CHAPTER 9

Bloody Antietam

THE yellow corn stood ripe in the fields of Maryland. Lee and Jackson mentioned it. That corn would help feed their armies. They marched gray and butternut battalions across the Potomac, ragged and footsore men who could fight, as the world knew. Lee gave out a proclamation to the people of Maryland, a Slave State, her folk of Southern traditions and leanings. His men had come to “aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke.”

And where would he hit first? Would it be Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Baltimore? Thus ran the questions that worried the North and harried those cities.

Meantime McClellan with an army marched toward Lee. He was feeling better. His friend, Lincoln, against a majority of the Cabinet, had again put him at the head of a great army in the field.

On top of the turmoil set going by Lee’s invasion of the North came more excitement because of news from the West. Telegrams tumbled into the White House telling of Bragg’s Confederate army slipping past Buell’s army, which had been set to watch him. Bragg was marching north toward Cincinnati and Louisville; those cities were anxious. Also Kirby Smith’s men in gray had marched into Kentucky, chased the State legislature out of Frankfort, and captured Lexington. “Where is General Bragg?” Lincoln queried in telegrams to several generals in the field.

Into Frederick City, Maryland, marched Stonewall Jackson’s men, followed later by Union troops. A woman, Barbara Frietchie, nearly a hundred years old and remembering 1776, leaned from a window and waved the Stars and Stripes at the Union troops to show her loyalty. And a story spread that she had unfurled the Union banner with grand words of defiance to Jackson’s troops. Whittier wrote a poem about her that was put in the schoolbooks and committed to memory by millions of children enacting her as saying, “Shoot if you must this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” which she had not said at all. But it was good Union propaganda. And a poet of the Southern cause could have given fame to another old woman in Frederick City, whose love ran to the other flag. She stood on her doorstep as the Southern boys marched past, tears in her eyes and hands raised—“The Lord bless your dirty ragged souls!”

The first big action of Lee’s army in Maryland made the Northern gloom heavier. For Stonewall Jackson smashed at the Union garrison in Harper’s Ferry, trapped them, and took 11,000 prisoners. Then four days later, on September 17, came Antietam, to be remembered for long as a blood-soaked word.

McClellan’s 90,000 troops met Lee’s army, about half that of McClellan in troop numbers, at Antietam Creek. Around a cornfield and a little white Dunker church, around a stone bridge, and in a pasture lane worn by cowpaths surged a human tornado. Fighting Joe Hooker rode in the worst of the storm, and said of it, “Every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before.” Hooker fell from his saddle with a bleeding foot. An old man with his white hair in the wind, Major General J. K. F. Mansfield, fell from his saddle, a corpse. Four other Union generals fell off their horses with wounds. General Sedgwick was three times wounded, in shoulder, leg, and wrist. Colonel B. B. Gayle of Alabama was surrounded, drew his revolver, called to his men, “We are flanked, boys, but let’s die in our tracks,” and fell riddled with bullets. Longstreet, heading one of Lee’s corps, took two bullets in his right leg, one in his left arm; another ripped his shoulder, and he sent Private Vickers of Alabama to tell Lee that he was still on the field—but Vickers tumbled with lead through the head, and the next bullet received by Longstreet was in the face and he was carried away to live on. “Don’t let your horses tread on me,” a wounded man called from a huddle of corpses where officers were picking their way through.

 

Keystone Battery on drill.

 

Abraham Lincoln, President, U.S.A., visits the Antietam camp of General George Brinton McClellan, Commander of the Army of the Potomac. Detail from photograph in Gardner Album No. I, from the collection of Oliver R. Barrett.

 

Harper’s Ferry in May, 1861

 

View of Antietam from the grove where McClellan watched the battle. Sketch by Benson J. Lossing.

 

Into Shepherdstown, Virginia (later West Virginia), on that hot and dusty autumn day the wounded poured, and Mary B. Mitchell, the volunteer nurse, said, “They filled every building and overflowed into the country around, into farm-houses, barns, corn-cribs, cabins; six churches were all full, the Odd Fellows’ Hall, the Freemasons’, the Town Council room, the school-houses.” She saw men with cloths about their heads, about their feet, men with arms in slings, men without arms, with one leg, with bandaged sides and backs; men in ambulances, wagons, carts, wheelbarrows, men on stretchers or leaning on comrades, men crawling with inflamed wounds, thirsty, bleeding, weak.

At the center of the red harvest stood the little white Dunker church, where the teaching on Sundays was that war is sin and no man who enlists for war can be a Dunker. There the dead lay in blue and gray. And on the breast of one in blue a pocket Bible was open at the Psalm reading “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” On the flyleaf a mother had written, “We hope and pray that you may be permitted by a kind Providence, after the war is over, to return.”

In the fields lay men by thousands. Flat corn leaves fallen over some of the bodies were spattered and blotched with blood drying and turning rusty. On a golden autumn Sabbath morning three-mile lines of men had faced each other with guns. And when the shooting was over the losses were put at 12,000 on each side.

Lee crossed the Potomac, back into the South again. McClellan did not follow. Lincoln had telegraphed him: “God bless you, and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if possible.” But McClellan had again won a victory and did not know it. He still believed the enemy outnumbered him.

McClellan’s chances of wiping out Lee’s army were estimated by Longstreet: “We were so badly crushed that at the close of the day ten thousand fresh troops could have come in and taken Lee’s army and everything it had. But McClellan did not know it.” He had two soldiers to the enemy’s one, completely superior cannon, rifles, supplies. He had failed when it lay in his hands to “destroy the rebel army if possible,” as Lincoln urged. He had 93,000 men answering roll call as Lee was fading down the Shenandoah Valley with less than 40,000. He might have brought the war shortly to a close. But his fate lay otherwise.

McClellan felt himself called on to be a statesman and political theorist while at the same time a military strategist and field commander. At Harrison’s Landing he had handed Lincoln a long letter he had written. Lincoln read it with McClellan looking on, told McClellan he was much obliged, and put the letter in his pocket. Several hours, more likely days, it had taken McClellan to write for the President his ideas on how the country should be run, instructions to his Commander in Chief that the war should be “conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization,” as though perhaps Lincoln hadn’t thought about that. Private property should be respected; “radical views, especially upon slavery,” would melt away the armies. McClellan believed it healthy advice, for he wrote his wife: “I have written a strong, frank letter to the President. . . . If he acts upon it the country will be saved.”

McClellan’s political sincerity, and the frankness he mentioned with pride to his wife, were incomplete, else he would have informed Lincoln that Fernando Wood, the Mayor of New York who in ’61 tried to get his city to secede from the Union and set up as a Free City, had called on him in camp to talk politics. With a furious and relentless campaign raging, time pressing and time short, he gave hours of conference to one of the most insidious and corrupt of politicians who, with an associate Democrat, told him he ought to be the party’s next candidate for President. McClellan wrote his wife that the President had neglected to answer his letter. Lincoln, when asked what he would do about the letter, was reminded of the man who mounted into the saddle of a horse that got to acting up and the man said, “Well, if you’re going to get on I’m going to get off!”

A folk tale epitomized much. Lincoln had scolded McClellan, the drollery ran, for not sending more complete and detailed reports of his army’s progress. So McClellan sent a telegram to Lincoln one day: “Have captured two cows. What disposition should I make of them?” Lincoln: “Milk ’em, George.”

Once in a conference Lincoln remarked he would “like to borrow” the Army of the Potomac from McClellan if it could be made to do something. Once he had called at McClellan’s house in Washington; finding the General away, Lincoln waited. The General came home, went to bed, ignored the President, who walked away telling John Hay it was no time to stand on dignity, and he would willingly hold General McClellan’s horse if that would bring victories. “McClellan is a great engineer, but he has a special talent for a stationary engine,” was an early comment. Later Lincoln told the elder Frank Blair, “He has got the slows,” and wearily replied to a demand of McClellan for more shoes, mules, horses: “I have just read your despatch about sore-tongued and fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”

While McClellan “rested” his troops a White House visitor casually asked Lincoln what number of men he supposed the “rebels” had in the field. And as Leslie’s Weekly published the President’s reply, he said seriously, “1,200,000 according to the best authority.” The visitor turned pale and cried, “My God!” “Yes, sir,” went on the President, “1,200,000—no doubt of it. You see, all our generals, when they get whipped, say the enemy outnumbers them from three to five to one, and I must believe them. We have 400,000 men in the field, and three rimes four makes twelve. Don’t you see it?”

Stanton, Chase, Greeley, and other unrelenting enemies of McClellan believed they solved him and saw through him as though he were transparent. Which he was not. McClellan lived much of the time in a peculiar world of his own making. He would almost get ready to hurl his army into a great campaign, then hesitate, think of more to be done, make excuses, get sore at his own excuses, and finally find himself in mental operations and defensive vocabularies difficult to analyze. Scores of letters he wrote to his wife indicated how little he realized that any political business he mixed in should be restricted to the immediate needs of the Army of the Potomac and not include broad national policies. Only by sticking strictly to military affairs could he have had a chance to outplay the Washington authorities and the powerful antislavery factions who sought to pull him down.

No case was ever made out that McClellan was not brave and able. Only politicians, personal enemies, loose talkers, called him coward or sloven. At Malvern Hill and Antietam he performed superbly—and then failed to clinch and use what he had won. If he had been the ambitious plotter that Stanton, Chase, and others feared, he would have marched his army to Washington and seized the Government there, as he said many urged him to do. His defect was that while he could not have instigated such treason himself, he did allow approaches to such treason to be talked freely in his staff and army without rebuke or repression from him. His political dabbling with Fernando Wood of New York over the future Presidency of the United States was not by his device; he did not ask Wood to come down to the Peninsula the first time, nor to Maryland for the second visit.

Yet it was also true that the slippery, conniving Wood did not see McClellan as a presidential figure until McClellan set himself up as a spokesman of governmental policy, virtually used his position as head of a great army to carry on an advocacy of measures easily construed as proslavery. When this drew the slimy Wood to his camp, he did not kick Wood out. He welcomed Wood, took up with Wood’s proposal he should be made President and held to it till his friend General “Baldy” (William Farrar) Smith showed him that it could look like a betrayal of trust. A second time he welcomed Wood to his headquarters, and this time took up with Wood’s plan, which looked so rotten that Baldy Smith broke with him.

His friend William H. Aspinwall, the New York steamship-railway magnate and financier who came to his camp, gave McClellan the keen advice to go along with Lincoln’s policy as to the Negro, say nothing, and be a soldier. From the way he wrote his wife of what Aspinwall told him, it would almost seem as though this was the first time McClellan seriously considered the gift of silence on politics for a general heading an army given to him by a government wrestling with delicately shaded political questions. He did not know that he had by his political trafficking, and by his unceasing gabble of “imbeciles” and “geese” at Washington, hampered unity of his staff, lowered the fighting quality of his army, and so muddled the army objectives that the President might have to take action—even if it led straight into worse muddles.

 

Two plans the President struggled with incessantly, like an engineer wrestling to put bridges over a swollen river during a flood rush. One of these was to make practical the colonization of Negroes to be freed. The other was gradual compensated abolishment of slavery.

Thus far all laws passed by Congress fully protected the ownership of slaves held by men loyal to the Union, or men not partaking in the rebellion. Not many were there of such Unionist slaveowners. All other owners of slaves were under the threat of confiscation of their property if and when the Union armies reached their plantations.

Months earlier, as far back as December, 1861, Lincoln spoke to Senator Sumner about sending a message on emancipation to Congress. But the armies were slow. The North got no grip on the South to warrant action. The President waited.

The idea of emancipation as a war measure, a military necessity, began developing. Even the Copperhead Democrats would have added difficulty arguing against emancipation if it could be shown as necessary to win the war.

At a Cabinet meeting on September 22, 1862, there was a final discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation before its going out for the round world to read and think about. Lincoln spoke with a solemn deliberation. They had considered such a proclamation earlier, and he reminded them of that. “I have thought all along that the time for acting on it might probably come. I think the time has come now.”

Lincoln read the proclamation, commenting as he went along, as though he had considered it in all its lights. It began with saying the war would go on for the Union, that the efforts would go on for buying and setting free the slaves of the Border States, and the colonizing of them; that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in States or parts of States in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” and the Federal Government would “recognize the freedom of such persons.” It was a preliminary proclamation, to be followed by a final one on next New Year’s Day.

Two days later, September 24, 1862, on a Monday morning, this preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was published, for the country and the world to read. The President held that to have issued it six months earlier would have been too soon. What he called “public sentiment” would not have stood for it.

The President’s act had been like a chemist tossing a tiny pinch of some powerful ingredient into a seething and shaking caldron. Colors and currents shifted and deepened. New channels were cutting their way far under the surface. The turmoil and the trembling became unreadable by any man. But below the fresh confusion was heaving some deep and irrevocable change.

A wave of fury swept the South. Lincoln was breaking the laws of civilized warfare, outraging private-property rights, inviting Negroes to kill, burn, and rape, said statesmen, orators, newspapers. Members of the Confederate Congress talked of running up the black flag, killing all prisoners and those wounded in battle.

Lincoln had warned nearly a year ago that the contest might develop into “remorseless, revolutionary warfare.” The awful responsibility of carrying on and finishing a war of conquest lay ahead.

 

Towering over all other immediate issues, just after the Emancipation Proclamation was given out, stood the sphinx of McClellan’s army—how to get it moving, how to use it as a weapon and a hammer, how to keep it from going into winter quarters without fighting, as in the winter before.

A telegram went to McClellan saying: “The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy, or drive him south. Your army must move now, while the roads are good.” McClellan was to advise Washington what his line of action would be, the time he intended to cross the river, and at what point fresh troops were to be sent to his army.

During early October, while McClellan asked shoes, horses, mules, and new bridges for his army, the telegrams poured into Washington from the Western armies winning victories on shoes, horses, and mules worse than McClellan had. For days the cities of Louisville and Cincinnati telegraphed Lincoln for help, for troops to save them from Bragg’s army. But Bragg found it hard going in Kentucky, and he turned southward with his army. At Perryville, Bragg collided with the Union army under Buell. The slopes were strewn with thousands of dead and wounded as Bragg moved further south.

In the Deep South, down in Mississippi, a Confederate army tried to take Corinth, a railroad and supply point. They were beaten off, losing 7,000 in dead and wounded as against 2,000 Union losses. Lincoln telegraphed Grant, “I congratulate you and all concerned.”

Three weeks had gone by since Antietam. Yet McClellan stayed north of the Potomac with 100,000 men while Lee not far off in Virginia was recruiting his army from conscripts called up by the Richmond Government.

Lincoln had called General Henry W. Halleck from the West to serve as General in Chief of all land forces. He was forty-seven years old, a New York boy, a West Pointer, an engineer with artillery in the Mexican War. He not only understood army regulations but could write them. Twelve lectures at Harvard on the science of war were for Halleck merely introductory. He wrote a book justifying war, telling how it should be carried on. He helped occupy California and organize it as a Territory, was lieutenant governor, and wrote most of the State constitution. Resigning in 1854, he went into law; when the war opened in ’61 he was head of the leading law firm of San Francisco and major general of the State militia. On the word of General Scott that Halleck had extraordinary military talent Lincoln appointed him a major general. He took over the Department of Missouri when Fremont stepped out. In St. Louis those who liked him nicknamed him “Old Brains.” His department got results, whether it was his work or his management or the rising genius of Grant and Sherman.

After Shiloh he had taken the field, replacing Grant, heading 100,000 men against the Confederate 50,000 at Corinth. Outnumbering the enemy two to one, Halleck had advanced with pick and shovel, entrenching, bridge-building, road-making. After six weeks he had arrived at Corinth when the enemy had slipped out and was fifty miles away again. He had reported this to Washington as a victory. Yet he had proved an efficient administrator at St. Louis, and Nicolay and Hay wrote of him: “He was a thinker and not a worker; his proper place was in the military study and not in the camp. No other soldier in the field equalled him in the technical and theoretical acquirements of his profession.” Welles in his diary noted Halleck as given to overpretense and too often “scratching his elbows.”

McClellan now complained again about lacking horses and Lincoln telegraphed: “To be told, after more than five weeks’ total inaction of the army, and during which . . . we have sent to the army every fresh horse we possibly could, amounting in the whole to 7918, that the cavalry horses were too much fatigued to move, presents a very cheerless, almost hopeless prospect for the future.”

The autumn weather was perfect for marching an army. McClellan telegraphed Lincoln asking whether he should march on the enemy at once or “wait the reception of new horses.” General in Chief Halleck now replied, “The President does not expect impossibilities, but he is very anxious that all this good weather should not be wasted in inactivity.” McClellan came back with a long letter asking instructions as to many details, getting a reply that “the Government has intrusted you with defeating and driving back the rebel army on your front.” He could use his own discretion as to details. And as McClellan had mentioned in his long letter that perhaps Bragg was marching his Confederate army from Tennessee eastward, General Halleck ended his telegram, “You are within twenty miles of Lee, while Bragg is distant about four hundred miles.”

McClellan now slowly moved his army across the Potomac and put it about where Pope’s army had lain before Second Bull Run. It was November. Lincoln told one of his secretaries that he had a test by which he would make a final judgment of McClellan. If that commander should permit Lee to cross the Blue Ridge and place himself between Richmond and the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln would remove McClellan from command. Now when Lee’s army reached Culpeper Court House the test of McClellan was over. Lincoln prepared a removal order.

Two men traveled in a driving snowstorm near midnight of November 7 to find the tent of General McClellan near Rectortown. They stepped in and shook off the snow from their big overcoats. One of the men was Adjutant General C. P. Buckingham of the War Department. The other was Major General Ambrose Everett Burnside. Buckingham handed McClellan a message relieving him of command of the Army of the Potomac and ordering him to turn it over to Burnside.