The Army of Northern Virginia was not destroyed at Antietam, as Lincoln had hoped. Nor was it beaten utterly, as McClellan claimed. But it was badly hurt. Three of the nine division commanders, nineteen of thirty-six brigade commanders, and eighty-six of 173 regimental commanders were killed or wounded.1 Most of the wounded officers and enlisted men, as well as the stragglers, eventually returned to the army. But Lee would be unable to think about resuming his preferred strategy—the offensive—for another eight months.
The Confederate commander did not give up easily. “My Chief was most anxious to recross into Maryland” to salvage the campaign, wrote Lee’s adjutant Walter Taylor on September 28. But in view of his army’s condition, Lee changed his mind. “I would not hesitate to make [the attempt] even with our diminished numbers,” he informed Jefferson Davis on September 25, “did the army exhibit its former temper and condition,” but “the hazard would be great and a reverse disastrous. I am, therefore, led to pause.”2
The army indeed did not exhibit its former temper for some time after Antietam. “I fear this Md. trip has rather injured us more than good done,” wrote a Georgia captain on September 23. “Wee lost more than we gained in it, I think.” A Georgia private whose regiment was badly cut up wrote home that “it looks like they are going to kill all the men in battle before they stop. This war will have to stop before long, as all the men will be killed off.”3 Some soldiers took out their frustrations by damning Marylanders. “Don’t let any of your friends sing ‘My Maryland,’ not ‘my West [er]n Md.’ anyhow,” wrote Walter Taylor to his sister. When a Confederate band struck up the song after the retreat to Virginia, it “was prevented by the groans and hisses of the soldiers.”4
Lutheran Church in Sharpsburg four days after the battle. This church was badly damaged by shell fire and later had to be torn down. At the time of this Alexander Gardner photograph, the church was being used as a Union field hospital. Several other buildings in the village (population 1,300 at the time of the battle) suffered similar damage. (National Archives)
The battle and the Confederate retreat did great things for morale in the Army of the Potomac—even though some soldiers wondered why McClellan had not renewed the attack before the crippled rebels could escape. Nevertheless, “their retreat shows how complete our victory was,” wrote General John Gibbon, commander of the Iron Brigade, which had fought so savagely in the Cornfield. “We have whipped and dispirited them terribly,” boasted a New York lieutenant. General Alpheus Williams, who had taken command of XII Corps after Mansfield was mortally wounded, wrote that “our men fought gloriously and we taught the rascals a lesson, which they much needed after Pope’s disaster.”5
General Orlando Willcox had taken over a IX Corps division after its commander was killed at Chantilly. “It was completely run down after a long series of what in fact amounted to disasters,” Willcox wrote two weeks after Antietam, “but the late fights & all our efforts have brought it up wonderfully.” A month after the battle a Maine soldier reported that “a different spirit has been infused into the hearts of the men. . . . Instead of faultfinding and repining which was once so general amongst the soldiers now is found contentment and cheerfulness and a right idea of the work before them.”6
The Northern press broke out in a paroxysm of exultation, all the more exuberant because of the pessimism that had preceded it. “At no time since the war commenced did the cause of the Union look more dark and despairing than one week ago,” declared the New York Sunday Mercury on September 21, but now “at no time since the first gun was fired have the hopes of the nation seemed in such a fair way of realization as they do today.” It was too bad the rebels got away without further damage, “but when we recollect what a transition has taken place, from the depth of despondency to the height of exultation, from defeat to glorious victory, we ought to rejoice over what has been done, rather than grumble because we have not accomplished everything.” The New York Times could scarcely find strong enough adjectives or big enough type to describe this “GREAT VICTORY” which “must take its place among the grand decisive conflicts of history. . . . Its effects will be seen and felt in the destinies of the Nation for centuries to come.”7
The Times and other newspapers admitted that the surrender of Harpers Ferry was “humiliating . . . the most disgraceful thing of the war.” And Lee’s escape across the Potomac “will be a disappointment to the public at large.”8 But these events paled in comparison with the “glorious victory” at Antietam, which “raised the country from the darkest despondency” to “hope and elation.” It “destroys the prestige of rebel invincibility . . . it restores confidence, solidity, and enthusiasm to our own troops” and has produced “the greatest damage [that] has been inflicted on the rebel cause . . . since the war began.”9 Harper’s Weekly summed up the Northern public’s perception of Antietam: the rebels had invaded Maryland “exultant, hopeful, flushed with triumph; they retire defeated, disappointed, disheartened.”10
The initial Southern response to the news of Antietam—news that came first from Northern newspapers because there was no telegraph link from Lee’s army to the South—was shock and disbelief. “It looks rather gloomy for our prospects in Md. and I cannot possibly understand it all,” wrote a young Virginia woman when she learned of Lee’s retreat. In Georgia, Lieutenant Charles C. Jones Jr. expressed “painful anxiety” about the fate of Lee’s army.11 The Richmond press implicitly acknowledged the nasty blow of news from Maryland when it denounced the “sheer and shameless fabrication . . . monstrous fables . . . nauseating absurdities” of Northern claims of Antietam as a victory. “It is strange that our community should have been so much excited by the lying reports of the Yankee papers,” declared the Richmond Dispatch. There was no reason “for discouragement,” for “Gen. Lee obtained a decided advantage” in the battle and then withdrew “perfectly at his leisure.”12
The Dispatch and the Enquirer convinced themselves that the capture of Harpers Ferry was Lee’s real objective and that the army’s campaign of two weeks in Maryland was “among the most brilliant” in history. “Our people are disappointed because we did not gain a victory [at Sharpsburg] as decisive as those around Richmond and at Manassas.” But “they cannot expect such victories always.”13 Addressing all those Southerners who “are not obstinately determined to be miserable” because of the lying reports of a great Union victory, the Dispatch asked on September 30: “If we have been thus badly beaten, why is no use made of the victory? Why has McClellan not crossed the river and destroyed the army of Gen. Lee? Why has the latter been allowed to refresh and recruit at his leisure? The truth is this: The victory, though not so decisive as that of Manassas, was certainly a Confederate victory.” Lee’s retreat, added the Enquirer, was merely a strategic maneuver, “like the crouch before the spring of the lion.”14
Was all of this brave rhetoric another example of whistling past the graveyard? Perhaps so, but many of these themes became orthodoxy in the South during the weeks after the battle: Lee fought McClellan to a standstill at Sharpsburg; his unmolested withdrawal and the repulse of McClellan’s feeble pursuit were a thumb in the Yankees’ eye; the capture of 12,000 Federals at Harpers Ferry was a major achievement; and therefore “the net result of the campaign was in our favor.”15
This perception became even stronger after two Confederate offensives in the West came to grief in October. A small Union army commanded by William S. Rosecrans turned back a Confederate effort to recapture Corinth, Mississippi, in a vicious two-day battle October 3–4. Even the Southern press conceded that this affair was a defeat and “disaster.”16 And after a drawn battle at Perryville, Kentucky, on October 8, Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith gave up their campaign and retreated again to Tennessee. These “two reverses” were serious but “by no means decisive,” declared the Dispatch, because they were “counterbalanced” by the successes in Virginia including the capture of Harpers Ferry. “Instead, therefore, of desponding, we see cause to entertain the brightest hopes.”17 (See map insets, p. 76.)
This editorial was a tacit acknowledgment that many Southerners were indeed “desponding.” That category included Jefferson Davis, who was “very low down after the battle of Sharpsburg,” according to the Confederate secretary of war. Combined with the failure of the Kentucky invasion, the retreat from Maryland and the heavy losses of Lee’s army especially in officers meant, said Davis, that the South’s “maximum strength has been mobilized, while the enemy is just beginning to put forth his might.”18
Northerners came up with an assorted mix of metaphors to celebrate the trinity of triumphs at Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville, of which Antietam was the greatest. “The wheel of fortune has turned around once more,” wrote a diarist two days after that battle. There are “gleams of light that promise the return of sunshine,” added another three weeks later.19 Looking back over the three weeks that began with the battles at South Mountain on September 14, the New York Herald announced that “the battle of Antietam has broken the back of the rebellion” and “changed the tide of affairs, and victory now attends us everywhere.”20
On September 13 President Lincoln had taken an hour out of his crisis schedule to meet with a delegation of Chicago clergymen bearing a petition urging a proclamation of emancipation. Lincoln did not tell them that a draft of such a proclamation had rested in a desk drawer for almost two months while he waited for the military situation to improve. That situation had instead gotten worse—and never more so than at that moment when Lee was in Maryland, McClellan had not confronted him yet, panic reigned in much of the North, and the war seemed on the verge of being lost. Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay recalled this period as one of “fearful anxiety” and “almost unendurable tension” for the president.21
Some of that tension spilled over into his remarks to the delegation, which had claimed that emancipation was the will of God. “If it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty,” said Lincoln testily, “it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.” In present circumstances, with Rebel armies in Maryland and Kentucky and threatening Pennsylvania and Ohio, “what good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do . . . when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States? . . . I don’t want to issue a document the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!”22
A week later all had changed. Five days after Antietam Lincoln called a special meeting of the Cabinet. He reminded members of their decision two months earlier to postpone issuance of an emancipation proclamation. “I think the time has come now,” the president continued. “I wish it was a better time. . . . The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland.” When the enemy was at Frederick, Lincoln had made a “promise to myself and (hesitating a little) to my Maker” that “if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, [I] would consider it an indication of Divine will” in favor of emancipation. Perhaps recalling his conversation with the Chicago clergymen, Lincoln suggested that Antietam was God’s sign that “he had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” Therefore, said the president, he intended that day to issue the proclamation warning Confederate states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”23
Perhaps no consequence of Antietam was more momentous than this one. It changed the character of the war, as General-in-Chief Halleck noted in a communication to Ulysses S. Grant: “There is now no possible hope of reconciliation. . . . We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat.”24 The proclamation would apply only to states in rebellion, which produced some confusion because it thus seemed to “liberate” those slaves who were mostly beyond Union authority while leaving in bondage those in the border states. This apparent anomaly caused disappointment among some abolitionists and radical Republicans. But most of them recognized that the commander in chief’s legal powers extended only to enemy property. Some of that “property,” however, would be freed by the Proclamation or by the practical forces of war because thousands of contrabands in Confederate states were already within Union lines.
And in any event, the symbolic power of the Proclamation changed the war from one to restore the Union into one to destroy the old Union and build a new one purged of human bondage. “GOD BLESS ABRAHAM LINCOLN!” blazoned Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune on September 23. “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation.” The Emancipation Proclamation “is one of those stupendous facts in human history which marks not only an era in the progress of the nation, but an epoch in the history of the world.” Speaking for African Americans, Frederick Douglass declared: “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree.”25
Democrats almost unanimously denounced the Proclamation and vowed to campaign against it in the fall congressional elections. Many border-state Unionists also complained loudly. Lincoln had already discounted this opposition, which had once concerned him so greatly. He had tried in vain to get the border states to move voluntarily, but now “we must make the forward movement” without them, he told the Cabinet. “They [will] acquiesce, if not immediately, soon.” As for the Democrats, “their clubs would be used against us take what course we might.”26
More serious, perhaps, was the potential for opposition in the army, especially by McClellanite officers in the Army of the Potomac. There was good reason for worry about this. General Fitz-John Porter branded Lincoln’s document “the absurd proclamation of a political coward.” It has “caused disgust, and expressions of disloyalty, to the views of the administration” in the army, wrote Porter privately.27 McClellan himself considered the Proclamation “infamous” and told his wife that he could not “make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection.” McClellan consulted Democratic friends in New York, who advised him “to submit to the Presdt’s proclamation & quietly continue doing my duty as a soldier.” He even took action to quiet loose talk among some of his subordinates about marching on Washington to overthrow the government. On October 7 McClellan issued a general order reminding the army of its duty of obedience to civil authority. “The remedy for political errors, if any are committed,” he noted in a none-too-subtle reference to the forthcoming elections, “is to be found in the action of the people at the polls.”28
The issue of emancipation would continue—at times dangerously—to divide the army and the Northern public for another six months or more. But in the end, as the Springfield (Mass.) Republican predicted on September 24, 1862, it would “be sustained by the great mass of the loyal people.” These were the people who agreed with Lincoln’s words in his message to Congress on December 1, 1862: “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.” The Springfield Republican proved to be right when it anticipated that “by the courage and prudence of the President, the greatest social and political revolution of the age will be triumphantly carried through in the midst of a civil war.”29
The battle of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation had a signal impact abroad. Only two days before the first news of Antietam arrived in London, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Prime Minister Palmerston’s son-in-law, told Confederate envoys John Slidell and James Mason that “the event you so strongly desire,” a British–French offer of mediation and diplomatic recognition, “is very close at hand.” But the news of Union victories in Maryland came as “a bitter draught and a stunning blow” to friends of the Confederacy in Britain, wrote the secretary of the American legation. “They express as much chagrin as if they themselves had been defeated.”30
The London Times certainly was stunned by the “exceedingly remarkable” outcome of Antietam. “An army demoralized by a succession of failures,” in the words of a Times editorial, “has suddenly proved at least equal, and we may probably say superior, to an army elated with triumph and bent upon a continuation of its conquests.” Calling Lee’s invasion of Maryland “a failure,” the normally pro-Southern Times admitted that “the Confederates have suffered their first important check exactly at the period when they might have been thought most assured of victory.”31 Other British newspapers expressed similar sentiments. South Mountain and Antietam restored “our drooping credit here,” reported American Minister Charles Francis Adams. Most Englishmen had expected the Confederates to capture Washington, and “the surprise” at their retreat “has been quite in proportion. . . . As a consequence, less and less appears to be thought of mediation and intervention.”32
Adams’s prognosis was correct. Prime Minister Palmerston now backed away from the idea of intervention. The only favorable condition for mediation “would be the great success of the South against the North,” he pointed out to Foreign Secretary Russell on October 2. “That state of things seemed ten days ago to be approaching,” but with Antietam “its advance has been lately checked.” Thus “the whole matter is full of difficulty,” and nothing could be done until the situation became more clear. By October 22 it was clear to Palmerston that Confederate defeats had ended any chance for successful mediation. “I am therefore inclined to change the opinion I wrote you when the Confederates seemed to be carrying all before them, and I am [convinced] . . . that we must continue merely to be lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.”33
Russell and Gladstone, plus Napoleon of France, did not give up easily. The French asked Britain to join in a proposal for a six-months’ armistice in the American war during which the blockade would be lifted, cotton exports would be renewed, and peace negotiations would begin. France also approached Russia, which refused to take part in such an obviously pro-Confederate scheme. On November 12 the British Cabinet also rejected it after two days of discussions in which Secretary for War Sir George Cornewall Lewis led the opposition to intervention. In a letter six days later to King Leopold of Belgium, who favored the Confederacy and supported intervention, Palmerston explained the reasons for Britain’s refusal to act. “Some months ago” when “the Confederates were gaining ground to the North of Washington, and events seemed to be in their favor,” an “opportunity for making some communication” appeared imminent. But “the tide of war changed its course and the opportunity did not arrive.”34
Most disappointed of all by this outcome was James Mason, who was left cooling his heels by the British refusal to recognize his own diplomatic status as well as that of his government. On the eve of the arrival in London of news about Antietam, Mason had been “much cheered and elated” by initial reports of Lee’s invasion. “Recognition is not far off,” he had written on October 1st. Dashed hopes soured Mason on the “obdurate” British, and he felt “that I should terminate the mission here.”35 He decided to stay on, but never again did his mission come so close to success as in September 1862.
The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation further eroded the Confederacy’s chances for diplomatic recognition—though at first it seemed to have the contrary effect. The American minister to France warned Seward to expect “the most mischievous efforts” by Confederate sympathizers “to pervert and misconstrue the motives which have prompted the proclamation.”36 Anti-American conservatives in Britain and France, and even some liberals, professed to see the Proclamation not as a genuine antislavery act but as a cynical attempt to deflect European opinion or as a desperate effort to encourage a slave insurrection. If Lincoln really wanted to free the slaves, they asked, why did he announce that the Proclamation would apply to states where he had no power and exempt those where he did? The Proclamation was “cold, vindictive, and entirely political,” wrote the British chargé d’affaires in Washington. Lord Russell, who had earlier censured the Lincoln administration for not acting against slavery, now perversely pronounced the preliminary Proclamation a vile encouragement to “acts of plunder, of incendiarism, and of revenge.”37
The “incitement to insurrection” theme was based on a phrase in Lincoln’s preliminary Proclamation stating that the government “will do no act or acts to repress” slaves “in any acts they may make for their actual freedom.”38 Lincoln, of course, meant that the army would not return slaves coming into Union lines. But the anti-American press (which included most major newspapers in Britain) seized upon this phrase as an excuse to berate Lincoln and the Union cause.
This cartoon in the satirical British weekly Punch reflected the initial reaction by English conservatives to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which is portrayed as Lincoln’s last desperate card in the deadly game against the Confederacy—the ace of spades with its malevolent black face, implying that the Proclamation was an attempt to set off the gunpowder of a slave insurrection. (Punch)
The London Times was the most notorious in this regard, seeing it as an opportunity to reopen the issue of British intervention on humanitarian grounds. With this Proclamation, declared the Times, Lincoln “will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when the blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. LINCOLN will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”39 Many other British newspapers took their cue from the Times, branding the Proclamation “the last resort of a bewildered statesman,” “the wretched makeshift of a pettifogging lawyer,” “the last arm of vengeance . . . to carry the war of the knife to private homes where women and children are left undefended.”40
British friends of the Union understood this “demoniacal cry” by “the ghouls of the English press” for what it was.41“In England,” wrote John Stuart Mill to an American friend, “the proclamation has only increased the venom of those who after taunting you for so long with caring nothing for abolition, now reproach you for your abolitionism as the worst of your crimes.” But these “wretched effusions,” said Mill, came from conservatives “who so hate your democratic institutions that they would be sure to inveigh against you whatever you did, and are enraged at no longer being able to taunt you with being false to your own principles.” Benjamin Moran, the acidulous secretary of the American legation, wrote that the response of the British press to the Proclamation exposed “the hollowness of the anti-slavery professions of this people. . . . Altho’ they know that Mr. Lincoln is in earnest, they so desire us to be crushed that they won’t believe him.”42
But the “effusions” of the anti-American press probably did not reflect the sentiments of a majority of the British people. And this majority was not silent. The London Morning Star spoke for them when it pronounced the Proclamation “a gigantic stride in the paths of Christian and civilized progress—the turning point in the history of the American commonwealth—an act only second in courage and probable results to the Declaration of Independence.”43 In November 1862, pro-Union forces in Britain began to organize meetings and circulate petitions in favor of the Proclamation. When Lincoln on January 1st confounded European cynics who had predicted that he would never issue the final Proclamation, pro-Union sentiments in Britain grew stronger. Lincoln implicitly responded to criticisms of the preliminary Proclamation by stating in the final version that emancipation was “an act of justice” as well as a military measure, and by enjoining freed slaves to refrain from violence.44
Even though the final Proclamation exempted states or parts of states containing one-quarter of all slaves, it nevertheless announced a new war aim that foreshadowed universal emancipation if the North won the war. A black Methodist clergyman in Washington, Henry M. Turner, rejoiced that “the time has come in the history of this nation, when the downtrodden and abject black man can assert his rights, and feel his manhood. . . . The first day of January, 1863, is destined to form one of the most memorable epochs in the history of the world.”45
As recognition of this truth dawned across the Atlantic, huge mass meetings in Britain adopted pro-Union resolutions and sent copies to the American legation—some fifty of them in all.46“The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy,” wrote Henry Adams from London on January 23. “It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor all over this country.” The largest of the meetings, at Exeter Hall in London, “has had a powerful effect on our newspapers and politicians,” wrote Richard Cobden, one of the foremost pro-Union members of Parliament. “It has closed the mouths of those who have been advocating the side of the South. Recognition of the South, by England, whilst it bases itself on Negro slavery, is an impossibility.” Similar reports came from elsewhere in Europe. “The anti-slavery position of the government is at length giving us a substantial foothold in European circles,” wrote the American minister to the Netherlands. “Everyone can understand the significance of a war where emancipation is written on one banner and slavery on the other.”47
Antietam and emancipation had important consequences for American politics at home as well as diplomacy abroad. The state and congressional elections of 1862 in the North loomed as potential obstacles to the administration’s ability to maintain home-front support for its war policies. The two policies that became the main Democratic targets were “arbitrary arrests” and emancipation.
On September 24, two days after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln issued a second edict suspending the writ of habeas corpus and authorizing military trials for “all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice.”48 This order was aimed primarily at those who resisted by riots or shootings the enforcement of the draft for nine-months’ militia authorized by Congress in July. Although most areas raised their militia quotas by volunteering, and opposition to the draft in remaining areas was largely peaceful, intense violence did break out in a few localities. Espionage and guerrilla activities also remained a serious problem in border states, especially during the Confederate invasions of Maryland and Kentucky. The Constitution authorized suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in time of rebellion or invasion (Article I, Section 9). During the war as a whole the Lincoln administration used this power sparingly in the free states. But arrests escalated during the tense period of August and September 1862, giving Democrats an opportunity to make political capital out of the government’s alleged violations of civil liberties.49
More important as a Democratic issue in 1862, however, was emancipation. Denouncing the Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional, Democrats also appealed to the racial fears and prejudices of many Northern voters. In state and district party conventions, Democratic resolutions denounced the Black Republican “party of fanaticism” that intended to free “two or three million semi-savages” to “overrun the North and enter into competition with the white laboring masses” and mix with “their sons and daughters.” Midwestern Democratic orators proclaimed that “every white man in the North, who does not want to be swapped off for a free Nigger, should vote the Democratic ticket.”50
The most important state election would take place in New York, where the Democrats nominated for governor Horatio Seymour, a veteran of thirty years in state politics who had served a previous term as governor. “A vote for Seymour,” declared the leading Democratic newspaper in New York, the World, “is a vote to protect our white laborers against the association and competition of Southern negroes.” Seymour himself denounced emancipation as “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder.”51
But the issue of these Northern elections that subsumed all others was the war itself. On this question the Democrats sent forth a mixed and uncertain message. Peace Democrats, especially in the Midwest, made no secret of their opposition to the war as a means to restore the Union. War Democrats like Seymour and Manton Marble, editor of the World, endorsed restoration of the Union “as it was” by military victory and attacked the Lincoln administration for its failure to achieve that victory. Republicans responded with charges that War Democrats were no better than Copperheads. One of the mildest of such accusations was a New York Times editorial which maintained that Seymour’s “thin disguise of loyalty” merely cloaked a “formidable attempt to cripple the National Administration in the very midst of its contest with the rebellion.”52
Republicans of course exaggerated the disloyalty of Democrats for political effect. But they did not make up their charges out of whole cloth. Even such a temperate, impartial observer as Lord John Lyons, British minister to the United States, was convinced after speaking with War Democrats in New York that they desired “to put an end to the war even at the risk of losing the Southern States altogether.” If Democrats won control of the House, reported Lyons, they expected Lincoln to read the handwriting on the wall and “endeavor to effect a reconciliation with the people of the South.”53
Whatever the accuracy of Lyons’ observation, there is no doubt of the truth of Republican claims that a Democratic victory in 1862 “will be interpreted in Secessia and Europe as a vote for stopping the war.”54 The correspondence of European diplomats favoring a mediation offer explicitly stated such an assumption. Southerners interpreted Democratic gains in the states that held their elections in October—Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana—as a “matter of more serious interest than the military news,” for they indicated that “Lincoln and the Republicans are about to be overthrown” by Northern voters who expressed a “willingness for peace.”55
Before Antietam, Republicans and Democrats alike considered the prospect of Democratic control of the House all but certain. The Democrats nominated their candidates and adopted their “war is a failure” platforms during those August and early September days of “profound despondency,” noted the New York Times in October. “Thousands, whose hearts were depressed by the reverses of the war, were ready for the moment to seek a remedy in any quarter.” But now “our armies have achieved brilliant victories” that reinvigorated Northern determination to see the war through to victory.56
The election of 1862 in Maine, a rock-ribbed Republican state, confirmed the Times’s analysis of pre-Antietam sentiments. Maine held its election in early September. The Republican candidate for governor won with 53 percent of the vote, but this was a significant decline from the 62 percent the Republicans had gotten in 1860. If they were to suffer that kind of proportionate decline in other states (most of them more evenly contested than Maine), the Republicans would indeed lose the House in 1862.57
If the elections had been held any time during the three weeks after Antietam, however, Republicans might have defied the tradition of significant losses by the party in power in mid-term elections and retained their two-to-one majority in the House. (In every mid-term election for the previous twenty years the opposition party had actually won control of the House.) But the post-Antietam euphoria—and its attendant political benefits—gradually wore off during those three weeks. The main reason was the inactivity of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan had not only failed to renew the attack on September 18; he also sat tight on the north side of the Potomac for almost six weeks while he reorganized and resupplied the army. But that gave Lee time to reorganize and resupply his army, which needed the time much more than the Federals.
As day after day of fine fall weather passed, frustration with McClellan’s failure to move grew stronger. “Will the Army of the Potomac Advance?” asked headlines in Northern newspapers. “Why Should There be Delay?”58“What devil is it that prevents the Potomac Army from moving?” asked the Chicago Tribune on October 13. “What malign influence palsies our army and wastes these glorious days for fighting?”
On October 10–12 Jeb Stuart again thumbed his nose at the Yankees and then stuck the thumb in their eyes by riding around McClellan’s whole army with impunity. Stuart’s 1,800 troopers raided as far north as Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, evaded the Union cavalry that tried to intercept them, and returned to their own lines bringing 1,200 captured horses and dozens of prisoners with the loss of only two men. Gideon Welles was far from the only person to lament this “humiliating, disgraceful” fiasco, which was more evidence of McClellan’s “inertness, and imbecility. . . . The country groans, but nothing is done. Certainly the confidence of the people must give way under this fatuous inaction.”59
Democrats made significant gains in the Pennsylvania congressional elections on October 13, one day after the completion of Stuart’s raid. This was no coincidence. Voters took out their anger by voting against the party in power. Republicans were frustrated by the irony, in the New York Tribune’s words, “that Republican candidates should lose because Democratic Generals won’t fight.” Lincoln undoubtedly shared this sentiment. But he also accepted the political reality that the commander in chief takes the blame for failure just as he benefits from success. “With the administration military success is everything,” observed an astute Boston Republican; “it is the verdict which cures all errors.”60
Lincoln did everything he could to prod McClellan into action. The president had visited the Army of the Potomac on October 1–4 and had personally told McClellan to get moving. After returning to Washington, Lincoln had Halleck send McClellan an order that any other general would have considered peremptory: “Cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy. . . . Your army must move now while the roads are good.” Nothing happened—except Stuart’s raid. Lincoln reined in his anger about that misadventure for almost two weeks before bursting out with a telegram to McClellan in reply to an excuse from the general about brokendown horses: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”61
General McClellan and President Lincoln plus various officers at V Corps headquarters near the Antietam battlefield on October 3, 1862, where Lincoln vainly urged McClellan to follow up his victory with a vigorous pursuit of the enemy. (Library of Congress)
More temperately, the president wrote McClellan a fatherly letter. “You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness,” Lincoln reminded him. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing?” McClellan had insisted that his men could not march and fight without full rations and new shoes. Yet the enemy marched and fought with scanty rations and few shoes. To wait for a full supply pipeline “ignores the question of time,” which benefited the enemy more than it did Union forces. If McClellan crossed the Potomac quickly and got between the enemy and Richmond, said Lincoln, he could force Lee into the open for a decisive battle. “We should not so operate as to merely drive him away,” maintained the president. “If we can not beat the enemy where he now is [west of Harpers Ferry], we never can. . . . If we never try, we shall never succeed.”62
But McClellan still delayed. Halleck threw up his hands in exasperation. “I am sick, tired, and disgusted,” he said. “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”63 On October 26 the Army of the Potomac finally began to cross its namesake river. But it took six days to get the whole army across (the Army of Northern Virginia had done it in one night after Antietam) and another seven days to move fifty miles to the vicinity of Warrenton. Lee divided his smaller force again and placed Longstreet’s corps between the enemy and Richmond. Jackson stayed in the Valley on McClellan’s flank, confident that he could outmarch the Yankees to join Longstreet if necessary.
For Lincoln this was the last straw. Tired of trying to “bore with an auger too dull to take hold,” he relieved McClellan and ordered Burnside to take command of the army on November 7. To his private secretary Lincoln later explained this decision: “I peremptorily ordered him to advance,” but McClellan kept “delaying on little pretexts of wanting this and that. I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy. I saw how he could intercept the enemy on the way to Richmond. I determined to make that the test. If he let them get away I would remove him. He did so & I relieved him.”64
Nothing in McClellan’s tenure of command became him like the leaving of it. Despite emotional pleas from some officers and men to defy Lincoln’s order and “change front on Washington,” McClellan discountenanced all such talk and turned the army over to a reluctant Burnside. “Stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me, and all will be well,” he told his soldiers as thousands yelled their continuing affection for him and others wept unashamedly. McClellan boarded a train for New Jersey, where he would sit out the rest of the war except for a run against Lincoln as the Democratic candidate for president in 1864. In that effort, as a Union naval officer wryly put it, he met “with no better success as a politician than as a general.”65
McClellan’s farewell to the Army of the Potomac on November 10, 1862 (detail). (Harper’s Weekly)
Lincoln had waited until after the elections to remove McClellan. Those elections resulted in significant Democratic gains: the governorship of New York; the governorship and a legislative majority in New Jersey; legislative majorities in Illinois and Indiana; and a net increase of thirty-four members of the U.S. House of Representatives. If gubernatorial elections had been held in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana in 1862, Democrats might have won them also. Contemporaries and most historians have interpreted these elections as “a great, sweeping revolution of public sentiment,” “a near disaster for the Republicans,” “a great triumph for the Democrats.”66
In reality they were nothing of the sort. Republicans retained the governorships of all but two of the eighteen Northern states and the legislatures of all but three. They made an unprecedented gain of five seats in the Senate. And they kept a majority of twenty-five in the House after experiencing the smallest net loss of House seats in twenty years—indeed, the only time in those two decades that the party in power retained control of the House.67
What might have happened without Antietam could well have been a different story. A shift of an average of 1 percent of the votes to Democrats in sixteen Republican-held congressional districts in nine states would have given Democrats a comfortable majority in the House.68 And who can doubt that a Confederate victory at Antietam and/or the continued presence of the Army of Northern Virginia in Maryland or Pennsylvania would have swayed that tiny percentage of voters—and more. That would indeed have been a disaster for Republicans and a great triumph for Democrats—especially the Peace Democrats. It might also have meant disaster for the Union cause.
To the end of his life McClellan believed that Antietam was his finest hour, when he had saved the Union and earned the gratitude of the republic. Perhaps he was right. Several pivotal moments occurred in the Civil War. McClellan was involved in two of them. As his splendidly trained and equipped Army of the Potomac advanced up the Virginia Peninsula in May 1862, the Confederacy was on the ropes. Much of its South Atlantic coast was gone. New Orleans, Nashville, and several other cities had fallen. Union forces had gained control of most of the crucial Cumberland–Tennessee–Mississippi River network. Twenty-five thousand Southern soldiers had become prisoners of war. The government was preparing to flee Richmond. One more punch by McClellan might have knocked the Confederacy out of the war. But McClellan could not bring himself to throw that punch.
Instead, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee got the South off the mat at the count of nine and began counterpunching with such skill and power that by September the Union appeared to be on the ropes. This remarkable turnaround was the war’s first pivotal moment. Now it was Washington that seemed to be in danger. Confederate armies marched into Maryland and Kentucky in a campaign to win these states and conquer a peace. Foreign nations were preparing to recognize Confederate independence. Northern armies and voters were demoralized. Lincoln had shelved his proposed edict of emancipation to wait for a victory that might never come. But it did, along the ridges and in the woods and cornfields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River in the single bloodiest day in all of American history.
The victory at Antietam could have been more decisive. The same was true of two lesser victories that followed at Corinth and Perryville. But Union armies had stymied the supreme Confederate efforts. Foreign powers backed away from intervention and recognition, and never again came so close to considering them. Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Northern voters chastised but did not overthrow the Republican party, which forged ahead with its program to preserve the Union and give it a new birth of freedom. Here indeed was a pivotal moment.
No other campaign and battle in the war had such momentous, multiple consequences as Antietam. In July 1863 the dual Union triumphs at Gettysburg and Vicksburg struck another blow that blunted a renewed Confederate offensive in the East and cut off the western third of the Confederacy from the rest. In September 1864 Sherman’s capture of Atlanta reversed another decline in Northern morale and set the stage for the final drive to Union victory. These also were pivotal moments. But they would never have happened if the triple Confederate offensives in Mississippi, Kentucky, and most of all Maryland had not been defeated in the fall of 1862.
Contemporaries recognized Antietam as the preeminent turning point of the war. Jefferson Davis was depressed by the outcome there because the Confederacy had put forth its maximum effort and failed. Two of the war’s best corps commanders, who fought each other at Antietam (and several other battlefields), Winfield Scott Hancock for the Union and James Longstreet for the Confederacy, made the same point. In 1865 Hancock looked back on the past four years and concluded that “the battle of Antietam was the heaviest disappointment the rebels had met with. They then felt certain of success and felt that they should carry the war so far into the Northern states that the recognition of the Confederacy would have been a necessity.” And twenty years after the war, Longstreet wrote simply: “At Sharpsburg was sprung the keystone of the arch upon which the Confederate cause rested.”69 Only with the collapse of that arch could the future of the United States as one nation, indivisible and free, be assured.
