As the Battle of Antietam unfolded, Major General Ambrose Burnside had good reason to wonder whether Army of the Potomac commander Major General George McClellan was as good a friend as he always had seemed. Up to the day of the battle, “Little Mac” had shown nothing but trust in the ability of his prewar chum. He had elevated Burnside from commanding the IX Corps to the oversight of the Left Wing of the army, the combined forces of the IX and V corps.

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The campaign for both men had gone well—so far. With the advantage of finding General Robert E. Lee’s lost Special Orders No. 191 on September 13, McClellan had tracked down the Confederates and engaged them at South Mountain, forcing Lee into a defensive position along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Md.

But then Little Mac had consumed 36 hours preparing to attack Lee’s heavily outnumbered Confederates on September 17, and the Rebels had been able to fend off the Union attacks throughout the early and midmorning hours. Burnside’s Left Wing was on the Federal left flank, and McClellan had wanted him to drive forward to Sharpsburg. Burnside began his attack around 10 a.m., but Antie­tam Creek and the steep bluffs on the western bank had prevented him from moving quickly.

McClellan began to grouse at Burnside for his perceived slowness. Burnside was puzzled; he had been the first Union commander to overtake Lee’s army in Maryland and the first to engage in battle at South Mountain, so Burnside and his staff considered McClellan’s behavior bizarre. It looked to them as though McClellan had grown jealous of his chief subordinate, or wished to use him as a scapegoat if something went wrong.

In Burnside’s sector Antietam Creek could be crossed on the stone triple-arched Rohrbach Bridge—immortalized after the battle as Burnside’s Bridge—or at Snavely’s Ford, the better part of a mile downstream. The day before the battle McClellan seemed to question Burnside’s competence when he sent the army’s chief engineer, Captain James Duane, to personally position Burnside’s divisions before the bridge and the ford. Duane performed this duty vicariously, though, through junior officers. They inadvertently placed General Isaac Rodman’s division in front of a reputed cattle ford, about midway between the bridge and Snavely’s Ford.

When Burnside received the order to attack, he threw one assault after another against the bridge, which turned out to be such a strong position that the Confederates held it for nearly three hours with a couple of depleted regiments. Rodman, meanwhile, moved forward to cross at the designated ford, only to find that it was too deep for infantry.

Earlier that year Captain Duane 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 that manual, “and by cavalry and carriages when its depth is about four feet. The requisites for a good ford are, that the banks are low but not marshy, that the water obtains its greatest depth gradually, the current moderate, the stream not subject to freshets, and that the bottom is even, hard, and tenacious.”

These criteria applied to a routine crossing, uncomplicated by enemy resistance. Had Duane not known that Antietam Creek was too deep for infantry there, or that the banks were abrupt and the bottom treacherous, he ought at least to have been able to see from a great distance that the opposite shore rose to a steep bluff that infantry would have had to scale in the face of point-blank musketry—if the crossing could be made at all. Rodman soon deduced that he had been sent to the wrong place, so he started downstream for the rumored pedestrian ford near Farmer Snavely’s house.

Those who later criticized Burnside’s performance at Antie­tam first minimized the difficulty that the stream posed, then exaggerated the time it took him to put his troops across the creek. Bruce Catton started that trend in 1951, describing 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 had not reconnoitered the creek despite his implied familiarity with it. Instead, he was echoing the words of Henry Kyd Douglas, who had served on the staff of “Stonewall” Jackson.

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