Battle of Antietam: Controversial Crossing on Burnside’s Bridge

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In 1951 Bruce Catton indicated in his book Mr. Lincoln’s Army that Major General Ambrose Burnside deserved much of the blame for the incomplete Union victory at the Battle of Antietam. Throughout the 1862 Maryland campaign Burnside had commanded a wing composed of two corps — his own IX Corps and Major General Joseph Hooker’s I Corps — in Major General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. At Antietam, however, McClellan took Hooker’s corps away from Burnside, posting the two halves of Burnside’s wing at either end of the army. Catton observed that Burnside, ‘getting a bit stuffy for once in his career, refused to yield his position as wing commander, forwarding McClellan’s orders for the IX Corps to the nominal commander of that corps instead of implementing them directly. That led to delays and confusion, Catton concluded, causing the IX Corps to take much longer than expected to cross Antietam Creek and attack the right wing of Robert E. Lee’s army.

Jacob Dolson Cox, a Canadian-born brigadier general, served as the official commander of the IX Corps on that Wednesday morning of September 17, 1862. A couple of decades later Cox pointed out that he and Burnside were standing together on the same knoll, watching the conflict unfold on McClellan’s right, when the first attack order arrived. The delay that ensued as a result of Burnside passing the order on to Cox could not have exceeded 15 or 20 seconds, because Cox said that Burnside read the brief message and immediately handed it to him. What took time was the tough job of getting troops across the creek.

In Burnside’s sector Antietam Creek could be conveniently crossed in two places: on the Rohrbach Bridge or at Snavely’s Ford, almost a mile downstream. General McClellan had been monitoring Burnside’s performance somewhat critically for the previous couple of days, and on the eve of the battle McClellan sent his own chief engineer, Captain James Duane, to personally position Burnside’s divisions before the bridge and the ford. Duane performed that duty vicariously, through junior officers, and they mistakenly placed Isaac P. Rodman’s division in front of a reputed cattle ford, about midway between the bridge and Snavely’s Ford.

Once Burnside received the order to attack, he sent a brigade against the bridge, which turned out to be such a strong position that the Confederates held it for nearly three hours with a portion of one brigade. Rodman, meanwhile, moved forward to cross at the designated ford, only to find it too deep for infantry.

Earlier that year Captain Duane — the same man who had been directed to position those brigades — had published a manual for engineer troops that began with advice on river crossings. A river with a moderate current may be forded by infantry when its depth does not exceed three feet, read the third sentence of the manual, but that applied to a routine crossing, uncomplicated by the immediate presence of enemy resistance. Duane’s engineers could not approach close enough to learn that Antietam Creek ran too deep for infantry there, that the banks dropped too abruptly or that the bottom shifted treacherously. They ought, however, to have been able to see that the opposite shore consisted of a steep bluff that infantry would have had to scale in the face of point-blank musketry. Rodman perceived those deadly deficiencies as soon as he advanced, so he veered downstream to locate the rumored pedestrian ford near Farmer Snavely’s house.

Burnside Bridge was built during the late 1830s to help the farmers of the prosperous agricultural region connect with the nearby C&O Canal and National Road. (Libary of Congress)

Those who later denigrated Burnside’s performance at Antietam based their arguments on two specific misrepresentations: minimization of the difficulty that the stream posed, and exaggeration of the time it took him to put his troops across the creek. Catton described the creek as insignificant and so shallow that a man could wade it in most places without wetting his belt buckle. Although Catton was a marvelous literary stylist, he may never have even laid eyes on Antietam Creek. He was simply echoing the words of Henry Kyd Douglas, who served on the staff of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. In 1899 Douglas put together his memoirs — not published until 1940 as I Rode with Stonewall — in which he wondered if it was sarcasm that had prompted people to rename the Rohrbach Bridge after Burnside. He challenged his readers to examine Antietam Creek.

Go and look at it, he urged, and tell me if you don’t think Burnside and his corps might have executed a hop, skip, and jump and landed on the other side. One thing is certain, they might have waded it that day without wetting their waist belts in any place. To buttress his opinion, Douglas recalled that a U.S. Army officer once remarked to him that he was puzzled how Burnside prevented his troops from dashing impulsively across the creek.

Since Douglas took part in the battle and grew up only a few miles from the creek, scholars took him at his word without accepting his implied challenge to test the depth of the stream. The National Park Service even mounted a plaque on the eastern end of Burnside’s Bridge with Douglas’ snide comment etched upon it that is still there. Yet except for the U.S. Army officer whom Douglas left conspicuously unidentified, that criticism did not seem to take root until the publication of I Rode With Stonewall.

Lately more careful historians such as Dennis Frye have demonstrated that Douglas had a penchant for hyperbole and invention, and his observations about the depth of the creek help to illustrate those flaws. Douglas’ route to and from Sharpsburg and his duties during the battle took him nowhere near the creek that day, or on any other day in 1862. For that matter, during Douglas’ entire life there was little to bring him in close contact with the Antietam in that vicinity; he may have known it better when he lived near its shallower upstream reaches, at Hagerstown.

Antietam Creek drains four counties in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the crossings Burnside faced lay three miles short of the mouth, where it empties into the Potomac as a sizable stream. During high water periods it can become a perfect torrent just downstream from Burnside’s Bridge, and only the most experienced whitewater raftsmen would dare test it then. Even with the sedimentary accumulation behind a shallow concrete dam just downstream from the bridge, the creek lies too deep and muddy today, and its banks are too steep, to meet the criteria of Captain Duane’s good ford for infantry.

On Sunday, June 5, 1994, I took Major Douglas up on his dare to examine Antietam Creek. I ate breakfast that morning in a Hagerstown diner. There, I met an old man who had lived his whole life in the area, and he assured me that the depth of the creek had not increased noticeably since he was a boy, despite the paving of permeable ground that accompanies widespread development.

My visit came in the middle of a weeks-long drought, and the water under Burnside’s Bridge flowed at about the same level as it had in the photographs taken four days after the battle. I followed the creek bank on the nature trail to Snavely’s Ford and crossed, which soaked me to the top of my inseam. The banks there sloped easily, and the bottom felt stable even though the current ran quite strong. At a height of 5 feet 10 inches, I am about 2 inches taller than the average Civil War soldier, but an infantryman of even minimum height might have surged across there with relative ease.

Then I moved upstream to the first bend above Snavely’s Ford. The banks there, vertical and slick with mud, stood 4 feet or more out of the water. I let myself down into chest-deep water and started across, but less than one-third of the way across my feet became tangled in the branches of a submerged tree, and I turned back.

From there to the next big bend upstream, the bluffs on the far shore — the side the Confederates held — reached a height of 60 feet or more at an angle of 50 or 60 degrees, and the banks yawned head-high out of the water, still vertical or even concave. It would have been impossible to cross there, so I made no further attempt until I reached the outside curve of the large bend, a few hundred yards below the bridge. There, I found most of the creek bed only 3 feet deep, but in the main channel I suddenly dropped in, to my chin.

I made one last crossing just below the bridge itself, upstream from the postwar dam. The bed of the stream has filled in behind the dam, so the water came only to my waist, but stones made the bottom precarious footing. Twice I stumbled enough to fall into the water, which bothered me not at all because the temperature was already near 90 degrees — and no one was shooting at me. Passage here during the battle would have proved far more difficult, though, because this was the location that the Confederates kept under the most murderous fire during the battle.

Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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