The Seven Days’ Battles had powerful repercussions. Many things would change in their wake, and one of those was George McClellan’s relationship with his government. The change could easily have been more sudden than it was. On the evening of June 28, in the midst of the Seven Days’ fighting, McClellan had telegraphed the president reporting recent action and complaining bitterly, “I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” blaming Lincoln and rejecting any personal responsibility, even though he had kept many of his troops idle. Then he added, “If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.” War Department personnel who decoded the dispatch were aghast at the last two sentences and deleted them without even informing Lincoln of their inflammatory nature. The president never knew McClellan had written them and responded to the rest of McClellan’s dispatch, “Save your Army at all events. . . . If you have had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington.”
Even though McClellan’s most insulting sentences never reached Lincoln’s eyes, the general’s stock with the president was clearly falling. Lincoln had once said he would hold McClellan’s horse if the general would bring victories, but it now appeared questionable that McClellan could do that. When Lincoln visited McClellan’s camp at Harrison’s Landing a few days after the end of the campaign, the general showed that he could be questionable in other ways as well. There on July 7 McClellan handed Lincoln a letter urging that the war should be fought only for the Union and not in any way to curtail much less eliminate slavery. Only the most limited of means should be used, as had been the case hitherto, treating Rebel civilians as if they were friendly civilians and not resorting to any of the harsh measures that were customary in time of war. McClellan further seemed to hint that if any other course were pursued, the army would not support it. This would have been going a bit too far, even for a general who had not just been beaten in a major campaign. As it was, McClellan’s advice was just the opposite of the direction Lincoln was thinking of going and probably increased the president’s skepticism about the wisdom of retaining him.
Firing McClellan outright would be politically risky. Instead of removing McClellan from the head of the army, Lincoln decided to remove the army gradually from under McClellan. Even before the beginning of the Seven Days’ Battles, Lincoln had decided that the various Union troops operating in northern Virginia while McClellan was on the peninsula needed to be under a single commander. For that commander Lincoln looked to the West, where Union forces had scored one victory after another. The man he chose was John Pope, lately commander of the Army of the Mississippi under Halleck. Pope had snapped up several posts along the Mississippi that the navy had largely won for him and had participated in Halleck’s hesitation waltz from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth.
Pope took over his new command on June 27, even as the Battle of Gaines’ Mill was raging down on the peninsula. Christened the Army of Virginia, it consisted of McDowell’s corps, which would never join McClellan outside Richmond, as well as Banks’s hard-luck command from the Shenandoah Valley, and a third corps containing a relatively high proportion of German American regiments and commanded by none other than Franz Sigel, who had turned in a questionable performance at Wilson’s Creek the preceding summer but was always a favorite of the typical German American soldier, who famously announced with pride, “I fights mit Sigel.” All together Pope’s new army counted fifty-one thousand men in its ranks. At any rate, Lincoln now had the option of transferring one unit at a time from McClellan’s command on the peninsula to Pope’s in northern Virginia, where Lincoln had always believed the true road to Richmond began.
Even while the Seven Days’ Battles were still raging, it was becoming clear that, organize the troops how he might, Lincoln did not have enough manpower in uniform to conquer the Confederacy. He would need more, but issuing a call for enlistments at a time when public morale had just suffered the severe blow of McClellan’s defeat in front of Richmond would be another politically risky move. Instead, Lincoln wrote a letter and gave it to Seward to take to northern state governors one by one in private discussions. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die,” Lincoln wrote, “or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me; and I would publicly appeal to the country for this new force were it not that I fear a general panic and stampede would follow, so hard is it to have a thing understood as it really is.” It would be helpful, Seward explained to each governor, if they would all sign an open letter, urging Lincoln to call on the states for more troops so that the Union armies would finally have enough men “to speedily crush the rebellion.” The governors did so, and on July 1 Lincoln issued a call for three hundred thousand additional three-year volunteers.
This call summoned up another great surge of patriotic recruiting. More than half a million men had already enlisted out of a population of about thirty million, and the new call would dig deep into the nation’s manpower reserves. Later that same month, Quaker abolitionist James Sloan Gibbons wrote a poem titled “We Are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More.” In it Gibbons spoke for the new recruits, expressing their willingness to serve if their country needed them:
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!
You have called us, and we’re coming by Richmond’s bloody tide,
To lay us down for freedom’s sake, our brothers’ bones beside;
Or from foul treason’s savage grip, to wrench the murderous blade;
And in the face of foreign foes its fragments to parade.
Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!
The poem first appeared in the New York Evening Post and was read to an enthusiastic crowd at a mass public meeting in Chicago. Luther O. Emerson, Stephen Foster, and others set it to music so that Americans were soon singing it to several different tunes.
Modern readers might be tempted to think Sloan guilty of sentimentalism with his talk of enlistees leaving their “plows and workshops” and their “wives and children dear.” In fact, in many cases it was the simple truth. Regiments enlisted in this second great wave of patriotic enlistment tended to include a disproportionately high number of older men, in their late twenties or early thirties, married, with children. Their family responsibilities had held them back from enlisting the previous year. Now it seemed the country’s need might demand even that sacrifice. In Newton, Iowa, farmer Taylor Pierce had a long talk with his wife, Katharine. She would have to operate the farm and care for their three children if he went, but she was willing. She would not have it said that her cowardice had kept her husband from serving the country in its time of need. As Taylor put it, “The rebellion could not be put down without the government got more help.”
In Iowa City, Sam Jones also weighed enlisting. “Up to this time, I had not thought it necessary that I should go,” he later explained. “I had had a feeling that those who were enlisting were doing it because they delighted in the public martial display of the soldier life; but a feeling came over me at this time that I was needed in the defense of my country.” Could free government survive, he wondered, and would it require him to go and fight? His conclusion was, “We, the people, are the government.” That decided it for him. “I made up my mind to be a soldier and fight for my country.” Both Pierce and Jones became members of the newly recruited Twenty-Second Iowa Regiment.
Four hundred miles to the southeast, in the little village of Hope, Indiana, saddle and harness maker William Winters, like Taylor a father of three, had a similar talk with his wife, Hattie. She too agreed, and William joined the newly organized Sixty-Seventh Indiana Regiment. Five hundred miles to the northeast of Hope, near the Pennsylvania border in the western New York State town of Portville, Amos Humiston had much the same solemn discussion with his wife Philinda about how she would manage at home with their children, seven-year-old Frank, five-year-old Alice, and three-year-old Fred. The result was the same as those in the Taylor and Winters households and tens of thousands of others across the country, and Amos went off to join the new 154th New York Regiment. Of these four men, Taylor, Jones, Winters, and Humiston, only two would survive the war.
The women who remained at home, in both North and South, had to take on new roles and responsibilities in the absence of their husbands or other male family members, performing as best they could tasks that had previously been carried out by men. With very few exceptions the women did not see their new roles as a liberation, a revelation of their latent abilities, or anything else but a terrible burden that they had to bear for their families and for their country. Nineteenth-century American society recognized men and women as being fundamentally different and assigned different roles to them in keeping with their differing abilities and natures. The arrangement worked well, and very few people wanted to change it. Certainly, to judge by their surviving diaries and letters, scarcely any of the wives and sisters whom the soldiers left behind coveted the male roles of those who were away in uniform.
A few Civil War women were different, however, and seemed to covet the most thoroughly male role in that society, that of soldier. In some cases, a young, childless wife sought to accompany her husband to war by entering the army herself. Sometimes a young single woman sought the life of a soldier for reasons of her own. Enlistment physicals, if any, were cursory in the extreme, and a number of women, carefully disguised as young men, were able to find their way into the army. Of course, the law and army regulations, as well as the overwhelming majority opinion within society, held that the army was absolutely no place for a woman, and if her sex was discovered, dismissal was immediate. Some scholars argue that possibly as many as four hundred different women may have served for at least some time during the war, a number equal to about 0.01 percent of all Civil War soldiers.
The other twenty million or so women in America seemed to agree wholeheartedly with society’s belief that soldiering was man’s work. Sometimes young women sought to shame reluctant young men into doing their duty and enlisting. An able-bodied, single young man who was slow to join the company being organized in his hometown might well find a package, left for him by anonymous local young ladies, containing a hoopskirt and suggesting that, given his apparently nonmartial proclivities, the skirt might be appropriate attire. The message was clear: a real man did his duty, even if that meant fighting and possibly dying. Women stayed behind and kept the home fires burning.
As the new recruits flocked to the colors, the army could have gotten better use out of them if it had incorporated them into veteran regiments where the new men could learn the business of war with experienced soldiers alongside them. That was not how it was done. Troops were raised by states, as complete regiments, and each new regiment gave a governor additional opportunities to curry political favor by appointing its colonel and other field officers. The new recruits also felt more at home in new regiments, where everyone else was as green as they were, though that fact was not necessarily conducive to their advantage or safety in battle. Nonetheless, experienced regiments received only a trickle of recruits and grew smaller as the war went on, while most of the new men went into new regiments like the Twenty-Second Iowa, Sixty-Seventh Indiana, and 154th New York.
The setback on the peninsula, even coming as it did at the end of a six-month string of Union victories in the West, showed that the war was going to be harder, more costly, and longer than most Americans had previously thought. Many Union policies, including Lincoln’s own approach to the war, had been based on the idea that most white southerners were not deeply committed to the Confederacy and would not fight desperately to save it. Firm but gentle pressure from Union forces would bring these southerners to their senses. For that reason, Union policy toward southern civilians had been conciliatory, not treating them like rebellious civilians or even like civilians of an enemy country but rather like its own friendly civilians. This approach was most starkly on display when rebellious citizens of states claiming to be no longer part of the United States approached Union military commanders and demanded that they observe the Fugitive Slave Law by returning to them slaves who had escaped and fled into Union lines. During the first year of the war, Union officers had often complied with such demands, except when they were enterprising and principled enough to call the escapees contrabands and protect them or when Union soldiers, who were daily becoming less sympathetic toward slaveholders, succeeded in hiding the slaves.
The official policy of applying the Fugitive Slave Act even on behalf of people who were actively in rebellion against the government was intended both to assure white southerners that the government in Washington intended no social revolution such as immediate abolition of slavery would bring and that it was committed to respecting all of the property rights they claimed. That applied to food or draft animals that might be of great use to passing Union armies in the prosecution of the war, and it applied most strongly to the property rights white southerners claimed in their slaves. Just as a constitutional right to privacy was to become a code word for abortion rights in the late twentieth century, so a constitutional right to property had in the mid-nineteenth century become a shibboleth for the defense of slavery.
The first fifteen months of the war had demonstrated to Lincoln and to other perceptive observers, especially the common soldiers in the Union armies, that white southerners were deeply committed to both of the closely intertwined causes of the Confederacy and slavery. Indeed, Lincoln had learned to his dismay that even southerners who did not back the Confederacy still clung tenaciously to the institution of slavery and the white supremacy it protected.
Despite his having reversed Freémont’s local emancipation proclamation the preceding year, Lincoln was—and had been since the day he took office—deeply committed to ending slavery as soon as he could do so in a way that would have a chance of surviving both politically and legally. He also hoped to accomplish his purpose with the minimum of painful upheaval to the country. Consistent with these goals, Lincoln hoped to persuade Congress to appropriate funds to compensate slaveholders for the emancipation of their slaves, and he hoped to persuade state legislatures to enact statutes for the gradual emancipation of the slaves within their borders. No one had ever questioned the legal right of a state legislature to take such action, and that would keep the matter out of the hands of the Supreme Court with its proslavery majority and rabidly proslavery Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.
For just these reasons Lincoln had been skeptical about other attempts to chip away at the edifice of slavery during the first year of the war. In August 1861 Congress had passed and Lincoln signed a Confiscation Act providing for the freeing of slaves actually used by the Confederate army for the building of fortifications and other warlike purposes. It was a start, but Lincoln doubted that it would stand up to constitutional scrutiny by the Supreme Court. In any case, it was cumbersome to implement and could never be expected to free very many slaves. When in April 1862, Major General David Hunter had issued an order freeing slaves within his command in the Union-held enclave on the southern coast, Lincoln had rescinded it as legally hopeless. Congressional bans on slavery in the District of Columbia and all U.S. territories, passed in April and June 1862, were positive steps, but Taney was already on record about the latter, and his views could be easily guessed about the former.
Lincoln’s preferred approach to ending slavery started with the Union-loyal slave states. Lincoln hoped to persuade them to enact programs of long-term, gradual emancipation with congressionally funded compensation for slaveholders who had to give up their chattels. In order to achieve that goal and because he held the highly pessimistic view of race relations in a nonslave society that was widespread at that time, Lincoln also hoped to persuade freed slaves to accept colonization somewhere outside the United States. If the border slave states enacted gradual emancipation, owners were reimbursed, and freedmen left the country, states in the Confederacy would see that slavery could be given up without financial disaster or social upheaval and was therefore not worth fighting for. If slavery was not worth fighting for, there would be no reason to fight for the Confederacy. It was this belief that led Lincoln to imagine that Union military success, within the context of a conciliatory policy, would lead to the collapse of the Confederacy and the restoration of the Union. “We should urge it persuasively,” he wrote in a March 24, 1862, letter to Horace Greeley, “and not menacingly, on the South.”
He was destined to be disappointed on all counts. The border states indignantly rejected Lincoln’s urging that they adopt gradual, compensated emancipation. Even Delaware, which had a tiny percentage of slaves and had never seriously considered secession, gave no consideration to the idea of the eventual emancipation of its slaves. If even Delaware would not entertain such a proposition, it clearly had little chance in any other state. Black Americans were understandably unenthusiastic about the prospects of leaving the country. Being in America, being at least prospective heirs to all its promise for the future, was the chief compensation they had for their and their ancestors’ years of toil, and, as time was to show, it was no inconsiderable blessing but rather a boon sought eagerly in future generations by persons from every corner of the globe. They could hardly be expected to give it up willingly, and Lincoln, to his credit, would not see them go any other way.
Gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization were both clearly faint hopes by the beginning of the summer of 1862, and McClellan’s retreat from Richmond during the last week of June, though militarily less significant than the events of the past six months in the West, was nevertheless the kind of high-profile, morale-raising event for the Confederacy that ruined whatever chances Lincoln may have had of applying overall military pressure on the Confederacy to the point that its populace began to doubt the wisdom of their decision for secession. The prospects for a short war, conciliatory policies, and voluntary emancipation all seemed to be fading to the vanishing point.
It was time to take a further dramatic step. Emancipation was not going to happen the easy way, was not going to happen at all, perhaps, unless Lincoln tried something new. As Lincoln himself put it two years later, “I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!”1 His answer was the Emancipation Proclamation. When he started writing the proclamation is something historians still argue about. Sources conflict.
He presented it to his cabinet for the first time on July 22. He began by explaining that he was not asking their approval on the policy. That was settled and was something that Lincoln said he owed to God. He said he was open to any suggestions they might have on the specific wording of the proclamation. The document he read announced that in all areas still in rebellion at the end of one hundred days, all slaves would be permanently free. He based the proclamation on his war powers as commander in chief. In that respect it differed from the Second Confiscation Act, which Congress had passed only a few days before. Lincoln believed his proclamation would prove more legally defensible. As commander in chief, Lincoln had the power to wage war against the nation’s enemies, capture their ships, bombard their forts, shoot their soldiers—and take their slaves.
The cabinet members reacted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but Secretary of State Seward had a practical suggestion. He approved of the proclamation, but Union forces had just suffered an embarrassing setback on the peninsula. If Lincoln were to issue the proclamation now, it would look bad. “It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government,” he explained, “a cry for help; the government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.” In short, as Lincoln later explained, it would sound like “our last shriek, on the retreat.”2 Lincoln had not thought of that, and the sense of it struck him forcefully. He agreed with Seward and put the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation into his desk drawer until the nation’s armies should win a victory. It was to stay there longer than he expected.
Another step that Lincoln took in order to achieve more satisfactory results in the war was to bring Henry Halleck to Washington as the new general in chief of all the Union armies. The post had been vacant since Lincoln had relieved McClellan of his duties on the eve of the Peninsula Campaign the previous March, and during that time the president himself had tried to provide central direction for the Union armies. Dissatisfied with the results of his own efforts, Lincoln now decided to bring in the learned Halleck, apparent architect of the Union’s dazzling successes in the Mississippi Valley, whose troops called him, behind his back, “Old Brains.” Lincoln issued his order promoting Halleck to Washington on July 11, and Old Brains formally took the reins of command on July 23.
By that time Pope had been in command of the Army of Virginia for almost a month. During that time he had made himself unpopular both with the enemy and with his own men. On July 10 Pope had issued an order dealing with hostile civilians and the guerrillas who sheltered among them, abusing the restraints of civilized war by using them as cover for waging their own war. Pope’s order stated that henceforth civilians who engaged in acts of war or espionage against Union forces would be subject to the normal rigor of the laws of war, which prescribed summary execution in such cases. Local civilians would be held financially responsible for the depredations of the guerrillas who operated among them and whom they were presumed to harbor. Houses used as blinds from which to take potshots at Union troops would be destroyed. The Union army would live off the land, confiscating supplies it needed from the civilian populace.
In general Pope proposed to start treating Confederate civilians in the way that the laws of war prescribed for enemy rather than friendly civilians. His action was very much in keeping with the new turn Union policy was now taking, away from conciliation and toward a more pragmatic, hard-war approach, though at this time Pope could have known nothing of emancipation, Lincoln’s ultimate hard-war policy. One did not have to be privy to White House cabinet meetings to see that white southerners had rejected northern attempts at conciliation and that nothing but stern, relentless war waging was going to end this conflict. The soldiers in the ranks of the Union armies probably knew it better than anyone else.
Nevertheless, Pope’s order was controversial and came in for criticism by some northern Democrats, including McClellan and his cronies in the Army of the Potomac, who regarded it as a departure from their own highly civilized methods and a descent to waging war in manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. Other strong critics of Pope’s order included most Confederates who heard of it. Jefferson Davis called Pope’s new policy “a campaign of indiscriminate robbery and murder” and directed that officers of Pope’s army who fell into Confederate hands be treated as criminals rather than as prisoners of war. A furious Robert E. Lee reviled Pope as a “miscreant” and announced to a subordinate general, “Pope must be suppressed.”
A few days after issuing his controversial order, Pope issued a proclamation to his troops intended to encourage and motivate them. “Let us understand each other,” Pope wrote,
I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; whose policy has been attack and not defense. . . . I presume that I have been called here to pursue the same system and to lead you against the enemy. I am sure you long for an opportunity to win the distinction you are capable of achieving. . . . Meantime I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of “taking strong positions and holding them,” of “lines of retreat,” and of “bases of supplies.” Let us discard such ideas. . . . Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us, and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.3
Pope’s address hinted at the undeniable fact that the eastern Union armies had experienced little but failure while their western comrades had experienced almost nothing but victory. It also suggested that a spirit of defeatism and a feeling of inferiority toward the Rebels had infected the eastern forces, which was true, and it seemed to imply that western Union soldiers were better fighters than their eastern counterparts. That may have been true as well since the few regiments of western Union troops in Virginia were to compile a record as the Army of the Potomac’s hardest fighters. But Pope’s stating all of it in an order to his entire army was tactless in the extreme, and its possible truth, though unadmitted by those who resented it, made it rankle all the more. Thereafter, many of Pope’s troops, as well as McClellan and his officers in the Army of the Potomac, seethed with hatred toward him.
As was shortly to become apparent, pronouncements about seeing “the backs of our enemies” in Virginia were best left to generals who could make good such boasts against Robert E. Lee. Pope began to advance along the line of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, which led generally southwest from Alexandria, on the Potomac opposite Washington, through Manassas Junction, and on into the Virginia Piedmont. Banks and Sigel’s corps joined him by marching southeast after crossing the Blue Ridge at one of its gaps. By early August Pope’s army held the town of Culpeper Court House, south of the Rappahannock River, seventy miles southwest of Washington and about one hundred miles northwest of Richmond via the Virginia Central Railroad that joined the Orange & Alexandria at Gordonsville, about thirty miles farther down the Orange & Alexandria from Pope’s position at Culpeper. Between Pope and Gordonsville was Stonewall Jackson with sixteen thousand Confederates, dispatched by Lee to impede the advance of “that miscreant Pope” and if possible begin the work of suppressing him.
On August 9 Pope’s lead corps under Banks collided with Jackson in what came to be known as the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Banks drove forward aggressively, and at first it appeared that he might finally get the better of his old Shenandoah nemesis, who was not conducting the battle particularly skillfully. Tactics were not Stonewall’s forte, but once all of his troops arrived on the battlefield, especially the large division of the hard-hitting A. P. Hill, Jackson had a two-to-one advantage in numbers and forced Banks to withdraw.
Theoretically Lee’s position should have been a very dangerous one. With McClellan’s army thirty miles southeast of Richmond and Pope’s one hundred miles northwest of it, Lee should have been compelled to keep major forces guarding both directions. As Lee saw it, that was not the case. He had taken McClellan’s measure during the Seven Days, and he believed he had little to fear from that callow young man. He therefore decided he could afford to leave only the smallest of forces to guard the peninsula approach to Richmond and take almost his entire army to suppress Pope. Davis expressed some misgivings about such an audacious course but allowed it out of confidence in Lee, whose reputation was fast becoming the rock on which all of Confederate morale and Confederate nationalism rested.
In fact, Lee’s situation was even safer than he realized. On August 3 Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw his army from the peninsula and transport it back up the Chesapeake to Alexandria for operations in northern Virginia. Unwilling to abandon his great campaign against the Confederate capital and perhaps sensing the movement as a first stage in the transfer of the units of his army, one by one, to Pope’s Army of Virginia, McClellan protested the move and did not get his troops under way until August 14. For a prolonged period during mid-August, McClellan’s army, the largest the Union possessed, would be in a position neither to threaten Richmond from the southeast nor to aid Pope on the Virginia Piedmont.
By mid-August Lee had joined Jackson north of Gordonsville along with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. Outnumbered, Pope fell back across the Rappahannock. Lee tried to move around Pope’s flank, but the Union general skillfully maneuvered sideways to keep the river, swollen by recent rains, between himself and the larger Confederate army. For three days, Pope matched Lee move for move, and the frustrated Confederate general could get nowhere. Then on August 25 Lee dispatched Jackson with about one-third of the Army of Northern Virginia’s infantry, together with Major General James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart (West Point, 1854) and all of its cavalry, to swing wide and fast to the west of Pope’s army, get behind him, and strike at his supply line, the Orange & Alexandria.
This sort of maneuver was what Stonewall did best, and Pope, who was apparently taking his own advice about looking “before us, and not behind,” did not realize what was happening to him until Jackson’s men on August 27 captured his supply depot at Manassas Junction. The ill-fed Confederates held high carnival amid the mountains of foodstuffs stockpiled there and then destroyed what they could not carry off. Jackson took up a strong defensive position along an unfinished railroad grade just west of the old Bull Run battlefield, overlooking the Warrenton Turnpike near the village of Groveton, and waited for Pope to react.
“Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear,” Pope had told his troops six weeks before. By August 27 it was clear to Pope that at least Stonewall Jackson and a large segment of the Confederate army were lurking in the rear. Jackson’s destruction of his supply line would have forced Pope to fall back in any event, but the aggressive Union general hoped that he could take advantage of the situation to trap and destroy Jackson’s wing of the Army of Northern Virginia. Pope’s withdrawal from the line of the Rappahannock necessarily released Lee to cross the river. This was exactly what Lee had intended to accomplish by Jackson’s turning movement, forcing Pope back off the river and allowing Lee to get across it so that he could bring on a showdown battle with the outnumbered Union army somewhere north of it. He immediately put his large wing of the army, under the immediate command of Longstreet, on the march following Jackson’s route to join Stonewall in the Union rear.
Pope mistakenly believed that Jackson was near Centerville and ordered his own army to concentrate on that place. As one of his divisions marched up the Warrenton Pike on the evening of August 28, Jackson decided it was time to attract Pope’s attention somewhat more and gave the order for his troops to attack. Because the individual brigades of the Union division were strung out at long intervals, the fight that evening, which came to be known as the Battle of Groveton, pitted Ewell’s division of Jackson’s command, with 6,200 men, against little more than a single brigade of Federals, aided by a couple of regiments from the next brigade on the road, for a total Union strength of 2,100 men.
The Union brigade in question was the only brigade of western men fighting in Virginia, three regiments from Wisconsin and one from Indiana, under the command of Union-loyal North Carolinian John Gibbon (West Point, 1847), who had insisted that they wear the regulation dress uniform of the U.S. Army, with an almost knee-length uniform frock coat and a flat-topped, broad-brimmed black felt hat, encircled by a sky-blue wool hat cord and adorned with a small brass French-horn infantry pin in front and with the brim pinned up on the left side. The rest of the Union army preferred the more comfortable sack coat and kepi or forage cap, but Gibbon’s boys soon learned to wear their regulation hats and coats with pride and gloried in being called the Black Hat Brigade until they earned another title.
On this August evening at Groveton, they faced what was for most of them their first combat and slugged it out at close range in the open field with Ewell’s entire division, giving as good as they got. When darkness put a stop to the fighting, the battle had been a draw, and about one in every three men who had taken part in it was shot. Among the wounded was Ewell, whose shattered leg had to be amputated.
Once again Pope misinterpreted the intelligence he received, guessing that Jackson must have been in retreat from Centerville and that the clash with Gibbon’s brigade had blocked his way. Jubilantly Pope concluded that he had Stonewall dead to rights and needed only to press on rapidly the next day and close in for the kill. He ignored other reports reaching him that day from the West. There an outlier of the Blue Ridge formed a range of hills known locally as Bull Run Mountain. The road Jackson had used to turn Pope passed through Bull Run Mountain at Thoroughfare Gap. That same August 28, Lee’s own wing of the Army of Northern Virginia had pushed through the gap against the feeble resistance of a single poorly handled Union division. Bull Run Mountain had been the last obstacle in the way of Lee’s reuniting with Jackson, which was now all but assured to happen within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, with ominous portent for the still oblivious Pope.
One bright spot in the outlook for Pope was that troops from the Army of the Potomac were finally beginning to join him, having come by ship up the Chesapeake from Harrison’s Landing to Alexandria and then marched overland from there. Porter’s Fifth Corps was on hand, as was the Third Corps under Major General Samuel Heintzelman (West Point, 1826). Two more corps, Franklin’s Sixth and Major General Edwin V. Sumner’s Second, had already landed at Alexandria, but McClellan would not let them advance to join Pope, citing vague concerns about their inadequate artillery and supply wagons. Less than three weeks earlier McClellan had written to his wife, “Pope will be badly thrashed within two days & . . . they will be very glad to turn over the redemption of their affairs to me. I won’t undertake it unless I have full & entire control.” Even as the battle was beginning in earnest on August 29 McClellan had advised Lincoln that it might be best “to leave Pope to get out of his scrape, and at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe.”4
Beginning on the morning of August 29, Pope hurled his troops in one assault after another at Jackson’s lines. The fighting was desperate, and sometimes Jackson’s troops were on the verge of giving way, but each time they somehow rallied and held on. Lee, with Longstreet’s twenty-eight thousand men, moved into position on Jackson’s right, extending forward from the end of Jackson’s line so as to threaten Pope’s left flank. Union cavalry had brought reports of Longstreet’s approach, but by this time Pope had made up his mind about the situation and was not going to be confused by facts. At first he refused to believe that Longstreet was present. Then he maintained that the larger Confederate force was on the field only for the purpose of covering the retreat of the full Confederate army, which he continued to insist was an ongoing effort.
When his assaults on the twenty-ninth failed to bring victory, Pope renewed his attacks on the thirtieth and continued them throughout most of the day. Finally, when Pope’s army was exhausted and out of position from a day of fierce attacks that had once again come very close to success, Lee launched Longstreet’s wing of his army in a giant flank attack that crumpled the left end of Pope’s line. As the two armies struggled across the Bull Run battlefield where Union and Confederate had met thirteen months before, Henry House Hill once again became a key terrain feature, this time stubbornly held by Union troops to cover the retreat of the rest of the Army of Virginia northward across Bull Run. In the twilight, Pope’s army made an orderly fighting retreat. It was a contrast with the undignified scramble of the previous summer, but it was still a retreat. Union casualties for the battle came to about ten thousand men, while Lee’s losses were nearly as great at just over nine thousand.
Lee was by no means finished with Pope and sent Jackson swinging around the retreating Army of Virginia in another turning movement aimed at cutting Pope off from Washington and completing the destruction he had escaped at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope blocked Jackson in a September 1 clash at the hamlet of Chantilly. An inconclusive fight in the midst of a summer thunderstorm, Chantilly allowed Pope to complete his retreat to the fortifications around Washington. Lee had won a famous victory, but he had failed in his purpose of destroying Pope’s army. Perhaps he could take comfort in reflecting that Pope was, in any case, “suppressed.”
Lee’s victories in the Seven Days and at the Second Battle of Bull Run had changed the momentum of the war in Virginia and shifted the scene of the fighting from the outskirts of Richmond north about one hundred miles to the outskirts of Washington. Of far greater importance, they had sent Confederate morale soaring, raised the Confederate image abroad, and discouraged the North. Lincoln sadly transferred Pope to Minnesota to deal with a Sioux uprising there, and with even greater sadness weighed the significance of reports he received that McClellan, Porter, and perhaps other officers of the Army of the Potomac had deliberately withheld needed support from Pope in hopes that he would experience a defeat. Porter would later be courtmartialed and dismissed from the army for failing to obey one of Pope’s attack orders during the battle, though the case would remain controversial for a generation and be overturned by the next Democrat to take the White House, Grover Cleveland, in 1886.
In having a desire to see Pope defeated, McClellan was, if anything, guiltier than Porter, but McClellan seemed to be, for the moment at least, indispensable. The army was dispirited, possibly too demoralized to fight effectively against an enemy whose aggressiveness seemed to know no respite. Lincoln believed that the only way to restore confidence and high morale in units of the Army of the Potomac was to restore them to McClellan’s command. On September 2, Lincoln gave him command of all the Union forces in northern Virginia and Maryland. The three corps that had composed the Army of Virginia would henceforth be incorporated into the Army of the Potomac, to which the Ninth Corps was shortly added, fresh from its amphibious successes on the southern coast.
Lee’s victories had affected foreign opinion as well and nowhere more than in Britain, where the government and many others within the landed gentry and wealthy mercantile classes had been none too well disposed toward the United States, which was their chief transatlantic rival and which the more perceptive of them could see was bound to surpass their country in power and greatness—if nothing happened to derail its growth. Now the British were closer than ever to outright recognition of Confederate independence. That summer U.S. ambassador to Britain Charles Francis Adams had learned that a ship under construction at the John Laird Sons and Company yard in Birkenhead was in fact intended for the Confederate navy. Acquired through the efforts of Confederate agent James Bullock, the vessel had been built in deep secrecy as hull number 290, a suspiciously sleek and powerful-looking bark-rigged ship with auxiliary steam power, then launched and christened the Enrica. Officials in the United States tried to get the British government to enforce its neutrality laws and seize the vessel, but before the British authorities acted, the mysterious Enrica had slipped out of port and rendezvoused at the island of Terceira in the mid-Atlantic with a Confederate supply ship that equipped her with eight cannon. With Confederate officers and a crew composed largely of Englishmen, she went into commission as the Confederate States Ship Alabama, a cruiser that would over the course of the next two years destroy millions of dollars worth of northern shipping. Historians still argue as to whether the British authorities deliberately dragged their feet in order to allow the Alabama’s escape from their waters, though after the war Britain paid the U.S. government an indemnity of more than fifteen million dollars. For now, though, the appearance of the Confederacy’s swift new commerce raider served to underscore the apparently increasing British sympathy for the slaveholders’ republic.
British leaders received news of the Confederate victories in Virginia that summer with delight. In the wake of Second Bull Run, Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell suggested to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston that the time had come for Britain to recognize the Confederacy and perhaps propose mediation with a view to restoring peace on the basis of Confederate independence. Palmerston was more cautious. He had heard that Lee was north of the Potomac, which if true was sure to bring a showdown battle. He told Russell they should await the outcome of that battle before acting.
Lee had indeed crossed the Potomac. After failing to trap Pope at Chantilly, Lee had decided to keep the momentum of his campaign going by swinging to the west of Washington and crossing into Maryland, with a view to possibly proceeding deep into Pennsylvania. He wrote to Davis, informing him of his plans and stating that he planned to cross the Potomac the next day unless contrary orders arrived from the Confederate president. Those would have had to have been already on the way since Lee’s dispatch could not even have reached Davis before the first units of the Army of Northern Virginia began fording the Potomac near Leesburg on September 3.
By crossing the river east of the Blue Ridge and its northern extension, known somewhat perversely as South Mountain, Lee planned to keep up his threat to Washington, thus pinning Union troops down in its defenses. He then planned to march northwest and take control of the passes across South Mountain. These could be easily defended while his army cut off Washington’s communication with the West via the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and plundered the agricultural wealth of western Maryland and south-central Pennsylvania, living off the land and carrying away what it did not eat of the late-summer harvest. Also, Confederates had claimed since the beginning of the war that Maryland would eagerly join the Confederacy if not suppressed by Union troops. Some Marylanders certainly encouraged that view. A number of Maryland men had enlisted in the Confederate army, and some Maryland women had come south as refugees from Union rule, notably the beautiful and prominent Cary sisters of Baltimore, Jenny, Hetty, and their cousin Constance, who had sewn the first Confederate battle flag.
The Cary sisters also found a tune, “O Tannenbaum,” to which James Ryder Randall’s 1861 poem “Maryland, My Maryland” could be sung. Written in the wake of the Baltimore riot by a Marylander living in Louisiana, the poem called on citizens of the state to rise up and join the Confederacy:
The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland! My Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!
With eight more stanzas in similar vein, the song immediately became a favorite all across the South, played by brass bands or sung by many a young woman, accompanying herself on the piano, for the benefit of nattily uniformed young men about to depart for the seat of war. Various bands in Lee’s army played it as their units splashed through the shallow waters of the Potomac or marched northward into the Old Line State. This would be Maryland’s chance to cast its lot with the Confederacy.
Lee believed he could remain in Maryland or in Pennsylvania for an extended period with impunity because he reckoned that the Union army around Washington was completely demoralized and would not be ready for battle again for weeks if not months. If as reported McClellan was back in command of that army, so much the better. Lee had taken McClellan’s measure on the peninsula and believed he had little to fear from the Young Napoleon and certainly not anytime soon.
Lee hoped that his present campaign might be the last of the war. The Confederacy was riding high after his recent victories, and even in the West, Confederate armies had gone over to the offensive in Tennessee and Mississippi. Lee sent a dispatch to Jefferson Davis suggesting that with a Confederate army on northern soil, this would be a good time to call on Lincoln to give up the war and grant Confederate independence. Davis thought more like Palmerston, reckoning that a Confederate army north of the Potomac guaranteed an impending showdown battle whose results both Lincoln and the British would await before deciding their next move. To Lee’s dismay, however, Davis decided that the prospect of a battle leading to a political settlement required his personal presence with the army and wrote Lee to say he was coming. Lee did not want the president looking over his shoulder and in a series of courteous but insistent dispatches succeeded in persuading Davis that it would not be wise for him to hazard himself on the road between Richmond and the army at this time.
The first disappointment for the Confederates was the chilly greeting they received from the people of Maryland. Western Maryland, in which the Army of Northern Virginia was now campaigning, was a land of relatively few slaves and overwhelming allegiance to the Union. Only a few Marylanders hailed the Rebels’ coming. If Lee’s army was disappointed in the Marylanders, the feeling was mutual. Its ranks much diminished by battle losses, as well as straggling by men exhausted or suffering from combat fatigue, numbered only about thirty-eight thousand. After more than a year in an army whose quartermaster department did at best an indifferent job of supplying new uniforms and accoutrements and after a summer of intense campaigning, the Confederate soldiers presented a ragged appearance, and one Maryland diarist recorded that they were the dirtiest group of men she had ever seen. The Marylanders had to admit, though, that Lee’s men had a certain swagger about them.
A glitch arose in Lee’s plan when the ten-thousand-man Union garrison of Harpers Ferry declined to evacuate when Lee’s army passed north of it. Located where the Shenandoah River flows into the Potomac and then the Potomac passes through a narrow gap between the Blue Ridge and South Mountain, Harpers Ferry lies in a basin surrounded by high ground. No one could hold Harpers Ferry without holding that high ground. Lee’s thirty-eight thousand men could fairly easily push the ten thousand Federals off the heights, trapping them in the basin of Harpers Ferry and compelling their surrender. That is why Lee had expected the Federals to pull out once he got well north of the Potomac. When they called his bluff and stayed put, Lee faced a difficult choice. To take the necessary high ground around Harpers Ferry, he would have to divide his army into at least three columns and send them marching by widely separated routes to come at Harpers Ferry from multiple directions. If McClellan moved aggressively toward him, Lee would be in a very dangerous situation with the components of his army so widely separated that they could not support each other and thus would be easy prey for the Army of the Potomac. Yet Lee could not afford to leave the Harpers Ferry garrison where it was since its presence in the lower Shenandoah Valley would interfere with his plans to have wagons haul at least some of his supplies from the valley via the excellent macadamized Valley Pike.
Lee believed he could trust McClellan not to be aggressive, and so on September 9, with his army encamped in and around Frederick, Maryland, Lee drafted Special Order Number 191, giving detailed instructions to his subordinates as to how the army should divide into four columns, three to march on Harpers Ferry by different routes and one to cover their rear against harassing Union cavalry from the direction of Washington by holding the passes of South Mountain. During the days that followed all went well for the Army of Northern Virginia as its separated components implemented Lee’s plan. McClellan, who was under considerable pressure from Lincoln to do something about the Rebels north of the Potomac, advanced with uncharacteristic speed though still slow enough to give Lee plenty of time to carry out his plans. Thus, Lee’s army marched northwest toward Harpers Ferry, and McClellan’s, advancing from Washington, followed behind.
On the morning of September 13, some of McClellan’s troops were resting in a field outside Frederick when two Indiana soldiers found three cigars lying on the ground, wrapped with a paper that, on further examination, looked important. History does not tell us what happened to the cigars, but the paper, which was a copy of Lee’s Special Order Number 191, was quickly passed up the chain of command to McClellan himself, who read it and exclaimed, “Now I know what to do! Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be ready to go home.” To Lincoln he telegraphed, “No time shall be lost. I think Lee has made a gross mistake, and that he will be severely punished for it. I have all the plans of the rebels, and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.”
Special Order Number 191 told McClellan that Lee’s army was scattered and vulnerable and furthermore told him exactly where he could find its isolated parts. Since the order was already several days old, time was of the essence. A competent general would have put his army in motion at once. McClellan ordered the Army of the Potomac to wait eighteen hours and march the following morning, September 14.
Lee was stunned when scouts informed him that the Army of the Potomac was advancing aggressively toward the detachments he had left to hold three key gaps in South Mountain. Shortly thereafter he learned the reason why. A pro-Confederate civilian had actually been inside McClellan’s headquarters when Special Order Number 191 arrived and brought word to Lee of the intelligence disaster. A quick investigation revealed the source of the leak. D. H. Hill’s division had been operating with Jackson’s command but still technically answered to Lee’s headquarters. Both headquarters had copied the order to Hill, each not realizing what the other had done. Hill received only one of the copies, but when he confirmed that he had it, each headquarters assumed that all copies of the order were accounted for. The extra copy had somehow ended up wrapped around the cigars in the field outside Frederick.
Lee moved to salvage the situation, positioning his available troops to hold the passes of South Mountain. Most of his army had recently taken up its positions surrounding Harpers Ferry, and the only way they could quickly reunite would be through Harpers Ferry. If the Federal outpost held out several more days and if McClellan acted intelligently on the information he now had, Lee’s situation would be dire.
Prospects for the Army of Northern Virginia looked very grim indeed as Federal troops approached South Mountain that afternoon and, after several hours of cautious preparations, moved to assault the outnumbered Confederates. The heaviest fighting took place at Turner’s Gap, northernmost of the three, where the National Road passed over the mountain and Lee had most of his troops. Watching Gibbon’s Black Hat Brigade drive the defenders back toward the gap, McClellan is supposed to have exclaimed that the brigade was made of iron, giving it a new nickname, the Iron Brigade. Fighting continued at Turner’s Gap for several hours, and the Confederates were just on the point of losing their last grip on the gap as darkness fell.
A few miles to the south, other Confederate forces successfully held Fox’s Gap, but a few miles beyond that lay Crampton’s Gap, where Confederate numbers had sufficed to provide only a few hundred defenders. McClellan proteégeé William B. Franklin, commanding the Sixth Corps, delayed for hours before launching an attack with overwhelming numbers that cleared the gap. With that, Franklin was in position to begin the destruction of Lee’s army since he could have advanced toward Harpers Ferry, scarcely ten miles away, and made the fragmentation of Lee’s army complete and irrevocable. Franklin was a true disciple of his mentor McClellan, however, and so, concluding that he was vastly outnumbered when in fact the exact opposite was the case, he halted and took up a defensive position.
Providence had already granted Lee a boon in the slowness with which McClellan had responded to the information in Special Order Number 191. Franklin’s lethargy and caution was a second gift. After that, one thing after another seemed to go Lee’s way. Confederate troops had to fall back from their positions on South Mountain that night, but McClellan kept his army almost stationary on September 15. Meanwhile, the Confederates had surrounded Harpers Ferry, and Jackson was presiding over efforts to capture the town and its garrison. Union commander Colonel Dixon S. Miles pulled almost all of his troops back into the indefensible town, virtually giving away the key high ground that overlooked it. Then on the morning of September 15 when Jackson launched his attack, Miles was so quick to order his command to surrender that he probably would have been court-martialed when Union forces next got hold of him had he not been struck and killed by one of the last artillery shells the Confederates fired before the white flag went up.
The surrender of Harpers Ferry gave the Confederates ten thousand Union prisoners and opened the way for the Army of Northern Virginia to reunite. Lee brought them together near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, about a dozen miles due north of Harpers Ferry, ten miles west of South Mountain, and a mile or two east of the Potomac, which here flowed from north to south. He deployed them facing east, toward South Mountain and McClellan’s approaching army, on gently rolling terrain, with the valley of Antietam Creek in front of them.
Lee still had high hopes for victory, planning to repeat the successful formula of Second Bull Run. If it worked, he would lure McClellan into bloodying the Army of the Potomac in fruitless assaults and then conclude the battle with another devastating Confederate flank attack like the one with which Longstreet had ruined Pope on the plains of Manassas. The plan was audacious in the extreme. Lee’s army was weakened by a summer of brutal campaigning and had been shedding stragglers steadily since it had marched north from Richmond. Worse, Lee’s position, although presenting reasonable cover and good fields of fire, had key weaknesses. In front of it, Antietam Creek, with three stone bridges and several fords, offered only a minor obstacle to the enemy, while behind Lee’s position, the Potomac was crossable at only one point, Boteler’s Ford. Getting an army across Boteler’s Ford would take hours, and if disaster befell his army, Lee would not be able to withdraw any substantial number of his troops via that ford before they were overrun and captured. Defeat on this field would be final for Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.
Lee arrived near Sharpsburg on September 15 and began deploying the first units of his army, numbering about eighteen thousand men. The first elements of the Army of the Potomac arrived on the far side of the Antietam Valley that afternoon, and by nightfall virtually all of McClellan’s troops were arrayed there. Thus, on the morning of September 16, Lee’s eighteen thousand faced some ninety thousand Federals, and McClellan had the opportunity to crush the Confederate force at Sharpsburg and take it and its commander as prisoners. As Lee had apparently calculated, the Union commander hesitated. Convinced that Lee had one hundred thousand or perhaps one hundred fifty thousand men, McClellan spent the day studying Lee’s position through a very large telescope mounted just outside the house he was using as his headquarters. While McClellan and his top generals took turns squinting into the eyepiece, most of the rest of Lee’s army arrived from Harpers Ferry.
McClellan planned to push one wing of his army across Antietam Creek north of Lee’s position and open the battle by having it attack southward between the Antietam and the Potomac. Union preparations on the evening of the sixteenth were obvious, and Lee had Jackson’s wing of his own army positioned to meet the Union thrust. Action began at first light on the morning of September 17, about 5:30, and raged intensely on the northern end of the battlefield for the next five hours.
McClellan dissipated his advantage in numbers by committing his units piecemeal, one corps at a time, so that the Confederate defenders were able to shift to meet them. With the southern half of the battlefield quiet, Lee pulled troops out of line there to support Jackson on the left. Even at that, the Federals nearly broke through. The fighting raged back and forth, and the cornfield of a farmer named Miller changed hands as many as fifteen times and was left thickly strewn with corpses and with nearly every cornstalk cut down by bullets. By late morning the Federals on this front had reached their initial objective, a plain, whitewashed meetinghouse of a sect of German Baptists whom locals derisively called “Dunkers,” but the Union attack was spent and could go no farther. Jackson, who realized that his line had several times that morning been within an ace of total collapse, attributed his successful defense to divine intervention.
About that time, fighting flared up in the center of the Confederate line, where a stray Union division had at first attacked by mistake. The Confederate position was extremely strong, but Lee and Jackson had left only the minimum defenders in their desperate quest to find every available man to hold the line near the Dunker Church. Both sides now fed reinforcements into the fight in the center, which focused on a sunken road—a dirt road eroded below surrounding ground level—that the Confederates used as a ready-made trench. One Union brigade after another attacked the Sunken Road until finally the Confederate line gave way. Longstreet, who commanded this sector, had no troops left to plug what was now a yawning gap in the center of his line. He had his artillery open fire on the pursuing Yankees and even assigned his own staff to man one of the guns after its crew had been shot down.
Though the troops that had captured the Sunken Road were fought out, McClellan had plenty of reserves and could have poured them into the gap, ripping Lee’s army in two and completing its destruction. Franklin, whose Sixth Corps had not yet fired a shot in the battle, requested permission to advance and exploit the breakthrough, but McClellan refused. Sometime later, a division commander in the Fifth Corps, which had also been unengaged, suggested to McClellan that his corps ought to be ordered in. Overhearing the exchange, Fifth Corps commander Fitz John Porter cautioned McClellan, “Remember, General, I command the last reserve of the last Army of the Republic.” This was errant nonsense, but it was good enough for McClellan, who left the Fifth Corps idle.
Meanwhile, on the southern end of the battlefield, Ambrose Burnside, with his Ninth Corps, was supposed to be diverting Confederate attention by crossing to the west bank of Antietam Creek. Here the Confederate line ran along the slope of a bluff that towered one hundred feet above the creek. Burnside was a highly intelligent, dedicated officer who on this day began giving the first indications that he was extremely inept at handling large bodies of troops on a battlefield. Although the creek was fordable in many places, Burnside focused his attention on a narrow, three-arched, stone bridge toward which he launched several attacks that either were broken up by the fire of a few hundred Confederates on the bluff or else veered off course and reached the wrong stretch of the creek. While Burnside strove earnestly but ineffectually for three hours to get his men across the waist-deep creek, McClellan dispatched a succession of increasingly insistent messages demanding action, and Lee drew off all but a handful of the units that had been guarding Burnside’s front and shifted the troops to help hold his desperately hard-pressed left and center—exactly what Burnside was supposed to prevent.
Finally, around 1:00 in the afternoon, Burnside got a compact column of troops to charge straight across the bridge into the teeth of the Confederate fire. At almost the same time, one of his divisions found and used a ford about two miles downstream and flanked the Rebels. At last Burnside’s corps streamed across the creek, formed its line atop the bluff on the west bank, and then had to wait in ranks for two hours while ammunition was brought up via the narrow bottleneck of the bridge. At last, at 3:00 p.m., the Ninth Corps swept forward and crushed the weakened right flank of Lee’s line. Fleeing Confederates ran through the streets of Sharpsburg while Burnside’s formation bore down not only on the town but also on Boteler’s Ford, Lee’s only line of retreat.
In the midst of their triumphant advance, the Federals were stunned when a new wave of Confederates struck their flank. A. P. Hill’s division was the last of Jackson’s troops to leave Harpers Ferry after processing the prisoners and booty there, and it reached the battlefield just in time to counterattack the Ninth Corps. Flanked, surprised, and further confused by the fact that many of Hill’s Confederates were wearing Union uniforms captured at Harpers Ferry, the Federals fell back with heavy losses. They regrouped atop the bluffs and still outnumbered the Confederates in front of them, including Hill’s division, by a margin to two to one. Burnside, however, had had enough and ordered his corps to fall back to the east bank of the creek and assume the position in which they had started the day.
The guns fell silent. It was 5:30 p.m. More than 3,600 men lay dead on the field, a record that still stands for the largest number of Americans to die in battle in a single day. More than seventeen thousand others were wounded. The hours of darkness that night gave Lee the opportunity to use Boteler’s Ford to retreat into Virginia, but he did not. Instead he kept his army on the battlefield the next day, daring McClellan to renew the assault and contemplating an attack of his own until Jackson tactfully showed him the impracticality of the idea. With an additional day’s opportunity of trapping Lee’s woefully outnumbered army with its back to the Potomac, McClellan did nothing. In the previous day’s battle, he had committed scarcely two-thirds of his army, and he had nearly as many fresh troops left now as Lee had battle-weary men who could still stand on two legs. Yet McClellan remained convinced that somewhere behind the bluffs along the Potomac, another hundred thousand or so Rebels lurked, ready at any moment to swarm out and overwhelm his outnumbered Army of the Potomac. During the night of the eighteenth to the nineteenth of September, Lee reluctantly retreated across the Potomac into Virginia, marking the end of the campaign.
In military terms, the campaign had decided nothing. Lee’s army had marched into Maryland, and it had marched back out again. No territory or resources had changed hands for longer than the few days the campaign lasted, and the relative strengths of both sides had remained the same. At most these fifteen days in September had revealed the resilience of the northern soldiers in returning to battle and fighting hard despite that summer’s setbacks, and it had revealed the loyalty to the Union of the large majority of the citizens of western Maryland.
However, by forcing Lee to retreat across the Potomac much earlier than he had obviously planned, the Battle of Antietam had given Lincoln the victory he had been awaiting since July and with it the opportunity to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, thus opening a new chapter in the war.