previous next
[197] meantime been all but lost; its gunners having been shot down or driven off, and its guns saved from capture only by a determined charge of the 23d Ohio, 100th Pennsylvania, and 45th New York.

South Mountain.

The rattle of musketry ceased at noon, and for two hours only the roar of cannon was heard; the combatants on either side awaiting the arrival of reenforcements. Hitherto, only Reno's division on our side, and Hill's on that of the Rebels, had been engaged. But, at 2 P. M., Hooker's corps came up on our side, and took the old Hagerstown road, leading away from the turnpike on our right, with intent to flank and crush the Rebel left. At 3 P. M., our line of battle was formed, with Ricketts's division on the right; King's, commanded by Hatch, in the center, with its right resting on the turnpike, and Reno's on the left; and a general advance commenced, under a heavy fire of artillery.

Meantime, Hill had sent pressing messages to Longstreet, at Hagerstown, for help; and two brigades had already arrived; as Longstreet himself, with seven more brigades, did very soon afterward; raising the Rebel force in action thereafter to some 25,000 or 30,000 men. Longstreet, ranking Hill, of course took command; little to the satisfaction of Hill, who evidently thinks he could have done much better.1

The enemy's advantage in position was still very great, every movement on our part being plainly visible to them; while we could know nothing of their positions nor their strength, except from their fire and its effect. Our men were constantly struggling up rocky steeps, mainly wooded, where every wall, or fence, or inequality of ground, favors the combatants who stand on the defensive. The disparity in numbers between those actually engaged was not very great — possibly three to two--but then, our men were inspirited by the

1 Hill, in his official report, says:

Maj.-Gen. Longstreet came up about 4 o'clock, with the commands of Brig.-Gens. Evans and D. R. Jones. I had now become familiar with the ground, and knew all the vital points; and, had these troops reported to me the result might have been different. As it was, they took wrong positions: and, in their exhausted condition after a long march, they were broken and scattered.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
South Mountain, Va. (Virginia, United States) (1)
Hagerstown (Maryland, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
D. H. Hill (5)
Longstreet (4)
Jesse L. Reno (2)
Ricketts (1)
Preston King (1)
D. R. Jones (1)
Joseph Hooker (1)
J. P. Hatch (1)
N. G. Evans (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: