If Antietam Creek were so insignificant a watercourse, one might wonder why local farmers had established any fords in the vicinity in the first place. After all, cattle hardly need as shallow a crossing as infantry. Major Douglas’ sarcastic comments notwithstanding, except for the bridge and Snavely’s Ford, the creek would have provided a perfectly effective military obstacle on June 5, 1994, and a great deal of evidence confirms that it served just as effectively on September 17, 1862.

A quarter of a century after the battle, a New York Zouave who navigated Snavely’s Ford remembered that it was at least waist deep. In 1903 a Rhode Island lieutenant recalled that he had found even that crossing breast deep. The historian of General Joseph Kershaw’s Confederate division acknowledged that the creek was not fordable for some distance above the Potomac, and he concluded that it could be waded without difficulty only at the upstream end of Lee’s defensive line, well above Burnside’s front.

Brigadier General Jacob D. Cox commanded the IX Corps during the fight on September 17, 1862. While some argue that confusion between Cox and Burnside helped impede the Union attacks on the bridge, Cox dismissed that argument. (Libary of Congress)

All three of those sources suffer from a distance in time from the event, as does Douglas’, and the last of the three may reflect more hearsay than recollection. They all predate the appearance of Douglas’ memoirs by decades, though, and none of them seems to have borne any partisan intent to refute any innuendo about the fordability of the creek, for no such accusation had been made prior to the 1940 publication of Douglas’ book. Even more convincing is the contemporary report of Colonel George Crook, whose brigade formed the upstream extremity of Burnside’s line. Though the creek should theoretically have been even more shallow there than at the bridge, and although no Confederates opposed the crossing there, Crook thrashed about for more than two hours before he found one spot where a few men could wade the creek at a time.

Bruce Catton’s repetition of Douglas’ assertion encouraged two more historians to assail Burnside. In a 1956 monograph for Civil War History, Martin Schenck accused the general of sulking over his demotion from wing command, reasoning that nothing but petulance could have caused him to spend so much time crossing his troops. To support his hypothesis, Schenck cited only three secondary works, selected reports from the Official Records and a single Confederate memoir — namely Douglas’ claptrap.

Schenck charged Burnside with wasting five hours, insisting that Burnside’s attack order came at 8 a.m. Schenck skipped over McClellan’s initial report to quote instead from the general’s revised report, dated nearly a year later. In his first report, written just four weeks after the battle, McClellan admitted that Burnside received no order to attack until about 10 a.m. Only in 1863, as McClellan prepared a more defensive report with an eye to presidential ambitions, did he claim that he sent Burnside his instructions two hours earlier. Burnside’s report, which Schenck did not consult, likewise timed the arrival at 10. Jacob Cox initially estimated that it reached them about 9 o’clock, but — judging by events that he witnessed elsewhere on the battlefield at the same time — Cox later acknowledged that the order probably arrived nearer to 10 a.m.

Generals’ reports are the less reliable half of the Official Records, for they often represent the efforts of an officer to account for his shortcomings in the wake of a failure. Battlefield correspondence more frequently yields the truth, as it does in this instance: McClellan’s actual order is published in a supplemental volume that Schenck also overlooked, and it is headed 9:10 a.m.

Allowing a couple of minutes for transcription, a few more minutes to assign the envelope to the courier and to explain the location of Burnside’s headquarters, and 15 minutes for that rider to gallop overland with it, Burnside would not have had it in his hands before 9:30. Any of the likely variations from that basic scenario, such as a wrong turn or a halt for directions, would have brought the delivery closer to 10. Certainly it must have been that time before the first troops moved against the bridge and the bogus ford.

In his adulatory 1957 biography George B. McClellan, Shield of the Union, Warren Hassler fell for both the 8 a.m. attack order and Douglas’ jibe about the depth of the creek. Relying on McClellan’s self-serving autobiography as well, Hassler described the commanding general dispatching a second staff officer to Burnside at 9 a.m. with orders to carry the bridge at the bayonet. He also cited the highly suspect 1894 reminiscence of one William Biddle, who insisted that McClellan sent Colonel Thomas Key to IX Corps headquarters at noontime with a third — and imperative — order to take the bridge at all costs.

Burnside’s troops had made their way over both creek crossings by 1 p.m., but the spearhead division that took the bridge had exhausted its ammunition, so Burnside moved fresh brigades in to replace it. Before continuing his assault into the village of Sharpsburg, he also brought his artillery and ordnance over the same bridge the rest of his infantry used, and realigned Rodman’s isolated division with the troops who had crossed at the bridge. By then McClellan had allowed the fighting on the right to fizzle out, so Lee managed to attend to Burnside a little more effectively. McClellan himself had infected his subordinates with the absurd notion that Lee fielded 100,000 men that day, so with his own back to the creek Burnside proceeded somewhat cautiously with his 13,000.

Hassler tried to revise the estimate of McClellan’s available troops downward, and Lee’s upward, from a Union strength of more than 80,000 and a Confederate force of about 40,000 to some 69,000 for McClellan and more than 57,000 for Lee. That would have reduced McClellan’s advantage in numbers from 100 percent to about 20 percent. When it came to assessing Burnside’s performance, however, Hassler reverted to the traditional tale of overwhelming Union forces — at least on Burnside’s front.

Characterizing Burnside’s realignment of troops as sitting down on the job, Hassler supposed that this additional delay prompted McClellan to send Captain Biddle with the imaginary fourth directive to move forward. To bolster this final message, Biddle ostensibly carried a signed order to relieve Burnside and replace him with another officer. That alleged order was supposed to be handed over if Burnside dawdled any further.

Here, Hassler misunderstood his own source, for in Biddle’s doubtful tale it was Colonel Key who carried both the third and fourth orders, while Biddle himself delivered none. That error is merely incidental to the overall historiography, though, for the entire story of those last orders exudes an aroma of fiction.

No one else mentioned any order for Burnside’s removal during the 32 years that intervened between the battle and Biddle’s revelation — including McClellan, who supposedly wrote the order and who later tried his best to discredit Burnside’s performance. It seems fairly obvious that Biddle’s account simply represented another of those inventive recollections that pollute the stream of history, and Civil War history in particular. Like other authors of such imaginative recollections, Biddle had to leave his fable unpublished until after the deaths of all the principal actors who might have contradicted it.

McClellan and his contemporary apologists spent the remainder of the 19th century building the case against Burnside with half-truths, sarcasm and outright lies. Similar prejudice among subordinate generals also played a subtle part in Burnside’s defeats at Fredericksburg, only three months after Antietam, and the debacle at the Petersburg Crater in 1864. Those disasters seemed to corroborate the image of Burnside as a bumbling incompetent who could do nothing right.

That relentlessly negative image carried into a second century with slipshod research, jaundiced interpretation and ill-considered conclusions. For two decades after the Civil War centennial, most popular histories reflected the pejorative portrait of Ambrose Burnside that had prevailed among McClellan’s partisans during and after the war. Only in the 1980s, when historians like Stephen Sears and A. Wilson Greene began producing more carefully researched and objectively analyzed studies of the Maryland campaign and the role of the IX Corps, did the tide begin to turn toward a more equitable assessment of Burnside’s services along Antietam Creek.

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This article was written by William Marvel and originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

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