Battle of Antietam: 7th Maine's Senseless Charge On the Piper Farm

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Battle of Antietam: 7th Maine's Senseless Charge On the Piper Farm
Major Henry Hyde led his small 7th Maine down into the Piper farm swale at Antietam as Rebel brigades and artillery blasted apart his lone regiment. He would forever rue that he had not “dared to disobey orders.”

It had no effect on the battle -- other than adding to the casualty lists -- and there was no good reason for ordering it in the first place. But for the whim of a subpar brigade commander, whose sobriety some held in question, it never would have happened. Yet late on the afternoon of September 17, 1862, during the Battle of Antietam, Major Thomas W. Hyde was ordered to use his 7th Maine Regiment to make a fruitless attack -- after the major fighting had ended on the northern part of the field. Such is the nature of warfare.

There was no regiment in the Army of the Potomac any better than the 7th Maine, part of Brig. Gen. John W. Davidson's brigade, Maj. Gen. William F. Smith's division, Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin's VI Corps. The Down Easterners had proved their mettle during the spring 1862 fighting on Virginia's Peninsula at Williamsburg, Garnett's Farm and White Oak Swamp. In fact, their performance at Williamsburg impressed Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan so much that he rode into their camp the day after the battle, proclaimed the regiment had "saved the day" and ordered that the name "Williamsburg" be written on the flag.

Even though the 7th had been in the thick of many fights, it had escaped significant battle casualties. That luck was more than offset by the devastating impact of sickness and disease. Following the regiment's withdrawal back to northern Virginia from the Peninsula in August 1862, the 7th began its march into Maryland in pursuit of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with just 225 men present for duty. The 24-year-old Hyde, recently appointed to command of the regiment and concerned with his scant numbers, "used to count mine once or twice a day, in hope of finding a few more present," to no avail. Regardless of the regiment's size, Hyde had great confidence in his charges. "They were all seasoned veterans and equal to anything. I did not believe the same number of soldiers of the Great Frederick [Frederick the Great of Prussia] could have stood against them."

Before the opening of the September 1862 Maryland campaign, Davidson was assigned to the District of St. Louis, and Colonel William H. Irwin of the 49th Pennsylvania took over leadership of the brigade. In addition to Hyde's Mainers, the brigade included the 20th, 33rd, 49th and 77th New York regiments. Irwin was a veteran of the Mexican War -- he had been wounded at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma -- and as Hyde would later write, he was "a gallant man, but drank too much, of which I was then unaware." Irwin's tenure as brigade commander would prove brief, but damaging enough.

Leaving Washington on September 7, McClellan led his Army of the Potomac northwest from the capital after Lee's Confederates, in what Hyde described as "slow and deliberate marches." The pace picked up a bit after September 13 when, while resting in a field outside Frederick, Md., three members of the 27th Indiana came upon an extra copy of Lee's Special Orders 191, the document that outlined the Confederate commander's initial plan of operations for the campaign.

The next day, McClellan ordered an attack on Confederate positions on South Mountain, but Hyde's 7th Maine only watched from afar as the VI Corps' 1st Division under Brig. Gen. Henry Slocum overwhelmed a much smaller Confederate force at Crampton's Gap, just outside Burkittsville. From there, the 7th Maine and the rest of the VI Corps crossed over the gap and entered Pleasant Valley. Their goal ostensibly was to come in behind Confederate Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws' forces, which were positioned at the southern end of Pleasant Valley, and disrupt Confederate plans for taking Harpers Ferry. As it turned out, the VI Corps moved too slowly to help at Harpers Ferry -- the Union garrison surrendered on the morning of September 15. Franklin could have made life miserable for McLaws' command by driving south down Pleasant Valley and getting behind the Confederates, but the VI Corps commander got cold feet, claimed he faced a much larger force and did not press on. The Confederates crossed over the Potomac River into Harpers Ferry and marched off to join the rest of Lee's army, then gathering around Sharpsburg.

The Union VI Corps would march there too once ordered to do so by McClellan on September 17. By 9 a.m., as the 7th Maine neared the battlefield, Major Hyde later recalled "meeting hundreds of wounded coming to the rear" and ordered his musicians to "arm themselves with guns picked up by the roadside, and join their companies." He remained extremely proud of his men, saying, "It was refreshing to turn from the crowds of wounded streaming back and look at the firm set faces behind me, everyone of them known to me personally, and never known to lack nerve in danger."

Initially the VI Corps was kept on the eastern side of Antietam Creek, near McClellan's headquarters at the Pry house, but by 11 a.m. Smith's 2nd Division, followed shortly by Slocum's 1st Division, was ordered to cross the creek and march to support the Union right. Major General Winfield S. Hancock's 1st Brigade of Smith's division led the march to the battlefield, followed by Irwin's 3rd Brigade, with the division's famous "Old Vermont Brigade" bringing up the rear. When Hancock's men reached the East Woods around noon, he ordered them through the woods and out into the fields just beyond, where they took positions supporting several VI Corps batteries.

Following Hancock into the East Woods, Irwin's brigade was ordered to move southeast, to cover the withdrawal of Brig. Gen. George Greene's XII Corps division from the area around the Dunker Church. "The scene before us was awful," surgeon George T. Stevens of the 77th New York, remembered. "The field upon which we had now entered, thrice hotly contested, was strewed with the bodies of friend and foe." Indeed it was. As the 77th New York moved across the meadows just south of Miller's cornfield, an area of ground literally covered with Union and Confederate dead and wounded, the rest of the brigade's New York regiments advanced toward the Dunker Church, while the 7th Maine marched almost directly south, across the fields just above the Sunken Road.

The Germans of the 20th New York were hit the hardest in the Dunker Church fighting. Hyde recalled that these men, "some eight hundred strong, were moving in fine line, and looked so well that the whole fire of the enemy was being concentrated on them." As the 20th struggled through blasts of Rebel gunfire, Hyde moved his small command directly south against the Confederates posted in and around the Roulette farm. The Mainers successfully drove out those Confederates, at the cost of a dozen or so casualties. Immediately afterward, Hyde moved his regiment to the right, to connect with the left of the 20th New York and the rest of the brigade.