George Smalley: Reporting from Battle of Antietam

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‘At this crisis Franklin came up with fresh troops and formed on the left. [Maj. Gen. Henry] Slocum, commanding one division of the corps, was sent forward along the slopes lying under the first ranges of the rebel hills, while [Maj. Gen. William] Smith with the other division was ordered to retake the cornfields and woods which all day had been so hotly contested. It was done in the handsomest style. His Maine and Vermont regiments and the rest went forward on the run, and cheering as they went, swept like an avalanche through the cornfields, fell upon the woods, cleared them in ten minutes, and held them. They were not again retaken.

‘The field and its ghastly harvest which the Reaper had gathered in those fatal hours remained finally with us. Four times it had been lost and won. The dead are strewn so thickly that as you ride over it you cannot guide your horses’s steps too carefully. Pale and bloody faces are everywhere upturned. They are sad and terrible, but there is nothing which makes one’s hart beat so quickly as the imploring look of sorely wounded men who beckon wearily for help which you cannot stay to give.’

Having overstayed his welcome at the Frederick telegraph office, Smalley hurried to the railroad station to catch a special train to Baltimore. For the next two hours, he continued working on his story, sitting on a log by the side of the tracks. He hopped the first military train he could find and headed for Baltimore. For the first time in 36 hours he slept, nearly missing the connecting train to New York. Jumping onto the express, he stood beneath an oil lamp at the end of the railroad car, scribbling away feverishly. He finished his article midway between Philadelphia and New York.

The War Department, after reading the first of Smalley’s dispatches, obligingly forwarded them to the Tribune office, where managing editor Sydney Gay had kept a full crew of typesetters and proofreaders waiting all night at the Nassau Street headquarters of the newspaper office. When Smalley entered the building at 5 a.m., dazed and dusty from his two-day ordeal, the hardbitten newsmen broke into a spontaneous round of applause. An hour later, a special edition of the newspaper was on the streets, headlining Smalley’s remarkable scoop.

The full story included a firsthand account of Burnside’s tardy crossing of Burnside’s Bridge. ‘Attacking first with one regiment, then with two, and delaying both for artillery, Burnside was not over the bridge before two o’clock–perhaps not till three,’ Smalley wrote. ‘He advanced slowly up the slopes in his front, his batteries in rear covering, to some extent, the movement of the infantry. A desperate fight was going on in a deep ravine on his right; the rebel batteries were in full play and apparently very annoying and destructive, while heavy columns of rebel troops were plainly visible, advancing, as if careless of concealment, along the road and over the hills in the direction of Burnside’s forces….Getting his troops well in hand, and sending a portion of his artillery to the front, he advanced with rapidity and the most determined vigor straight up the hill in front, on top of which the rebels had maintained their most dangerous battery….

‘The fight in the ravine was in full progress, the batteries in the center were firing with new vigor, Franklin was blazing away on the right, and every hilltop, ridge and woods along the whole line was crested and veiled with white clouds of smoke. All day had been clear and bright since the early cloudy morning, and now this whole magnificent, unequalled scene shone with the splendor of an afternoon September sun. Four miles of battle, its glory all visible, its horrors all hidden, the fate of the Republic hanging on the hour–could anyone be insensible of its grandeur?’

With courage, imagination and vigor, Smalley had witnessed the greatest battle of the war to that date and had managed to scoop the entire world with his quickly written, unromanticized account. He concluded, logically enough, by predicting that McClellan would resume the battle the next day. The fact that McClellan failed to do so led directly to his sacking by Lincoln a few weeks later.

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