They were, no doubt, the most famous cigars in American history.  

Corporal Barton W. Mitchell and Sergeant John McKnight Bloss were the lucky discoverers of these gift stogies. They and the rest of the 27th Indiana had halted their march just west of Frederick, Maryland, on September 13, 1862. Resting on the ground, stretched out and talking lazily, they spotted what looked like an envelope fallen near some low grass. Inside the envelope, wrapped by a piece of paper, the two noncoms were thrilled to discover their triple tobacco treasure: three fine cigars, just calling for a match. 

While Bloss searched his pockets for one, and perhaps, in the absence of an early discovery, contemplated what comrade would be both likely to possess the needed light and worthy of the third prize, Mitchell decided to take a look at the gift wrap, the paper that had enclosed the cigars. 

When he unfolded it, he found an even bigger prize. 

The paper was an official set of orders from General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, which detailed his plans for that army. The orders, along with the cigars, had been lost by Major General D.H. Hill, whose division had camped in the same field just days before the Indiana troops. 

Within hours, the orders were in the hands of Major General George Brinton McClellan, the young, brilliant organizer and diffident fighter who commanded the Army of the Potomac, the Union army that opposed Lee.

McClellan was both elated and, characteristically, cautious. If real, the orders were a gold mine. But were they real? Fate smiled on McClellan a second time. An officer on his staff had known, before the war, the staff officer from Lee’s army who had written the orders. He verified the handwriting. 

McClellan, then, had in his hand the whereabouts of Lee’s army. With that knowledge, he was in a position to crush the scattered units before they could regroup—and end the Civil War. “Here is a paper,” he told an aide, “which which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home.” 

Thus began the short campaign that led to the Battle of Antietam, one of the most significant battles in the American Civil War—a battle that would lead to a new direction for the war, a direction that would, eventually, redeem a national promise and free a people.  

Lee’s army was little more than two weeks away from a second masterful victory over the humiliated Union army on the plains near Manassas Junction, Virginia, just a few miles southwest of Washington, D.C. That victory came after Lee’s unlikely triumph over McClellan in the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, in early summer. There, over a period of seven days, the Confederate army had—through some trickery, much tough fighting, Lee’s brilliant generalship, and his quick insight into McClellan’s aversion to risk—met a far larger army and not simply defeated it but sent it packing back to Washington, D.C., demoralized. 

Emboldened by these successes, eager to take the war to Northern soil, mindful of the benefits of having his army feed off Northern farms for a while, hopeful that a Confederate victory in Maryland would convince that slaveholding state to join the Confederacy—which would, of course, leave the Washington-based Union government surrounded—and pursuing the dream that a decisive victory in Union territory would persuade the governments of Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy, Lee launched his first invasion of the North.  At the same time, Confederate armies in the west were moving into Kentucky and Union-held areas of Tennessee, hoping through multiple victories to make that recognition more certain. 

Though invading the North, Lee did not send his troops with banners flying and flags waving. Intent on surprise, he had the army march northward through the Shenandoah Valley, hidden by the Blue Ridge Mountains east of the valley and, farther north, by South Mountain, a ridge that crosses western Maryland from north to south. 

As McClellan could tell from the orders, Lee’s army was also vulnerable. More than half the Confederates, under command of Major General “Stonewall” Jackson, had been sent to capture the federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, the community at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley where John Brown had tried to stage a slave revolt just a few years before. Another body of troops, under General James Longstreet had ventured  more than 25 miles farther north, on its way to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Others—like D.H. Hill’s division—were scattered between.  

McClellan, though, was not one to move precipitously. He spent the afternoon and evening of September 13 making his plans to go after Lee. Finally, on September 14, his army began to move rapidly to the west, hoping to push through the passes of South Mountain. 

His coming would not be a complete surprise to Lee, however. A Marylander who sympathized with the Confederacy learned of McClellan’s coming into possession of the lost orders and rode off to notify Lee. Getting that intelligence on the night of the 13th and anticipating McClellan’s moves, Lee quickly made plans to send some units to defend the gaps along South Mountain, blocking the Union advance, while he gathered the rest of his army. 

On the 14th, these small portions of the two armies met. Leading units of the Union army dislodged the Confederate defenders at Crampton’s Gap but—worried about a counterattack—dug in after the fighting instead of moving on to Harpers Ferry. At Turner’s Gap and Fox’s Gap, farther north, fierce, daylong combat forced the Confederates to retreat.

The Union army fully controlled the passes of South Mountain. Nothing now could stop McClellan from moving his larger force west of the ridge and defeating Lee.  

Words © 2010 AtHome Pilgrim.

All Rights Reserved.