BURNSIDE'S BRIDGE

General Burnside's Bridge

General Burnside's Bridge

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 ...