America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Lee was never flamboyant or ostentatious, and rarely eloquent. His strength as a leader was his being. Sam Watkins recalled Lee’s visit to his camp early in the war, likening the general to “some good boy’s grandpa.” Lee had “a calm and collected air about him, his voice was kind and tender, and his eye was as gentle as a dove’s.” Without so much as a gesture or a word, he possessed a “soothing magnetism” that “drew every one to him and made them love, respect, and honor him.” Watkins confessed, “I fell in love with the old gentleman and felt like going home with him.”18

  Lee did not distinguish himself in his early campaigns in western Virginia and along the South Atlantic coast, though, like most generals, he blamed some of his difficulties on the lack of adequate troop strength. He immediately saw the Confederacy’s great tactical problem: the number of troops necessary to defend Richmond from every direction would soon reduce the South to the perimeter around the capital. The remainder of the troops would be too widely dispersed to withstand Union assaults elsewhere. While Lee understood the basic defensive posture of the Confederacy, he counseled a more aggressive strategy that could relieve the mass of troops in Virginia for important service elsewhere: “We must decide between the positive loss of inactivity and the risk of action.”19

  Lee found a ready disciple in Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson who had launched a merry escapade in the Valley of Virginia—seventeen thousand Confederate troops toying with three federal armies totaling sixty-four thousand men. Jackson’s mission in the spring of 1862: keep the federal forces occupied and prevent them from reinforcing McClellan’s large Union army bearing down on Richmond to the east. The sickly, nearsighted, partially deaf math professor from the Virginia Military Institute found his calling in combat. He delighted in playing tag with assorted Union forces that could never quite catch up to him. Jackson carried on an incessant dialogue with God, not unusual among nineteenth-century evangelicals, except that God always answered back. Before a battle, Jackson paced his tent engaging his Mentor. He had lost nearly everyone he had loved in his life; God was, literally, all he had left. The depth of his penetrating pale blue eyes seemed to envelop at once an overwhelming sadness and a steadfast purpose. In appearance and background, he was the opposite of Lee. In his generalship, he was equally brilliant.

  Believing he acted as God’s sword, Jackson pressed his troops to uncommon exertions on long, fast marches and lightning strikes against the enemy, impervious to weather, terrain, or exhaustion. Between May 8 and June 9, Jackson and his foot cavalry raced four hundred miles up and down the Valley of Virginia, using the Massanutten mountain range as a shield and darting through the gaps to surprise Union forces, capturing huge supplies of arms and ammunition and enemy soldiers equal to the size of his army. Moving northward through the valley, Jackson gave the impression that Washington, D.C., was his ultimate goal. This false reading pinned down sixty thousand federal troops in the valley and prevented Lincoln from reinforcing the anxious McClellan. Jackson’s quick strikes and withdrawals exhausted his troops, but they respected him. No long waits and brief skirmishes with Jackson; no futile charges in front of withering fire. Just hurtle forward, fall back, and then press on again. He exulted to fellow officers after a victory, “He who does not see the hand of God in this is blind, sir, blind!”20

  Jackson, with God’s help, drove the Federals crazy, inflicting seven thousand casualties while suffering less than half that number. “God has been our shield, and to His name be all the glory,” he declared, as he prepared to depart from the valley and bring his “army of the living God” to Richmond. There he would join with Lee, to put an end to McClellan’s campaign.21

  Lee’s initial move was to send his dashing cavalry commander, twenty-nine-year-old James Ewell Brown (J. E. B.) Stuart, and his twelve hundred Confederate cavalrymen on a ride around McClellan’s army. Stuart disrupted communications and supplies, took prisoners, and eluded inept attempts by Union cavalry to chase them down. He lost all of one man in the escapade. The bold raid also gave Lee the intelligence that the Union’s right flank was “in the air,” that is, not anchored by a strong feature of terrain such as a hill or river, nor curled back in the form of a defensive perimeter. Lee ordered Jackson back from the valley while he engaged McClellan in a minor contest on June 25, beginning what became known as the Seven Days’ Battles. With Jackson in place on the twenty-sixth, Lee launched an uncoordinated and largely ineffectual attack. Jackson was uncharacteristically lethargic, and Lee exercised little command over his troop movements. Whatever McClellan’s personal shortcomings, his expert training was evident in the stiff resistance his men put up throughout the Seven Days. Lee mounted another assault on the twenty-seventh that broke one Union line, but again the lack of coordination produced little strategic advantage.

  McClellan had seen enough. Already spooked by Stuart’s dramatic ride and Lee’s persistent if mostly ineffectual attacks, he concluded that he faced a larger and more formidable force than even his initial inflated estimates assumed. He began to withdraw down the peninsula, what one Rebel soldier called “the great skedaddle.” McClellan fired off an angry telegram to President Lincoln: “I have lost this battle because my force was too small.”22

  Lee continued to harass McClellan, who successfully parried these attacks in a series of minor encounters over the next three days. Growing impatient, Lee decided on an all-out assault to destroy McClellan’s army on July 1. Union forces, however, occupied a strong defensive position on Malvern Hill and repulsed the attack, allowing McClellan to continue his withdrawal in relative peace.

  So many things had gone wrong for Lee—poor intelligence, faulty maps, uncoordinated movements, and sluggish generals—that he viewed the Seven Days as a singularly frustrating episode. “Under ordinary circumstances,” he told President Davis, “the Federal army should have been destroyed.” The threat to Richmond was over, though at a frightful toll. Twenty thousand Confederates lay dead or wounded, nearly one fourth of Lee’s army, sixteen thousand on the Union side. The Shiloh war had come east. Northern journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, horrified at the sight of battlefield dead, pronounced it a “republic of suffering.” The battles were among the earliest demonstrations of the effectiveness of rifled muskets in the hands of well-trained defenders. Lee’s aggressive tactics had saved Richmond, but many more such successes would leave him without an army. Still, McClellan’s retreat gave southerners their first opportunity to exhale in many months, especially after the bad news from the West. The boost to morale was much needed. Lee proposed to push the advantage.23

  The news of McClellan’s retreat sorely tested President Lincoln’s patience. He took the unusual step of traveling to the Virginia coast to meet with his general to find out what had happened and ponder the next step in an increasingly frustrating war. McClellan was unapologetic, blaming the weather, the lack of sufficient troops (though at no time did he engage his entire force), and even Lincoln’s war aims. The president brushed aside these excuses, vowing to continue the contest “until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.” He replaced McClellan with John Pope, combined McClellan’s Army of the Potomac with Pope’s Army of Virginia, and ordered a new offensive against Richmond.24

  Pope had enjoyed some success in the West and, unlike McClellan, was a Republican. Some Republicans attributed McClellan’s reluctance to fight to his Democratic politics. His unhappiness with Lincoln was well known. Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs was shocked to overhear several of McClellan’s officers threaten “a march on Washington to clear out those fellows.” Whether high-ranking officers ever discussed a coup, except in idle talk, is unknown, but it is clear that these were dangerous days for the administration, with increasingly hostile northern public opinion and a rank-and-file soldiery loyal to a dismissed commander.25

  McClellan maintained popularity among his men. And why not? Retreating down the peninsula he made a
point of being the last federal soldier to abandon camp or cross a bridge, though he also steered well clear of the fighting. He lived his creed, citing as his first responsibility “the lives of my men.” As McClellan pictured the unfolding Peninsula Campaign in his mind’s eye, it would be a relatively bloodless affair, capped by a Union victory: “I do not expect to lose many men, but to do the work mainly with artillery, and so avoid much loss of life.” Nor did he countenance vandalism of Rebel property. The pity was that his war was over, if it ever existed. A new war had exploded in early 1862, and he could not adjust.26

  McClellan left for Washington in early August with a token force. Many of his troops moved from the peninsula to Pope’s command in northern Virginia. Sensing that the Union’s Army of Virginia was in a state of flux and had a new commander few officers and fewer enlisted men liked, Lee was determined to destroy the Union army. It was a result that had evaded him during the Seven Days’ Battles. Moving swiftly before McClellan’s men could reinforce Pope, and dividing his army—a risk he took because he believed Pope would not take advantage—he sent Stonewall Jackson forward on a wide flanking movement around Pope to seize his supplies at a familiar place, Manassas Junction, on August 27. Pope took the bait and engaged Jackson while James B. Longstreet launched a smashing attack against the bewildered Union forces. Pope’s greatest maneuver of the day was an effective retreat across Bull Run to Washington. As Robert Frost put it eloquently many years later, Lee’s two great divisions under Jackson and Longstreet “were like pistols in his two hands, so perfectly could he handle them.”27

  The contest was almost a replay of the First Battle of Bull Run, though befitting the new ferocity of the war the casualties were greater. The 5th New York suffered three hundred deaths in ten minutes. For all his success, Lee’s attack proved costly again, as he lost 19 percent of his force compared with 13 percent for the Federals, even though Union casualties were greater in absolute terms. Despite the casualties, the growing belief on both sides in the invincibility of Lee and the incompetence of Union officers and politicians was bolstered. Toward the end of June, Union forces had glimpsed the spires of Richmond. By the end of August, Rebel troops menaced Washington. Two days after the second Union debacle at Bull Run, President Lincoln relieved Pope of his command and reinstalled McClellan as commander of the consolidated Army of the Potomac.

  The war in the East changed the men as much as the western war had altered the lives of its combatants. The Peninsula Campaign and Second Bull Run transformed them from wide-eyed recruits to hardened veterans. “I have changed much in my feelings,” Marion Hill Fitzpatrick wrote a day after Second Bull Run. “The bombs and balls excite me but little and a battlefield strewed with dead and wounded is an every day consequence.”28

  The Peninsula debacle followed by the Bull Run disaster plunged President Lincoln into despair. The turn in the war after such a promising start to the new year altered his spiritual perspective on the conflict. The uncertainty of God’s purpose gnawed at Lincoln. He waited for a sign.

  The summer successes encouraged Robert E. Lee to gamble on continued federal incompetence. On September 4, 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac into western Maryland, a mere thirty-five miles from Washington. Lee had saved Richmond and sent Pope’s army packing, but he had not destroyed the enemy’s will or capability to fight. He knew his was a risky maneuver, but he felt he had no choice. With a force inferior in numbers and materiel, he must take advantage of every physical and psychological situation that favored his troops. Now was such a moment. Take the war to the enemy’s territory. His plan was to move into Pennsylvania, capture the state capital at Harrisburg, sever railroad connections with the Northwest, and put himself in a position to threaten Philadelphia and Washington. At the least, it would take the pressure off Richmond. At most, he could destroy the North’s resolve and end the war.

  In a letter to President Davis just before he crossed into Maryland, Lee admitted that his army, now reduced to fifty thousand able-bodied men, was “not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory. It lacks much of the material of war, is feeble in transportation … and the men are poorly provided with clothes, and in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes. Still we cannot afford to be idle, [we] must endeavor to harass, if we cannot destroy them.” He would carry still fewer troops into battle, as some could no longer walk on the gravel roads barefoot, and others sickened on a diet of green corn and green apples as the army marched beyond its supply lines. McClellan, of course, believed Lee had at least a hundred thousand men marching into Maryland.29

  Lee’s troops hoped for a friendly reception in Maryland. They struck up a popular song:

  I hear the distant thunder hum

  The Old Lines’ bugle, fife and drum;

  She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—

  Hazza—she breathes, she burns, she’ll come!

  Maryland! My Maryland!

  The farmers and townspeople ignored the footsore soldiers. There would be no popular uprising. No flowers strewn across the army’s path; just stones and dust.

  McClellan moved at his usual snail’s pace to intercept Lee’s army. On September 13, two Union soldiers found a piece of paper wrapped around three cigars near Frederick, Maryland. The paper contained Lee’s campaign orders, fallen from the pocket of a careless Rebel officer. The orders confirmed intelligence McClellan had already received about the division of Lee’s army and where the forces were located. The orders also indicated that Union forces far outnumbered Lee’s. McClellan clutched the document and cried, “If I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.” Despite the huge advantage, McClellan still took his time marching westward, allowing Stonewall Jackson’s troops to come up and join Lee’s army for a combined force of forty thousand men against McClellan’s seventy-five thousand. The delay also allowed Lee to learn of the intelligence leak and plan accordingly. Had McClellan moved swiftly and attacked, he would have enjoyed a four-to-one advantage in troop strength. Lee decided to hold defensive positions along a creek called Antietam. With the Potomac behind him, Lee’s only options were to fight or retreat. Despite inferior numbers, he had come too far to go home. Besides, Lee had great confidence his men could defeat McClellan. Lincoln hoped otherwise. He wired his general, “Destroy the rebel army, if possible.”30

  Antietam Creek runs through the Catoctin Valley “like a poem in blue and gold,” covered with patches of woods, sunlit fields, ripe orchards, and mountains gently rolling on the near horizon. The trees were just beginning to show their autumn colors. The valley had not one level spot. The depressions between the hills offered cover for infantry against artillery. Though most of these depressions were dry, some had creeks meandering through. Such was Antietam Creek, whose crooked course was typical. The fields were fat with corn and deep-green clover.31

  Although McClellan waited almost two days to initiate the battle, he still had a considerable edge in troop strength. Many Rebel soldiers were hobbled with feet bleeding from the rocky Maryland roads, and they struggled to join the main force. McClellan had more than twice as many soldiers ready for combat. Had his planned three attacks on the left, center, and right of the Confederate line occurred together, McClellan would have prevailed. Lack of coordination and poor communication, which plagued both armies at crucial moments throughout the war, thwarted those plans.

  At dawn on Wednesday, September 17, Union General Joe Hooker attacked Jackson’s corps on the Confederate left, advancing in a long line through David Miller’s cornfield, bayonets flashing just above the stalks, and into the woods, where they found the enemy. Hooker’s men pushed the Confederates back to the German Baptist Church (now known as the Dunkard Church) and a sunken road (now called, appropriately, Bloody Lane). The Union advance continued in severe combat until Hooker was wounded. The Rebels, under Texan John Bell Hood, pushed the Federals back over the same ground so dearly gained during the morning. By noon, the battle ended w
ith thirteen thousand men lying dead or wounded and the two armies at virtually the same place where they began the day. After the fighting, a fellow officer asked Hood where his division was. The Texan responded, “Dead on the field.” Sixty percent of his soldiers were gone.32

  Union General Ambrose E. Burnside struck the Confederate right at midday and pushed the Rebels back across the Stone Bridge (today known as Burnside Bridge) over Antietam Creek and down toward the Potomac. How Burnside’s men took this bridge astonishes because a steep bank rises from the creek, a perfect elevation from which to guard the bridge. Yet Burnside’s men waded through the Rebel fusillade and pushed the Confederates back. He could not hold it. Reinforcements never came.

  The Confederates were more fortunate. A. P. Hill’s division, the last of Stonewall Jackson’s corps to arrive, appeared just in time, setting off jubilation among the Rebels and confusion in federal ranks, as they wore captured blue uniforms. Hill waved his sword aloft to rally his men, who retook the bridge and saved the day and the war for the Confederacy. Years later, as Lee lay on his deathbed, his last words were “Tell Hill he must come up,” recalling when the fate of his army and of his country hung in the balance.33

  The day should have belonged to the Union army. McClellan’s attacks were hopelessly uncoordinated, and he failed at crucial moments to bring up reserves that he never used. The Confederates fought ferociously, but had a more astute and aware commander been at the Union helm, Lee’s army might very well have been destroyed.

  The bloodiest day of the Civil War was over: thirteen thousand Confederate troops dead or wounded and twelve thousand Union casualties; twice as many Americans killed in that single day than in every other nineteenth-century American war combined. A survey of the field revealed the democracy of death. A boy of fifteen hugged in the death embrace of the veteran of fifty—“the greasy blouse of the common soldier here pressing the starred shoulder of the Brigadier,” a boy from Georgia and another from Pennsylvania, their arms outstretched to each other as if seeking a last embrace. A Pennsylvania soldier expressed the feelings of many of his comrades on both sides when he walked over the battlefield at dusk: “No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed this morning. God grant these things may soon end and peace be restored. Of this war I am heartily sick and tired.”34