Any major Civil War battle created a horrifying patch of earth: “a little spot of hell,” as one eyewitness described the area around Bull Run, where not one but two battles ravaged the landscape. Wrecked cannons, wagons, and caissons; flattened buildings and fences; broken and abandoned equipment; rotting carcasses of dead horses and mules (and sometimes cattle caught in the crossfire); blackened and charred trees and underbrush: battlefields were assaults on the senses and on the very land itself. Bizarre idiosyncrasies stood out. Bits and pieces of half-consumed breakfast meals were scattered helter-skelter in the remains of a camp suddenly shelled by artillery fire at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri. A snow and sleet storm, a rarity given that most battles were fought in the sunny South, fell on the Fort Donelson battleground, powdering the wrack of war with an incongruously peaceful-looking white blanket. After the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee, one could hear the screams of horses given mercy deaths as they lay in pools of their own blood and intestines; one was a general’s horse that “had his fore feet on one side of the [enemy’s] works and his hind feet on the other, dead.”1
The dead soldiers were the most shocking: all those bodies, bloated and blackened, their limbs twisted in grotesque shapes caused by rigor mortis or blown away entirely by shell fire, arms and legs scattered about. Sometimes the dead fell in rows, incongruously uniform from the way a volley of musket fire had laid them out with an odd neatness. Others lay in piles, one atop the other. Hogs, vultures, and other animals sometimes descended on the remains. On some occasions, soldiers from the opposing side deliberately mutilated the corpses of their foes. “I saw one of our dead soldiers with his mouth crammed full of cartridges until the cheeks were bulged out,” noted a disgusted Union soldier walking the field after the Battle of Shiloh. “Several protruded from his mouth.” The man’s comrades gave as good as they got, digging only shallow pits in which they unceremoniously dumped the Rebel dead. “Some of our boys were disposed to kick the secesh into these pits,” he wrote. “One fell in with a heavy dump on his face. The more humane proposed to turn him over. ‘O, that’ll do,’ said a Union Missourian, ‘for when he scratches, he’ll scratch nearer hell.’”2
The war had quickly evolved (or devolved) from the earliest days, when the death of one soldier such as Elmer Ellsworth evoked extensive commentary. Americans treated Ellsworth’s death almost like a peacetime homicide, but as the casualty lists grew ever longer, they were no longer inclined to refer to a dead soldier as having been “murdered” on the battlefield. The soldiers themselves grew callous to the sight of a corpse, and whatever outrage they felt regarding the war dead had become more generalized, their sensitivity to combat casualties more numbed to the war’s cruelties. “Death is so common that little sentiment is wasted,” observed a young Union officer during the Peninsula Campaign. “It is not like death at home.”3
The war was now vast fields of Ellsworths, each with his own story but all blended together in what was a roiling sea of suffering. “Many of our dead and wounded were still on the field. . . . Many are hid away in the bushes who will never have burial, and years hence their bones will be discovered bleaching in the sun. Such is the case on every battle-field,” wrote a witness to the aftermath of the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas. “The scenes over this field of carnage beggars all description. Sights calculated to chill the blood and strike the mind with horror meet you on every side. Here is a human body with the mangled remnants of a head which a cannon-ball has torn to fragments. There lies another with both legs shot away. Here is one the top of whose skull is gone, leaving the brain all exposed to the weather, and see! he is still alive.”4
As Lincoln stepped onto the Antietam battlefield the morning of October 4, 1862, he stepped into the war’s darkest place, bounded and defined by violent forms of death he had never seen and probably never even imagined. But it was not his first battlefield. While serving in the Illinois state militia during the Black Hawk War of 1832, he was among the soldiers who occupied a battle site in an area around Sycamore Creek in northern Illinois. On a hill near the creek, twelve militiamen in an advance scouting party were surrounded and killed by Native Americans. Lincoln took no part in that fight, but he was among the main body of men who came upon the little battlefield afterward and found the bodies. The sight made a lasting impression. “I remember just how those men looked,” he recalled years later. “The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they lay, heads toward us, on the ground, and every man had a round red spot on the top of his head, about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp.” It unnerved him. “It was frightful, but it was grotesque,” he confessed, “and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.” The next day, Lincoln helped bury the men—the first and last time in his life he was directly involved in burying a dead body.5
Antietam was exponentially worse. More than twenty-two thousand men were killed and wounded in a twelve-square-mile area around the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek during an approximately fourteen-hour span on September 17, making it the deadliest single day in American history. When the sun finally set and the fighting died away, the sheer number of bodies left from the battle was indescribable. One short stretch of road—later nicknamed “Bloody Lane”—contained over five thousand dead and wounded Rebel soldiers: a “ghastly flooring” four and sometimes five layers deep. “The Confederates had gone down as grass before the scythe,” wrote one observer. “They were lying in rows, like the ties of a railroad. . . . I recall a soldier with a cartridge between his thumb and finger, the end of the cartridge bitten off, and the paper between his teeth when the bullet pierced his heart, and the machinery of life—all the muscles and nerves—came to a standstill.”6
The aftermath was an imposing exercise in mass body disposal. “In every direction around men were digging graves and burying the dead,” noted a Union officer riding across the battlefield the next morning. He stopped near a patch of woods bordering what would become known simply as the Cornfield, a scene of particularly ferocious slaughter, “where lay two or three hundred festering bodies, nearly all of [them] Rebels, the most hideous exhibition I had yet seen. Many were black as Negroes, heads and faces hideously swelled, covered with dust until they looked like clods. . . . Here was a long grave of ours, made in a rain-washed gulley, certain to be washed out the first time it rained hard.” He said as much to a gravedigger, who simply replied, “To be sure they will,” and resumed digging.7
People tried to staple the norms of the antebellum Good Death over these scenes. Comrades of dead soldiers wrote home to grieving parents that their loved ones had given inspiring speeches as they lay dying, bidding family and comrades farewell and urging them on to victory and observance of their duty. “One young fellow from Massachusetts lay dying his comrades trying to sooth,” a Wisconsin private wrote his family. “He said to them, ‘Go on and save Massachusetts; don’t stop for me I shall soon be out of trouble.’”8
Many letters home contained miniature eulogies of the deceased. “As a soldier, there could be none better,” Captain James Pierpont of Massachusetts reassured the parents of Corporal T. S. Yates, shot through the eye at Antietam. “Ever ready for his duty, and one of the bravest of the brave, he had won the love and respect of all that knew him.” Pierpont also reassured Yates’s parents that he had in his possession the corporal’s watch, “the only thing of value with him,” which he would return if they wished—a talisman of death reminiscent of the prewar locks of hair and other cherished mementoes of the dead.9
Many such letters were written to relatives by the friends and commanding officers of the deceased, and they probably helped some. But they were of little comfort, especially when battlefield death was so shocking and new. In the wake of the massive bloodletting that was Antietam and the other big early battles of the war, people struggled in their attempt to make sense of this strange new way of dying.
Politics played a role in the public perception of battlefields from the war’s earliest days. Soldiers who saw their comrades die on the field voiced a renewed determination to kill enemy soldiers by way of retaliation. “Three of my most intimate friends were shot down by my side,” wrote a Rhode Island soldier to his parents, “one of them having his head shot from his body, and another had his leg taken entirely off, the blood flying in my face. I felt so badly I almost fainted, but I rallied immediately, and clenching my teeth, went in, and every shot I fired I made it tell, as I can assure you that I saw five of the rebels fall dead, and I thought the death of my friends avenged.”10
Rumors of battlefield atrocities—many of dubious accuracy—motivated men to enlist, the idea of Northern men not just dying at Bull Run but dying wrongfully giving an extra spur. “O! Sir,” exclaimed a new recruit to a man in Iowa, who asked why there were so many men lined up to enlist, “since they read the account of how our wounded soldiers in the hospital and on the battle field at Bull Run were murdered, nothing could restrain them.” A newspaper editor in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, opined, “When we look away to that scene of carnage [at Bull Run] all strewed with the bodies of patriotic men who courted death for themselves, that their country might live, and then look upon the homes which their fall has rendered desolate forever, we realize—what I think the popular heart in its forbearance has never completely comprehended—the unspeakable and hellish atrocity of this rebellion.”11
Some tried to use the casualties as a shaming device, pressing reluctant men to enlist. There was an edge now to the criticisms leveled at those who would not volunteer or tried to find other ways to stay off the battlefield. One individual with a poetic bent penned a few lines aimed at those who joined Home Guard rather than frontline combat units:
Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
I have no taste for war;
My joy is not in fire and fight,
In cannon’s roar and bullet’s flight,
And nasty pools of gore.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let others fight, let others fall,
Let others wear the bays,
But of the military ball
Let me alone adorn the festive hall
Where brass and buttons blaze.12
The dead could give an extra edge to the blame assigned by the president’s critics to his (real and perceived) mistakes. For the Bull Run defeat, “Abraham Lincoln alone is responsible,” argued one Democratic newspaper, which also stated, with no apparent sense of contradiction, that the “awful responsibility” for what had occurred rested with numerous Republican Party leaders, all of whom had pressured the Union army into premature action and had gotten men killed. “When we publish the cold record of names of those that have futilely perished in battle recently,” explained a Democratic newspaper, “it seems to us that each one, though mute in death, speaks to those dear to him, imploring that they ask themselves whether these calamities were not the result of a delusion and a political deception practiced by [Republican] fanatical leaders.”13
In the early months of his presidency, Lincoln struggled to find an effective response. He did not do much to harness the energy of those whose assessment of the war, sobered by the battlefield dead, involved a stiffening of the spine and renewed resolve to do their duty. He made no public calls to revenge the dead, and he did not try to shame anyone to enlist in the face of those first casualty lists. His direct encounters with wartime death—primarily Elmer Ellsworth and Edward Baker—were more personal than anything else, of a piece with the private mourning he experienced when Willie and Eddy died or, going even further back, the deaths of his mother, sister, and Ann Rutledge. He understood the need to mourn these deaths with public propriety, keeping his grief hidden away and only occasionally allowing it to surface, and he also understood the need to keep Mary’s grief behind closed doors as much as possible.
But none of this translated, at least early in the war, into an understanding that death during such a massive civil war was essentially a public matter. Battlefields were a public square, a grim sort of polis, and as president and commander in chief, Lincoln occupied a prime role in shaping how the war dead would be understood and the meaning of their sacrifice articulated in this public realm. The battlefield had flipped the ordinary order of death. Eddy and Willie, Edward Baker and Elmer Ellsworth—these were private losses with a public dimension. But battlefields were at their core public deaths, which then filtered down into the homes and hearts of ordinary Americans. They required a new understanding, a new paradigm.
Lincoln did not fully grasp this, at least not right away. His first major address to the nation following his inauguration, sent to Congress’s special session on July 4, 1861, contained nothing regarding wartime death and what it might mean, because the war to that point had caused very few casualties. But even at the end of the year, after First Bull Run, Wilson’s Creek in Missouri (a smaller but quite nasty little fight) and numerous other violent encounters had killed or wounded thousands of men, Lincoln said little about the war’s fallen soldiers in his first annual address to Congress.14
The first truly massive battles of the war—Shiloh in April 1862, Second Bull Run that August, and the various battles constituting General George McClellan’s peninsula campaign earlier that summer—also elicited little in the way of a direct public response from the president. These battles put lists of dead soldiers in the columns of newspapers around the country, and they called forth a shocked, painful new national reckoning with the war’s mortal seriousness. But there was no campaign emanating from the White House designed to explain these deaths. Lincoln’s first proclamation of prayer and fasting, issued in August, made no mention of the fallen or any acknowledgment of the battlefield dead beyond a general reference to the affliction of “faction and civil war.”15
This is not altogether surprising, given the limitations of his office. Lincoln inherited in the presidency an institution that was not yet structured for such work. Presidents before him did little to shape public opinion. The idea of what we might call today “media management” barely existed.
It also may not have yet fully dawned on Lincoln that he needed to do something from the White House to shape the public’s perception of wartime death, because before the war he was not inclined to see death as a political matter. He never spoke much about dying for a cause or about death serving a higher moral cause, and he had always avoided rhetoric that smacked of political martyrdom. Equating dying with politics before the war was a radical thing, the stuff of extremists who spoke and wrote of sacrificing themselves (and others) to end human bondage, shades of John Brown. Lincoln wanted no part of this.
But now the politics of death was omnipresent, a powerful subtext in the debates swirling around wartime policymaking. When the finger-pointing inevitably began regarding the Union army and navy’s setbacks, those fingers jabbed that much sharper because everyone knew that somewhere in the background lurked graves. “Since the late disastrous affair at Bull’s Run, our people are beginning to inquire who is responsible for the misadventures of our armies?” noted a New York journalist in late July 1861.16
Antietam created a fresh round of such queries, particularly after the president announced soon after the battle that he planned to issue an emancipation proclamation. Now all the thorny, ugly questions about slavery and race in American life would be wedded to the battlefield dead. Would white men be willing to die for African American freedom? Would black men be willing to die for their own freedom? Were they all dying for the same reasons?
Up until the fall of 1862, Lincoln had done little to shape this dialogue. If anything, he seems to have understood battle, at least to this point in the war, as a matter of abstract calculations—the sanitized, unemotional approach to death he had learned long before from Blackstone and in the courtrooms. “I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision,” he wrote to General Don Carlos Buell in early 1862; “that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”17
His visit to Antietam was ostensibly a matter of these considerations, for he had come to believe, with good reason, that his commanding general, George McClellan, lacked insufficient drive to aggressively pursue the enemy. McClellan’s army held the field after the battle, yet he did nothing to impede the Confederate army’s retreat into Virginia. “Little Mac” was also becoming the focal point for much of the political opposition to Lincoln, to the degree that some wondered whether the general was purposely hindering an aggressive approach to the war by way of appeasing the peace wing of the Democratic Party, whose nomination for the presidency he wished to pursue in 1864. McClellan denied this, insisting he had no designs on the White House or any other political career. But the rumors persisted.18
More generally, and a bit surprisingly for a West Point graduate and experienced soldier, McClellan was shocked by the human cost of battle. He had seen combat before the war, having served as an engineer and artillery officer under General Winfield Scott during the war with Mexico and as an official U.S. Army observer of the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He was not an especially squeamish sort, and he well knew that war was a violent and deadly enterprise. McClellan was also quite capable of militant bravado. “Soldiers! I have heard there was danger here,” read an early war proclamation he had issued to his men. “I have come to place myself at your head and share it with you. I fear now but one thing—that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel.”19
The war produced its share of officers who reveled in this sort of bombast and were callous about the war’s human cost. But in McClellan’s case, the bombast masked an inner unease with battlefield death. Whatever his faults as a battlefield tactician—and they were many—and whatever his personality defects (a healthy ego and overweening arrogance), George McClellan was a fundamentally humane man. He had grown to love his men, perhaps too much, and the sight of their dead corpses horrified him. “I feel sure of success,” he wrote to his wife after touring the Fair Oaks battlefield in June 1862. “But I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded! Victory has no charms for me when purchased at such cost.” As the casualty lists from his Peninsula Campaign lengthened, he confessed to her, “Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me! My only consolation is that I have honestly done my best to save as many lives as possible.”20 While this was an expression of his private moral compass, it contained a political component as well. McClellan wanted to win the war—he was no traitor, as some would later claim—and yet he also wanted that victory to be as bloodless as possible, not only for his own men but for the Rebels as well.
Lincoln was not a bloodthirsty or callous man—quite the contrary. From his childhood days in Indiana, when he avoided hunting, he was never comfortable with violence. He had begun what would become a steady habit of commuting capital offenses by soldiers if at all possible, putting his thumb on the scales of war death. In September 1861, he penned a letter to General McClellan, asking that a Vermont private be spared the firing squad for falling asleep while on guard duty, after receiving a personal visit in the White House by a delegation of the man’s comrades. The story of the president saving the lowly private made the newspapers and quickly became part of the Lincoln legend. “Captain, your boy shall not be shot,” Lincoln is supposed to have remarked to the officer in charge of the Vermont delegation. The man’s life was spared, and variations of that tale and other similar incidents persisted throughout the war and after, reinforcing a growing popular image among many Americans of Lincoln as a fundamentally compassionate man who tried to spare common soldiers’ lives whenever possible.21
He took a less popular course regarding executions following a massive Native American uprising in August 1862, when Dakota Sioux warriors attacked white settlements in western and southern Minnesota, killing several hundred civilians and nearly eighty soldiers. In suppressing the uprising, army and civilian authorities took over five hundred Sioux prisoners, three hundred of whom were sentenced to death by highly dubious drumhead trials, some lasting only a few minutes.
Public opinion tended to side with the white Minnesotans, particularly when grisly stories—some true, many others not—made the rounds in the Northern press of atrocities visited by Dakota warriors on the settlers. Lincoln was under considerable pressure to allow the executions. “A great necessity is upon us to execute the great majority of those who have been condemned,” read one letter Lincoln received from Minnesota. “This is required as a satisfaction to the demands of public justice.”22
To his credit, Lincoln resisted such considerations. He ordered an immediate halt to the executions and personally reviewed the trial records of the condemned, and this at a time when he could easily claim to have had bigger fish to fry—emancipation was imminent, as was yet another ill-fated assault on Richmond by the Army of the Potomac. But he read every document and threw out most of the convictions, allowing only those to stand where proof was available that the defendant in question had acted with wanton cruelty. In the end, thirty-eight Sioux were hanged the day after Christmas 1862. If the president would not allow executions of individual Union soldiers in the name of enforcing military discipline, so too did he choose not to allow the deaths of Dakota Sioux in the name of political expediency. When told that his stance had cost Republicans support in the state, he retorted that he “could not afford to hang men for votes.”23
He was actually not so very different from his commanding general in his wish to mitigate the war’s deadlier aspects. But unlike McClellan, Lincoln came to believe that the war would require risking a revolution, of the sort that might create many more corpses, and the centerpiece of that revolution would be African American freedom. Sometime in the early summer of 1862, he made emancipation official Union wartime policy. In doing so, he understood that he was now linking the body count directly to the dark inner demons of race hatred and resentment his fellow white Americans harbored. He knew what sort of toxic combination race, slavery, and battle death might create. “See our present condition—the country engaged in war!—our white men cutting one another’s throats, none knowing how far it will extend,” he bluntly told a meeting of African American ministers at the White House in August 1862, “and then consider what we know to be the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other.” The president’s abolitionist critics were appalled that Lincoln seemed here to be blaming the war on African Americans and slaves, and while historians and Lincoln biographers have debated the meaning behind his words where slavery and American race relations were concerned, it seems clear that, emancipation policies aside, the war’s volatile mix of death, violence, and race worried Lincoln a great deal.24
When McClellan launched his long-awaited assault on Richmond via the peninsula area in eastern Virginia in the spring of 1862, Lincoln followed his progress—or lack thereof—with keen attention. By midsummer he resolved to visit the army, amid stories of impending disasters and alarming dispatches from McClellan that he was being overwhelmed and driven back from Richmond by Confederate forces. The president boarded the USS Ariel on July 7 with a retinue of army officials and landed at McClellan’s headquarters the following morning. After conferring briefly with McClellan aboard the Ariel soon after his arrival, he disembarked and made his way to the army’s lines, where he inspected the entrenchments guarding their frontlines. It was almost, if not quite, an actual battlefield. He did not come under enemy fire, nor did he see dead bodies, but he had inched closer to the war’s dark heart.
Two and half months later, he was returning to Antietam on a similar mission, a second visit to the Army of the Potomac, which reflected Lincoln’s ever-increasing frustration toward his commanding general. McClellan had won the battle, more or less, having blunted a Confederate invasion of the North and compelled Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s badly mauled force to fall back into Virginia. But despite Lincoln’s repeated urgings, McClellan made no attempt to follow. The president was again restless and worried, and his decision to pay a second visit to the army was impulsive. Gideon Welles called on the president at the White House and was surprised to learn of his absence, though he guessed the reason. “I have no doubt he is on a visit to McClellan,” Welles wrote in his diary. “None of his cabinet or not more than one, I think, can have been aware of this journey.”25
Lincoln boarded a train this time, leaving Washington, D.C., on October 1. He was accompanied by Ward Hill Lamon, an Illinois friend and fellow lawyer, who now acted as the president’s impromptu bodyguard and was the marshal for Washington. Also along for the trip was Oziah Hatch, another Illinois friend; the railroad’s president, John W. Garrett; and General John A. McClernand.26 They paused briefly at Harpers Ferry while Lincoln reviewed the troops stationed in the area, arriving at McClellan’s headquarters near the battlefield the following evening. The army put the president up for the night in a tent and serenaded him with a cavalry unit’s band.
He was spared the goriest aspects of Antietam. The battle had occurred several weeks before his arrival, and by the time of Lincoln’s visit, nearly all the corpses were underground or otherwise removed. Lincoln saw no fresh signs of the carnage. His time was instead occupied with reviewing live soldiers, members of General Ambrose Burnside’s corps, and conferring with McClellan at his headquarters three miles south of the battlefield.
Lincoln’s mood was dark. He wondered if the army’s terrible sacrifice on this ground had been for naught, because the commanding general lacked the vigor to pursue the enemy and prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. Standing on a hill overlooking the Army of the Potomac that morning after breakfast, the president turned to Hatch and asked him what he saw. Peering down at the sea of white tents beneath them, a perplexed Hatch said, “It is the Army of the Potomac.” “So it is called,” the president sarcastically replied, “but that is a mistake. It is only McClellan’s bodyguard.”27
McClellan suggested they review General Fitz-John Porter’s corps, several miles away. The party boarded ambulances, Lincoln sitting “with his long legs doubled up so that his knees almost struck his chin,” and set out for Porter’s campsite. His reception among the men was positive enough, for the most part—enlisted men cheered the president as he rode by—though some were unimpressed. “Republican simplicity is well enough, but I should have preferred to see the President of the United States traveling with a little more regard to appearances,” grumbled one soldier, who thought Lincoln “not only is the ugliest man I ever saw, but the most uncouth and gawky in his manners and appearance.”28
The atmosphere between Lincoln and McClellan was tense, and the president’s mood grew increasingly somber. As the men rumbled along in their ambulances between one campsite and the next, he asked Lamon to sing a song he remembered from their days riding the circuit together as lawyers in Illinois. Sensing the president’s sadness, Lamon sang “two or three little comic things” by way of lightening the mood.29
His efforts did not help; Lincoln was distracted and uncharacteristically jumpy. While the party stood on a knoll near a portion of the battlefield, McClellan began to describe for the president the order of battle, when the president suddenly interrupted him by saying, “Let us go and see where Hooker went in,” referring to Union general Joseph Hooker’s corps, which had been badly mauled during an assault on the morning of the battle. En route to the site of Hooker’s assault, Lincoln’s ambulance took a different path than the rest, at which point the president abruptly called off the tour entirely and returned to McClellan’s headquarters without notifying the general, who for several hours had no idea where the president was. Reviewing Porter’s corps the next day, the president rode by the men in silence, without “a word of approval, not even a smile of approbation.”30
It was not an auspicious visit, and on his return to Washington, Lincoln discovered himself in the middle of a controversy, what Lamon called a “tempest of defamation.” Rumors began making the rounds of various newspapers—especially the Democratic Party organs—that Lincoln had made light of the battlefield dead by asking his companions to sing songs as they strode among the soldiers’ graves. “It is a fact that President Lincoln, when he visited the battle field of Antietam, before the corpses had been buried, called upon an officer, who had been reported to him as a good songster, to ‘step out and sing me a song,’” reported a correspondent using the pseudonym “Manhattan.” The correspondent identified the president’s preference as a tune called “Jim along Josey,” an old folk tune, “and then, in an open plain, in hearing of the dying, and in sight of the sightless dead, the officer sung for the President of the United States.” The correspondent acidly concluded his account by observing “what a splendid but much abused ruler old Nero was. He fiddled while Rome was burning, but he never called out one of his officers to sing ‘Jim along Josey.’”31
Press commentary was scathing. “It is mortifying beyond measure that the chief magistrate of the American people should thus be represented before the eyes of the world,” declared one New Hampshire paper. A San Francisco commentator noted that the story “lends him into apparently trivial conduct, and to make jests on apparently very malapropos occasions.” The New York Sunday Times related a highly embellished account of the incident, in which Lincoln asked for the song while McClellan stood by with “trembling lip,” and Union officers who stood nearby quickly took their leave so they would not be present when the song desecrated the “sod that covered the bones on that battlefield, of their once gallant comrades.” Another version had McClellan pointing out a portion of the battlefield containing the graves of four thousand dead Union and Confederate soldiers, whereby Lincoln turned and requested the singing of a song called “Picayune Butler.”32
Memories of the affair lingered. In August 1864, nearly two years after Lincoln had visited Antietam, a supporter sent him a news clipping from “a vile Copper head sheet” published in New Jersey that had resurrected the controversy with an eye toward the impending presidential election by reprinting rumors that Lincoln wanted a “comic negro song” sung to him as he trod over the graves of the dead. In this version, Lincoln had asked Lamon to sing some funny tunes they both knew, dating back to their days together as lawyers on the Illinois Eighth Judicial Circuit.33
This new story made fresh rounds among the nation’s newspapers. “Abraham Lincoln called for a comic negro song when he was surrounded by corpses upon the battlefield of Antietam,” claimed the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A more detailed and imaginative version, printed in a Connecticut paper, had Lincoln’s party arriving in the ambulance at “Burnside’s Bridge,” a stone bridge that was the scene of heavy fighting. Here, “where the dead were piled highest,” went the tale, “Mr. Lincoln suddenly slapp[ed] Marshal Lamon on the knee, [and] exclaimed: ‘Come, Lamon, give us that song.’” A stunned McClellan is supposed to have replied “with a shudder,” “‘Not now, if you please, Marshal.’”34
The scandal picked up steam just as the nation headed into the presidential election’s final stretch, Lincoln’s opponents growing increasingly shrill—and creative. One account had Lincoln requesting the song to “drown the sighs of the living and the groans of the dying” as he walked among the battle’s casualties. Another had the “manly officers” of Lincoln’s entourage purposely lagging behind while Lamon sang his song, “leaving the heartless and ribald President to his own chosen companion and degradation.” Still another described one of the officers present upbraiding his commander in chief, saying, “This is not the place or the time, Mr. President, for such a song as that.” Accusing Lincoln of “a callous, cold blooded, ribald indifference to the sufferings of others,” an Ohio newspaper recalled the story and described the president as “call[ing] upon a parasite,” presumably Lamon, “for a ribald negro song . . . amid the dead and dying, the maimed and suffering soldiers who fell in that great fight.”35
The accusations stung. Worse, there was a striking lack of response by way of defending Lincoln in the various pro-administration newspapers, as if the editors, taking into account the president’s well-known penchant for jokes and songs, thought the Antietam tale was at least plausible. Some of the president’s supporters were worried. “Is there any good authority for the World’s story of Mr. Lincoln asking for a comic song on the battlefield of Antietam?” asked an anonymous writer in the New York Tribune?36
For Lincoln’s enemies, the contrast with the prim and proper military man George McClellan, who was now Lincoln’s opponent in the 1864 presidential election, was telling, and the repeated characterization of the tune as “Negro” injected yet another racial overtone in a campaign that was already deeply infused with racist accusations leveled against the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. “Abraham Lincoln called for a vulgar negro song at Antietam,” declared one especially virulent anti-Lincoln Philadelphia newspaper on Election Day, and “Geo. B. McClellan rebuked him for his levity on the field of battle. Freemen! To-day give your votes to the man who, in the hour of sadness, deeply sympathizes with the soldier, instead of filling his ears with a comic melody!”37
One critic made of the incident a nasty poem, titled “Lincoln at Antietam.” The poem pulled together in one place all the imagery associated with the suffering and dying on a Civil War battlefield and contrasted it with Lincoln’s supposed indifference and inappropriate behavior:
Dead upon dead were huddled thick,
The very air with death was sick;
The wounded waited, with ebbing life,
Their turn for the surgeon’s tired knife.
But carelessly rode Old Abe along,
And called in that scene for a negro song.
Youth and manhood lay weltering there,
With the sweat of agony matting the hair;
And the bravest of the brave heard with awe
The crunching sound of the busy saw.
But carelessly rode Old Abe along,
And called in such a scene for a negro song.
Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives,
Knit by love to those precious lives,
How must your hearts for news athirst,
Have throbbed and sunk, and bled, or burst,
While carelessly Old Abe rode along,
And called ’mid those graves for a negro song.38
Aspersions on his character, wild rumors based on half-truths and outright lies, were nothing new for the president, who had suffered the slings and arrows of his political enemies since the earliest days of his election. He endured them largely in silence, rarely contemplating a direct response, and at first he believed silence was the best response to the “Antietam song-singing.” “There has already been too much said about this falsehood,” he told Lamon, who urged him to make a public refutation. “Let the thing alone.” But the characterizations of him as “The Joker of Antietam” (as one paper put it) were impinging on something quite sensitive: the battlefield dead and his relationship with all those fallen soldiers.39
This eventually led him to contemplate the extraordinary measure of having Lamon publicly issue a denial. Lincoln himself wrote out the document—another unusual act. In it, Lamon admitted that Lincoln had asked him to sing a “little sad song” and that he had done so, but they were nowhere near any gravesite or burial ground, and the song was not considered inappropriate to the occasion. “Neither Gen. McClellan or any one else made any objection to the singing,” went the statement; “the place was not on the battle field, the time was sixteen days after the battle, no dead body was seen during the whole time the president was absent from Washington, nor even a grave that had not been rained on since it was made.”40
In the end, Lincoln believed that silence was his best response. “I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know is right,” he told Lamon. He chose not to have Lamon issue the denial. On the other hand, he did tell his friend to “keep the paper, and we will see about it.”41
But while he did not publicly refute the Antietam rumors, he did begin to pay closer attention to the need for articulating a public—and necessarily political—defense of battlefield death. It was not enough that he (and for that matter, Mary) knew and observed the proper rituals of mourning when death struck their private lives, as Willie’s father and Edward Baker and Elmer Ellsworth’s friend. Lincoln knew how to properly conduct a funeral, what to wear and what to say, and how to put on a brave public face in the wake of private loss.
But this all was still essentially prewar death, of a kind with Eddy’s death so long ago: the same basic rituals, the same gestures, albeit on a grander scale. Not so with battlefield death. The dead of Antietam and other Civil War battles were radically and strangely new to Lincoln, as with every other American. They were all in effect renegotiating a new relationship with death in the war’s awful wake. Lincoln would find the need to do so as well.