the hill and standing to arms. The enemy were reported massing their forces. We were preparing to repel them. At noon silence was broken by hostile cannon in the extreme front. As afternoon wore away, the bombardment increased. At five o'clock there was a battle, and the Aroostook was hurling shell into the woods. At about seven o'clock the firing was heavy, but it was confined to a narrow circle. Ayres was driving the enemy from his batteries. Our boat pushed from the landing. At dark we moved from Harrison's Landing, seven miles below. The army had not moved there; the trains had. Soon after we steamed into the channel, the bombardment grew heavier. The gunboats were thundering into the forests.

When I left the prospect was cheerless. That night we met reënforcements. Before morning the army was strengthened. Pray God it was made strong enough to go to Richmond.

This retreat of Gen. McClellan was masterly. He carried all that army and all his trains successfully through one narrow road, while encompassed by enemies two-fold as strong as his army.-Cincinnati Commercial.

BATTLE OF ANTIETAM.

[N. Y. Tribune Account.]

BATTLE-FIELD OF ANTIETAM,
Wed. Ev., Sept. 17, 1862.

FIERCE and desperate battle between two hundred thousand men has raged since daylight, yet night closes on an uncertain field. It is the greatest fight since Waterloo-all over the field contested with an obstinacy equal even to Waterloo. If not, wholly a victory to-night, I believe it is the prelude to a victory to-morrow. But what can be foretold of the future of a fight in which from five in the morning till seven at night the best troops of the continent have fought without decisive result?

I have no time for speculation—no time even to gather details of the battle-only time to state its broadest features, then mount and spur for New York.

After the brilliant victory near Middletown, Gen. McClellan pushed forward his army rapidly, and reached Keedysville with three corps on Monday night. That march has already been described. On the day following the two armies faced each other idly until night. Artillery was busy at intervals; once in the morning opening with spirit, and continuing for half an hour with vigor, till the rebel battery, as usual, was silenced.

McClellan was on the hill where Benjamin's battery was stationed, and found himself suddenly under a rather heavy fire. It was still uncertain whether the rebels were retreating or reinforcing. Their batteries would remain in position in either case, and as they had withdrawn nearly all their troops from view, there was only the doubtful indication of columns of dust to the rear.

On the evening of Tuesday, Hooker was ordered to cross the Antietam Creek with his corps, and feeling the left of the enemy, to be ready to attack next morning. During the day of apparent inactivity, McClellan, it may be supposed, had been maturing his plan of battle, of which Hooker's movement was one development.

The position on either side was peculiar. When Richardson advanced on Monday he found the enemy deployed and displayed in force on a crescent-shaped ridge, the outline of which followed more or less exactly the course of Antietam Creek. Their lines were then forming, and the revelation of force in front of the ground which they really intended to hold, was probably meant to delay our attack until their arrangements to receive it were complete.

During that day they kept their troops exposed and did not move them even to avoid the artillery-fire, which must have been occasionally annoying. Next morning the lines and columns which had darkened corn-fields and bill crests had been withdrawn. Broken and wooded ground behind the sheltering hills concealed the rebel masses. What from our front looked like only a narrow summit fringed with woods was a broad table-land of forest and ravine; cover for troops everywhere, nowhere easy access for an enemy. The smoothly sloping surface in front and the sweeping crescent of slowly mingling lines was all a delusion. It was all a rebel stronghold beyond.

Under the base of these hills runs the deep stream called Antietam Creek, fordable only at distant points. Three bridges cross it, one on the Hagerstown road, one on the Sharpsburg pike, one to the left in a deep recess of steeply falling hills. Hooker passed the first to reach the ford by which he crossed, and it was held by Pleasanton with a reserve of cavalry during the battle. The second was close under the rebel centre, and no way important to yesterday's fight. At the third, Burnside attacked and finally crossed. Between the first and third lay most of the battle-lines. They stretched four miles from right to left.

Unaided attack in front was impossible. McClellan's forces lay behind low, disconnected ridges in front of the rebel summits, all or nearly all unwooded. They gave some cover for artillery, and guns were therefore massed on the centre. The enemy had the Shepherdstown road and the Hagerstown and Williamsport road both open to him in rear for retreat. Along one or the other, if beaten, he must fly. This among other reasons determined, perhaps, the plan of battle which McClellan finally resolved on.

The plan was generally as follows: Hooker was to cross on the right, establish himself on the enemy's left if possible, flanking his position, and to open the fight. Sumner, Franklin, and Mansfield were to send their forces also to the right, co-operating with and sustaining Hooker's attack while advancing also nearer the centre. The heavy work in the centre was left mostly to the batteries, Porter massing his infantry supports in the hollows. On the left, Burnside was to carry the bridge already referred to, advancing then by a road which enters the pike at Sharpsburg, turning at once the rebel flank and destroying his line of retreat. Porter and Sykes were held in reserve. It is obvious that the complete success of a plan contemplating widely divergent movements of separate corps, must largely depend on accurate timing-that the attacks should be simultaneous and not successive.

Hooker moved Tuesday afternoon at four, crossing the creek at a ford above the bridge and well to the right, without opposition. Fronting southwest, his line advanced not quite on the rebel flank but overlapping and threatening it. Turning off from the road after passing the stream, he sent

forward cavalry skirmishers straight into the woods and over the fields beyond. Rebel pickets withdrew slowly before them, firing scattering and harmless shots. Turning again to the left, the cavalry went down on the rebel flank, coming suddenly close to a battery which met them with unexpected grape and canister. It being the nature of cavalry to retire before batteries, this company loyally followed the law of its being, and came swiftly back without pursuit.

Artillery was sent to the front, infantry was rapidly deployed, and skirmishers went out in front and on either flank. The corps moved forward compactly, Hooker as usual reconnoitering in person. They came at last to an open grass-sown field inclosed on two sides with woods, protected on the right by a hill, and entered through a corn-field in the rear. Skirmishers penetrating these woods were instantly met by rebel shots, but held their ground, and as soon as supported, advanced and cleared the timber. Beyond, on the left and in front, volleys of musketry opened heavily, and a battle seemed to have begun a little sooner than it was expected.

General Hooker formed his lines with precision and without hesitation. Ricketts' division went into the woods on the left in force. Meade with the Pennsylvania reserves formed in the centre. Doubleday was sent out. on the right, planting his guns on the hill, and opening at once on a rebel battery that began to enfilade the central line. It was already dark, and the rebel position could only be discovered by the flashes of their guns. They pushed forward boldly on the right after losing ground on the other flank, but made no attempt to regain their hold on the woods. The fight flashed and glimmered, and faded, and finally went out in the dark.

Hooker had found out what he wanted to know. When the firing ceased, the hostile lines lay close to each other-their pickets so near that six rebels were captured during the night. It was inevitable that the fight should recommence at daylight; neither side had suffered considerable loss; it was a skirmish, not a battle. "We are through for to-night, gentlemen," remarked the general, "but to-morrow we fight the battle that will decide the fate of the republic.

Not long after the firing ceased, it sprang up again on the left. Gen. Hooker, who had taken his headquarters in a barn which had been nearly the focus of the rebel artillery, was out at once. First came rapid and unusually frequent picket-shots, then several heavy volleys. The general listened a moment and smiled grimly. "We have no troops there. The rebels are shooting each other. It is Fair Oaks over again." So every body lay down again, but all the night through there were frequent alarms.

McClellan had been informed of the night's work, and of the certainties awaiting the dawn. Sumner was ordered to move his corps at once, and was expected to be on the ground at daylight. From the extent of the

rebel lines developed in the evening, it was plain that they had gathered their whole army behind the heights and were waiting for the shock.

The battle began with the dawn. Morning found both armies just as they had slept, almost close enough to look into each other's eyes. The left of Meade's reserves and the right of Ricketts's line became engaged at nearly the same moment, one with artillery, the other with infantry. A battery was almost immedately pushed forward beyond the central woods, over a ploughed field near the top of the slope where the corn-field began. On this open field, in the corn beyond, and in the woods which stretched forward into the broad fields like a promontory into the ocean, were the hardest and deadliest struggles of the day.

For half an hour after the battle had grown to its full strength, the line of fire swayed neither way. Hooker's men were fully up to their work. They saw their general every where in front, never away from the fire, and all the oops believed in their commander, and fought with a will. Twothirds of them were the same men who under McDowell had broken at Manassas.

The half-hour passed, the rebels began to give way a little-only a little, but at the first indication of a receding fire, Forward, was the word, and on went the line with a cheer and a rush. Back across the corn-field, leaving dead and wounded behind them, over the fence, and across the road, and then back again into the dark woods which closed around them went the retreating rebels.

Meade and his Pennsylvanians followed hard and fast-followed till they came within easy range of the woods, among which they saw their beaten enemy disappearing-followed still, with another cheer, and flung themselves against the cover.

But out of those gloomy woods came suddenly and heavily terrible volleys -volleys which smote, and bent, and broke in a moment that eager front, and hurled them swiftly back for half the distance they had won. Not swiftly, nor in panic, any further. Closing up their shattered lines, they came slowly away; a regiment where a brigade had been; hardly a brigade where a whole division had been victorious. They had met at the woods the first volleys of musketry from fresh troops-had met them and returned them till their line had yielded and gone down down before the weight of fire, and till their ammunition was exhausted.

In ten minutes the fortune of the day seemed to have changed; it was the rebels now who were advancing, pouring out of the woods in endless lines, sweeping through the corn-field from which their comrades had just fled. Hooker sent in his nearest brigade to meet them, but it could not de the work. He called for another. There was nothing close enough, unless he took it from his right. His right might be in danger if it was weakened,