the battle of Antietam, which brought the Army of the Potomac into what might be termed an accidental position on the upper Potomac."
It was a great deal gained to force the enemy into a "defensive-offensive" campaign ill his own territory and place the "Army of the Potomac" in that accidental position, though we did fail ill arousing Maryland, or getting any reinforcements from that State.
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