1st Texas at Antietam

[67th Tigers]

Question of the learned members,

 

I recently came across this sequence of events, is it roughly accurate?

 

1st Texas advance to about 50 yards of a Union battery, then stop and engage in a firefight. The Union gunner reply with a hail of canister fire, inflicting 80% casualties.....

[Mote]

From this, it looks like they managed to do that with three different batteries simultaneously, with only the rest of the brigade to the rear being free from Union artillery shooting them.

[KingSargent]

Where did you find the 80% casualties figure, and do you have the actual numbers?

 

Many of the CSA regts at Antietam were much below strength; notice that Wofford gives 854 men for the whole brigade.

 

IOW, while 80% of the men in the line may have become casualties that line may have been a fraction of the full strength of the 1st Texas. I notice that Wofford does not list any 1st Texas officers above LT as casualties, so either the field officers were real lucky or they were elsewhere (which can count as luck in this case).

[67th Tigers]

http://aotw.org/officers.php?unit_id=601

 

226 went into the Cornfield.

 

The positions during that attack being:

 

[Old Tanker]

I've tramped all over many ACW battlefields and Antietam as it played out over basically 3-4 linear miles during the course of a long day was brutal.

 

The visitors center is about two hundred yards east of the Dunkard Church . The church is about the size of a one car garage.

 

There is a family home that is near Bloody Lane that is still owned by the same family. It seems that it was damaged that bloody day but the family has yet to be reimbursed by the Feds as was the policy. Don't know why ? Maybe CSA sympathizers ?

[Rich]

Question of the learned members,

 

I recently came across this sequence of events, is it roughly accurate?

 

1st Texas advance to about 50 yards of a Union battery, then stop and engage in a firefight. The Union gunner reply with a hail of canister fire, inflicting 80% casualties.....

 

Not exactly....

 

Actually about 1990 Curt Johnson and I were heavily involved in helping a company develope an early hyperlinked history of the Battle of Antietam as an example of the capabilities of computers as simple informational storage tools that was going to include a digitized version of the Carman-Cope maps that would show the troop movements and give the user the ability to look at them from any vantage point, by scanning across the digitized world. Of course to do it at that time required a Cray supercomputer, which the company we were working with had in their basement. Of course they turned out to have little more than hot air in them besides that, so the project never saw the light of day.

 

But I still have a lot of the hardcopy and working notes that stemmed from that research in the office (that work did at least lead me to the idea for Artillery Hell, so it wasn't all wasted ), so I'll see what I can dig up on Monday to supplement my memory. But here is basically what I do remember.

 

The initial Union I Corps attack by Doubleday's Division drove south astride the Hagerstown Pike in a column of brigades, Gibbon, Phelps, Patrick, with Hoffman covering the corps right flank and rear to the 'threat' of Stuart and Pelham on Nicodemus Hill (Patrick was actually held back about 20 minutes for a similar purpose, leaving the initial advance to Gibbon and Phelps). On Doubleday's left was Rickett's Division, which was to advance with three brigades, Hartsuff and Duryea leading, with Christian in support. But in it's case Hartsuff was severely wounded before the advance began, when he went forward to look over the route of advance, throwing his brigade command into temporary confusion and delaying their advance, while Christian suffered a crisis of faith and departed the field without informing his subordinates leading to another delay.

 

The upshot was that instead of a single advance on a three brigade front, with three brigades in close support, the advance began as two disconnected brigades from two different divisions - Gibbon and Duryea - that had no physical or even visual contact and who fought two essentially separate battles. Worse, the Hagerstown Pike, unknown to either side, was a pernicious barrier to movement, the stout post and plank fences that bordered each side of the toll road, had been replaced just a few years earlier and were essentially impervious to any attempts to bring them down (notice that in photos taken just after the battle the fences, which had been in the middle of a storm of solid shot, canister, musketry, and the movements of thousands of formed troops, are essentially inatct). Crossing that barrier with formed troops was impossible, the result being that the battle was further partioned to one occuring west of the Pike and one east of the Pike.

 

So Gibbon pressed south with half his brigade formed east and half west of the pike. The western half engaged Jones and Winder's Brigades of Jackson's Division. The eastern half engaged Lawton's and Trimble's Brigades of Ewell's Division, along with Duryea further to the east and with Phelps' Brigade coming up in support (some of his men, the 2nd US Sharpshooters moved down the Pike itself to good effect until they tried to cross the fences). They managed to press the Confederate line, pushing back the two leading brigades of Jackson's Division as Patrick finally came up and pressing Lawton hard as Hartsuff's and Christian's regiments straggled into the line, but by that time Duryea's hard-fighting brigade had been used up and was nearly out of ammunition so was forced to fall back, relieving the pressure.

 

Then Jackson's second line counterattacked to restore their left, with Starke's and Taliaferro's Brigades, while Hays' small brigade crossed the Pike with some difficulty and hit Rickett's disorganized line. The Union line then fell back slightly, but on the left Starke and Taliaferro wheeled right towards the Pike, intending to roll up Gibbon's left wing and Phelp's only to find themselves unable to get across the fences so settled into a musketry duel, that ended abruptly when Campbell's Battery of Napoleons unlimbered to their left rear on a small hillock just west of the Pike and to their north and Gibbon's reformed right wing wheeled into their rear (Early's Brigade to the southwest on the SW edge of the West Woods couldn't see to interfere because of the lay of the terrain). The result was a near massacre of Starke's Brigade (the most famous pictures of the Confederate dead along the Pike are not from Hood's later counterattack, but are Starke's and Taliaferro's men caught in the terrific crossfire from their left front, left rear and rear).

 

The result was that about 4o minutes into the action Jackson's Division had been crushed west of the Pike and Ewell's Division east of the Pike had been hammered, but with Hay's support had fought Rickett's and Phelp's to a standstill. But further to the rear two brigades (Anderson and Magilton) of Meade's Division were moving to deploy along the north edge of the cornfield for a renewed attack south (his third brigade, Seymour's, had evicted the Confederates from the East Woods and from that cover were opening a destructive crossfire on Lawton and Hays and with the support of the Union artillery firing from east of the Antietam Creek near the Pry House, were slowly picking Ripley's shakey brigade apart.

 

That was the moment when Hood's Division was unleashed. He advanced up the east side of the Pike, with Wofford on the left and Law on the right, but with Law leading, so effectively in echelon. Law brushed Phelp's and the exhausted left wing of Gibbon back and then hammered forward to the northeast, driving Hartsuff and Christian - also nearly exhausted (by this time most of the leading Union brigades were very low on ammunition) - forcing Seymour's Brigade back into the East Woods where the XII Corps was attempting to come forward (and where its commander, Mansfield, was no killed throwing it into temporary confusion, but probably a good thing in the long run), and catching Magilton's Brigade while it was marching by the flank east to west along the north edge of the Cornfield, forcing them to abruptly fall back and reform. But that spent Law's regiments and left them isolated and only safe because of the confusion they had thrown the Union line into.

 

Wofford however wasn't as lucky. Coming up behind Law's left he pressed Phelps' and Gibbon's men in confusion all the way to the north edge of the Cornfield, where Anderson's Brigade was deployed, lying down behind the fence bordering the field. But at the same time his men also encountered the tactical problem that the turnpike fence posed. Across it as they moved through the cornfield, Campbell's men calmly showered them with spherical case and shot as Gibbon's right wing, closed up on the Pike after destroying Starke and Taliaferro, peppered them from the flank. The result was Wofford's men deployed in turn facing them across Pike, while the 1st Texas attempted to break the stalemate by pushing forward and wheeling onto the flank of Campbell....only to have their advance checked by Magilton's men, who calmly rested their muskets (most of the Pennsylvania Reserve regiments were still equipped with smoothbores at this time) on the lower rails of the farm fence they were sheltered behind and cut down the Texans who advance - according to one account - to within about 10 paces before breaking. At the same time Gibbon took personal command of the left section of Campbell's Battery (it was Gibbon's old battery) wheeling them to the left and firing double canister at 50 paces into the Texans left (one battery member described Gibbon calmly going from one gun to the other, depressing the pieces so the canister grazed the rise and richocheted up into the Texan's faces) while the rest of the battery continued firing into Wofford's line along the Turnpike fence.

 

That marked the high water of Wofford's advance as, with Law forced to withdraw to his right and rear, he too was forced to rapidly decamp to avoid encirclement and destruction. Which led to the next phase, mostly involving the XII Corps.

 

So the losses of the 1st Texas, to the fire from Anderson's Brigade to their front and Campbell's Battery and Gibbon's men to their left, didn't occur in isolation, but as part of a very complex series of maneuvers largely driven by the terrain and by natural and manmade obstacles (including the idiotic initial deployment by McClellan).

 

But otherwise I suppose the circumstances were just what you described.

[Old Tanker]

For what's worth The Iron Brigade's History(Gibbon) at Wiki says that the 1st Texas took 82% losses at Antietam.

It also says the three highest causulty rates % wise in any CSA reg'ts were inflicted by the Iron Brigade.

 

As was heard from a member of Archer's Brigade on July 1 , 1863.

 

" Them there ain't no militieee , that's 'em boys in the Black Hats "

[DB]

"Artillery Hell" would be this book, I suppose? http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/1995/johnson.htm

[Jim Martin]

What's amazing is that they stood their ground long enough to take 82% cas.

[Rich]

"Artillery Hell" would be this book, I suppose? http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/1995/johnson.htm

 

Yep. I've always wanted to do a revised edition, but....

[Rich]

What's amazing is that they stood their ground long enough to take 82% cas.

 

I'm not sure it actually took all that long? IIRc about 700 muskets firing at point blank range, two Napoleons concentrating on them at about 50 yards (plus the fire that was passing through Wofford's Brigade as they were coming up) and at least two other batteries north and northwest of the Cornfield firing at them as well.