On August 14 General McClellan, per Lincoln’s orders, began to withdraw his army from Harrison’s Landing and head for northern Virginia, where Union forces were being threatened at Manassas. Emma and her comrades were demoralized at the thought of retreating from Richmond. The entire campaign had been a waste: all of those entrenchments built, all those tracks and bridges repaired, and all those Union boys lost, fifteen thousand graves scattered along the length of the Peninsula, remains sinking in the marshy ground, waiting to be yanked up and eaten by hogs or desecrated by rebel hands. They had been so close, and now all of the Army of the Potomac swore at the prospect of giving up. In a letter to his wife McClellan detected the hand of God in his failure: “I think I begin to see his wise purpose in all this. . . . If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible.”
Emma was cheered only by learning, finally, what had happened to Jerome Robbins after she left him in the hospital at Talleysville. The following evening a group of Confederate cavalry, led by Robert E. Lee’s nephew, Colonel Fitzhugh Lee, clattered into the clearing. To Jerome’s surprise the rebels were courteous, and instead of being taken prisoner he was offered parole, a policy mandated by Stonewall Jackson, who believed treating medical personnel as enemy combatants was immoral. A steamer collected Jerome and 105 others and brought them to Camp Parole on the Chesapeake Bay, a facility set up to house parolees until they could be exchanged. Emma sent him a letter expressing her relief and a $5 note. He wrote to thank her, his tone and his words somehow reaching back to the place he had broken—that had been broken for as long as she could remember, if she were honest about it—and both Frank Thompson and Emma Edmondson forgave him, this time for good.
On the march north the men bivouacked in the street, many of them drunk, and several others mildly scandalized by the fact that Colonel Orlando Poe, the married commander of the 2nd Michigan and Emma’s friend, invited a woman to stay with them. “She slept in the tent with us & he lay next to her,” one soldier confided to his diary. “I believe she said she belonged to some Soldiers’ Aid Society though the exact nature of the aid she did not state to me.” The 2nd Michigan continued to Manassas, planning to reinforce General John Pope, whose troops had been in the vicinity of the Shenandoah Valley for days with no rations but the rotting fruit and corn in the fields. Emma was delayed in joining them, ordered instead by General Samuel P. Heintzelman to go on a scouting mission across the rebel lines to determine Confederate strength and positions.
She boarded a train to Washington at Warrenton Junction, gathered items for a disguise as a female slave—calico dress, headscarf, and silver nitrate, her skin be damned—and returned the same night. Since connecting with the group of contrabands who came to camp during the Peninsula Campaign, Emma interacted with slaves whenever she had the chance, listening to their stories and hoping she might one day teach them. Her choice to disguise herself again as a slave was, in her current circumstances, the best way she knew to show empathy.
Union forces under General Pope skirmished with Lee’s advancing forces all along the Rappahannock River, the lines between the two armies fluid and evolving, and Emma fell in with a group of nine contrabands in the neighborhood of Warrenton, nine miles from the train depot. The contrabands, Emma deduced, “preferred to live in bondage with their friends rather than to be free without them.”
At headquarters they began cooking rations, the air filling with the scent of “coosh”—bacon grease (and salt pork, if they were lucky), cornmeal, and water fried up into a flimsy pancake, a Confederate staple similar to a common meal of plantation slaves. Rebel officers lingered nearby, murmuring among themselves. Emma strained to listen, and within a few hours she learned the troop numbers at several important points and the number expected to arrive during the night. The lines were thick with pickets and she waited until dawn to break away.
On the journey back she found herself in the cross fire of a skirmish and sought refuge in the cellar of an old house. The firing grew hotter, shot and shell shaking the foundation, the floor above her opening up in patches and raining down in crumbling stone. She recalled the story of Elijah remaining in the cave during the tempest, the earthquake, and the fire, and afterward came the still, small voice. She closed her eyes, hoping to hear that same small voice speak to her.
Back at camp Emma learned that Stonewall Jackson’s division had torn through the Union supply depot at Manassas Junction, burning a hundred railroad cars and seizing all of the ammunition and subsistence stores his men could carry; only a half dozen barrels of hard bread and as many hams lay scattered around the tracks. The cars were pierced with rifle shots and still burning. Bridges were torched and tracks torn up. Smoke drifted from the scorched remains of a bakery. From Manassas Junction the general slashed his way to the railroad bridge over Bull Run, destroying it after he crossed, the reflection of the flames lighting the sky for miles. The Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas) was about to begin, Yankees and rebels meeting on the same ground as in the previous year, but this time the Federals were on the defensive, and Emma’s regiment was on the front lines.
At 5:00 a.m. the 2nd Michigan moved down the road to the old battlefield at Manassas and deployed as skirmishers, taking position in the woods about a mile from Jackson’s headquarters. The rebels caught sight of them and opened with a section of artillery, firing high into the oak trees, sending splinters the size of stove wood plunging to the ground. One piece swiped the cap clear off a lieutenant’s head but left him otherwise unharmed.
Emma was sent to the front with messages and mail, her mount a mule instead of a horse, and along the way she detoured to a side road and came upon a wide ditch. She tried to cross, but instead of leaping the mule reared and fell headfirst into the gap, heaving her against the side; everything turned black.
The dull thump of cannon pounded above, rousing her. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, or how her mule had managed to extricate his hooves from the mud, but there he stood at the edge of the ditch, looking down at her, quizzical and waiting. The mail! she thought, and began crawling out of the ditch on elbows and knees, panicked at the idea of it going undelivered.
Each motion forward revealed another injury. Her left thumb was limp and a rope of pain stretched through her left side, from foot to breast, but she crept inch by inch toward the mule. The mailbags, spattered with mud, still hung beneath the animal’s stomach. With broken leg, foot, and finger she remounted and made her delivery, every bump and jostle bringing a sharp, hot pain, substantial enough that she took a risk and visited the hospital corps. The surgeon wanted to examine her but she demurred, fearing what he might discover, and convinced him she needed only some morphine sulfate and chloroform.
The Union defeat at Second Bull Run cost sixteen thousand casualties, five times as many as were lost in the first conflict there. Inside Pope’s headquarters at Nalle House, an elegant brick mansion belonging to a captain in the US Navy, the entrance hall and parlor looked “more like a butcher’s shambles than a gentleman’s dwelling,” said one witness, with the dying and wounded lying head to foot. Silk settees and curtains were polka-dotted with blood. Beside the piano stood the amputating table, its instruments scattered across mantelpieces once dedicated to leather-bound books and vases of flowers.
The 2nd Michigan spent the next several days near Fairfax Station, where Emma worked in a field hospital set up by the train depot, and where she watched thousands more of the wounded wait in agony for trains to Washington. The city’s hospitals were overflowing, and two thousand cots were filled and laid out in the Capitol; lawmakers had to navigate carefully to avoid tripping over bandaged and bloody limbs. Belle leaned out the window of her cell in the Old Capitol Prison and taunted the returning soldiers as they passed by: “How long did it take you to come back from Bull Run? Are you going on to Richmond? Where’s General Pope’s headquarters?”
“Hush up, you damn bitch,” one retorted, “or I’ll shoot you!”
“Shoot me?” Belle laughed. “Go meet men, you cowards! What are you doing here in Washington? Stonewall Jackson is waiting for you on the other side of the Potomac. Aye, you could fight defenseless, imprisoned women like me, but you were driven out of the Shenandoah Valley by the men of Virginia.”
While McClellan let his exhausted troops recuperate, Lee followed up on his victory at Bull Run, sending his ragged, barefoot Confederates into western Maryland, the first invasion of Union territory. Counting on McClellan’s tentativeness, Lee hoped to capture Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia; Baltimore; or even Washington. The Federal capital braced for an attack just as it had after the first debacle at Bull Run. A steam warship was anchored on the Potomac, ready to carry Lincoln and his cabinet members to safety, and government employees were to be armed with muskets to assist in the capital’s defense. All was going according to the Confederates’ plan until two Union soldiers, resting in a field in Frederick, Maryland, found a piece of paper wrapped around three cigars: a copy of Lee’s Special Order No. 191, outlining his strategy. When the news reached McClellan, he turned to his officers and exclaimed, “Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home!”
He launched a series of assaults against the outnumbered Confederates along Antietam Creek, southwest of Frederick, in what would be the deadliest single-day engagement in the history of American warfare, with nearly five thousand men killed and twenty thousand wounded. Two days later the Union army’s staff photographer, Alexander Gardner, visited the scene, marking the first time an American battlefield was photographed before the dead were buried. He employed a new technique, stereographing, in which two lenses captured two simultaneous pictures that, when seen through a viewer, created a three-dimensional image. Although Gardner intended to repulse the public with his unflinching depiction of the war—“here are the dreadful details,” he wrote, “let them aid in preventing another such calamity falling upon the nation”—he only summoned them ever closer. Americans, throughout the North and South, decorated their parlors with his grotesque images, featuring such titles as “Federal buried, Confederate unburied” and “Bloody Lane, Confederate Dead, Antietam,” so authentic and visceral when compared with the stylized, patriotic renderings in Harper’s Weekly. Gardner’s success inspired other war photographers, a primitive gaggle of paparazzi who rushed to capture the carnage when it was still raw.
Antietam was a tactical draw; McClellan succeeded in driving the Confederates out of Maryland but allowed them to retreat to Virginia unmolested. Nevertheless he boasted about his “complete” victory and confided to his wife, “I feel some little pride in having with a beaten and demoralized army defeated Lee so utterly & saved the North so completely . . . my military reputation is cleared—I have shown that I can fight battles & win them!” While Lincoln remained concerned about McClellan’s timid performance, he took Antietam as a sign that God had “decided this question in favor of the slaves.” On September 22, five days after the battle, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, warning Confederate states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1, their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, forever free.” Elizabeth celebrated by arranging for the private purchase of a slave, Louisa Roane, so she could be reunited with her husband, a Van Lew servant and member of the Richmond Underground.
Bloody Lane, Confederate dead, Antietam.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Emma claimed to have been on the field at Antietam, helping carry the injured and dead from the field. She would remember coming upon one young wounded soldier, a thin rope of dark blood encircling his neck.
“I stooped down,” Emma wrote, “and asked him if there was anything he’d like to have done for him. The soldier turned a pair of beautiful, clear, intelligent eyes upon me for a moment in an earnest gaze, and then, as if satisfied with the scrutiny, said faintly: ‘Yes, yes; there is something to be done, and that quickly, for I am dying.’
“Something in the tone and voice” made Emma look closely at the soldier, studying the lines and dips of the face, the way the bones fitted together. Her suspicion was confirmed. “I administered a little brandy and water to strengthen the wounded boy,” she recalled, “for he evidently wished to tell me something that was on his mind before he died. The little trembling hand beckoned me closer, and I knelt down beside him and bent my head until it touched the golden locks on the pale brow before me.”
“I can trust you,” the soldier said, “and will tell you a secret. I am not what I seem, but am a female. I enlisted from the purest motives, and have remained undiscovered and unsuspected. . . . My trust is in God, and I die in peace. I wish you to bury me with your own hands, that none may know after my death that I am other than my appearance indicates.” Again, Emma said, the soldier looked at her with that same earnest scrutiny, and whispered, “I know I can trust you—you will do as I have requested.”
She claimed to have honored the soldier’s wish, making a grave for her under the shadow of a mulberry tree, apart from all the others. But Emma had not been on the field at Antietam at all; she, along with the rest of the 2nd Michigan, had stayed in Alexandria until shortly after the battle. The story let her believe, in some small way, that people might extend the same kindness to her, keeping her secrets and letting her know that she was not alone.