 |
| Winfield S. Hancock. |
 |
| The Burnide Bridge. |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[480]
Lee's line.1 The Nationals were deceived, and did not profit by the advantage gained.
Night soon closed the action on the right and center, the Unionists holding the ground they had acquired.
In the struggle near the center, the gallant General Meagher was wounded and carried from the field, and his command devolved on Colonel Burke, of the New York Sixty-third.
During the severe conflicts of the day, until late in the afternoon, Porter's corps, with artillery, and Pleasanton's cavalry, had remained on the east side of the Antietam as a reserve, and in holding the road from Sharpsburg to Middletown and Boonsborough.
Then McClellan
sent two brigades to support the wearied right, and six battalions of Sykes's regulars were thrown across bridge No. 2, on the Sharpsburg road, to drive away the Confederate sharp-shooters, who were seriously interfering with Pleasanton's horse batteries there.
Warren's brigade was sent more to the left, on the right and rear of Burnside, who held the extreme left of the National line.
This brings us to a notice of the operations of the day under the directions of Burnside.
The left was resting on the slopes opposite bridge No. 3, at Rohrback's farm, a little below Sharpsburg, which was held on the morning of the 17th by the brigade of Toombs (Second and Twentieth Georgia), supported by sharp-shooters and batteries on Longstreet's right wing, commanded by D. R. Jones.
Burnside was directed, at eight o'clock in the morning, to cross that bridge, attack the foe, carry the heights on the opposite bank of the Antietam, and advance along their crest upon Sharpsburg.
It was a task
1 D. H. Hill, in his report, speaking of the struggle at this point, declared that “affairs looked very critical,” for the Nationals were within a few hundred yards of the hill which commanded Sharpsburg and the Confederate rear. He rallied two hundred men, and made attacks with Surprising effect. “The Yankees were completely deceived by this boldness,” said Hill in his report (Reports of the Army of Northern Virginia, II. 117), “and induced to believe that there was a large force in our center.”
Scanned printed text.
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.