The Army of Northern Virginia
As opposed to the patchwork quality of the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia was a lean fighting machine. This was an army of combat veterans. Lee’s regiments were all battle-tested, and more than half had been in three or more major fights. Many of these soldiers had’seen the elephant’ back in July 1861 at First Manassas. Twenty-two units had been in five battles. Only around 21 percent of the regiments had fought in just one battle. The Rebels were hardened veterans of First Manassas, Jackson’s Valley campaign, Williamsburg, Seven Pines, the Seven Days’, Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas. Their commanders were hardened veterans too. Lee’s chief lieutenants, Maj. Gens. James Longstreet and Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, led Lee’s two corps at Sharpsburg, although their commands were not officially designated as corps until after the battle. That would require legislation from the Confederate Congress.

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The South Carolina–born Longstreet had a long military career that included combat in Mexico and against the Indians in Texas. He fought in many of the major conflicts of the Eastern theater and was prominent in the Seven Days’ battles, where Lee dubbed him ‘the staff in my right hand.’ At Second Manassas, his troops launched the devastating counterattack that forced the withdrawal of Pope’s army. At Sharpsburg his command held the Confederate center and right.

Lee’s infantry division commanders constituted an impressive array of combat leadership. Here was Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood, a Texan via Kentucky, who was a virtual pit bull in battle. His aggressive leadership played a prominent role in preventing the collapse of the Confederate left on the morning of September 17. Soon after Hood’s attack, the timely arrival of Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws’ Division helped wreck Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick’s division of Sumner’s II Corps. Another audacious commander in the campaign, Maj. Gen. D.H. Hill, bought time for Lee at South Mountain, reinforced Jackson’s flank in the West Woods and tenaciously held the Confederate center at the Sunken Road and Piper farm.

Jackson was Lee’s other ‘wing’ commander. This son of the western Virginia mountain region had earned his combat spurs early at First Manassas. His brilliant Valley campaign in the spring of 1862 further solidified his greatness. His sluggishness in the Seven Days’ campaign temporarily marred his reputation. However, he redeemed himself by capturing Harpers Ferry and holding Lee’s left at Sharpsburg.

It is believed that Lee had no more than 40,000 men at Sharpsburg. The months of campaigning and fighting had taken its toll. The average Confederate regiment numbered 166 men. Some had less. The 8th Georgia carried 85 officers and men into battle, while the 8th Virginia had 34 men and the 1st Louisiana Battalion numbered an amazing 17 combatants. At the other end of the spectrum, Longstreet’s regiments averaged around 360 in the ranks, and the 3rd North Carolina, recently augmented with conscripts, numbered 983.

Clothing
The average Union soldier at Antietam would have been clothed in the standard dark-blue four-button blouse with light-blue trousers. But within this sea of blue could be found a smattering of other hues and styles. Here was the Iron Brigade in frock coats and tall black hats; the 72nd Pennsylvania wearing short, Zouave-style jackets; a detachment of the 114th Pennsylvania, the ‘Collis Zouaves,’ attached to the 2nd Massachusetts, in the traditional turbans, short jackets and red baggy pants of the Zouaves; and the 1st and 2nd U.S. ‘Berdan’s’ Sharpshooters wearing coats of forest green.

McClellan took great pains to see that his army was reequipped following months of campaigning. This took place at the camps at Rockville and through the establishment of supply depots at Frederick and Hagerstown, Md. Between September 12 and October 25, 1862, the army received more than 100,000 pairs of shoes and boots, 93,000 pairs of trousers, 10,000 blankets and numerous other supplies.

This influx of supplies was not a mere luxury or crass display of Yankee abundance. They were sorely needed after all the hard campaigning that summer. For example, a few weeks after Antietam, the quartermaster of the I Corps was seeking more than 5,000 shoes for the unshod soldiers of that command.

The much-touted ‘ragged Reb’ was in evidence during the Maryland campaign perhaps more than in any other period of the war. Numerous civilian eyewitness accounts bear this out. One Marylander observed that ‘They were the roughest looking set of creatures I ever saw, their features, hair, and clothing matted with dirt and filth.’ Angela Kirkham Davis, a Unionist citizen of Funkstown, Md., near Hagerstown, recalled: ‘They were tired, dirty, ragged and had no uniforms whatever. Their coats were made out of almost anything that you could imagine, butternut color predominating. Their hats looked worse than those worn by the darkies. Many were barefooted; some with toes sticking out of their shoes and others in their stocking feet. Their blankets were every kind of description, consisting of drugget, rugs, bedclothes, in fact anything they could get, put up in a long roll and tied at the ends, which with their cooking utensils, were slung over their shoulders.’

Sharpsburg resident James Snyder, who was 16 at the time, recalled years after the battle a very poignant example of the Confederates’ condition at Antietam. On the eve of the battle, Snyder fled with his mother to a nearby farm. On September 18, the day after the holocaust, the teenager went back into town against his mother’s wishes. Upon entering his home, he found the place a wreck, with doors and windows open, and drawers and closets ransacked. Heaps of ragged uniforms were on the floor, apparently exchanged for the cleaner clothes of the Snyder family. In one bedroom James found a naked Confederate soldier lying on the bed, his dirty, tattered uniform piled on the floor. Young Snyder boldly challenged the man, asking, ‘What are you doing in that bed in that condition for?’ The soldier replied, ‘Young man I am here because I am sick, and I didn’t want to soil this clean bed with my dirty clothes, so I took them off.’

A major cause of the ragged appearance of Lee’s men was the inadequate supply system of the Confederate Army. In the late summer of 1862, many Confederate regiments were still operating under the so-called commutation system of clothing supply. This system gave responsibility to each company commander for clothing his troops. The officer was to then seek reimbursement from the government. Individual Confederate states also undertook various measures to clothe their men, while private citizens got in on the act by raising money for uniforms. Meanwhile, the Confederate government was in the process of establishing quartermaster depots. However, it was not until late 1862 and early 1863, too late for Antietam, that Confederate authorities committed themselves to clothe their troops by direct government issue.

Accordingly, a hodgepodge of uniforms was very much evident on the fields around Sharpsburg. Yet despite civilian accounts, the sparse photographic evidence that exists, mainly post-battle images of Confederate dead taken by Alexander Gardner, shows Confederates with short jackets, trousers and blanket rolls or knapsacks. Most of the men in these grim photos have shoes. Could it be that some of these troops, such as the dead Louisiana soldiers of Starke’s Brigade, shared in the booty captured at Harpers Ferry on September 15? Perhaps. Most of these men got nowhere near the captured supplies there, however, since they were rushed to Sharpsburg for the battle. A rare image of Confederates in formation on the march taken by a local photographer in Frederick reveals what appear to be well-equipped soldiers wearing a wide variety of headgear. Historians are not positive whether this photo was taken in September 1862 or in July 1864, during Early’s march on Washington.

Another interesting but inconclusive observation of Confederate uniforms was made by Union surgeon James L. Dunn in a letter to his wife after Antietam. He wrote: ‘All this stuff about their extreme destitution is all bash….I have yet to find a Rebel even meanly clad or shod. They are as well shod as our own men. They are dressed in gray.’

Whatever the case, months of campaigning in Virginia, climaxed by the invasion of Maryland, left most of Lee’s men in tatters. Two weeks after the battle, Lee’s army regrouped around the lower Shenandoah Valley village of Bunker Hill. One soldier from the 4th North Carolina wrote home: ‘Pa, I want you to have me a pair of boots made. Those shoes you made for me ripped all to pieces….Our regiment used everything we had. I have no blanket nor any clothes but what I got. I have got the suit on that you sent me. They came in a good time. I like them very well. If I had a pair of shoes I would be the best clothed man in the regiment.’

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