Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  As Little Mac was preparing to settle in, however, the strangest thing happened, a twist so unlikely that only history could write it with a straight face. Just outside Frederick, the 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment made camp in a meadow that had been home, only days earlier, to Confederate troops under General Daniel H. Hill. Much of the field was still trampled flat, but in a tall patch of grass, a Union corporal named Barton Mitchell noticed a paper package with something inside. He picked it up and was glad, because the package held three fine cigars wrapped in paper. But this was not just any paper—the wrapping was covered in neat script under the heading: “Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, Special Orders, No. 191.” With his friend Sergeant John Bloss, Corporal Mitchell began reading through various objectives assigned to men with familiar Rebel names: Jackson. Longstreet. Stuart. And at the bottom of the page appeared the most familiar name of all: “By command of Gen. R. E. Lee.” The signature purported to be that of Lee’s assistant adjutant general, R. H. Chilton.

  No doubt the two soldiers understood that this cigar wrap, if genuine, represented an intelligence coup of staggering dimensions. The paper suggested that Lee’s forces were widely divided on the other side of the mountains, with Jackson leading a detachment against Harpers Ferry while Lee and Longstreet took the rest of the men toward Hagerstown. They were all to meet up eventually at Boonsboro, but the boom of distant artillery from the direction of Harpers Ferry indicated that the reunion had not yet taken place. If this was true, the Federals now had a golden opportunity to attack the scattered Rebel forces and destroy them piece by piece. But how could anyone possibly know whether the paper was genuine?

  The soldiers gave the paper to their captain, who gave it to his colonel, who took it to his general, who showed it to an aide. The aide noticed the signature and announced that he had known R. H. Chilton before the war and would recognize that handwriting anywhere. The document was rushed to McClellan’s headquarters, where the general was in the middle of his meeting with town leaders. He studied the paper, then looked up and cried: “Now I know what to do!”

  * * *

  Lincoln was engaged that same day in a lengthy debate with a delegation of Chicago ministers who had come to Washington to plead for an emancipation decree. The president was nursing a sprained wrist after taking a fall; pained, he listened to all the familiar arguments in favor of such action. At points he jousted and parried, poking holes of doubt into the delegation’s confidence. He did not think such a measure would be as popular as the ministers seemed to believe. Besides, what power did he have over Southern slaves when the Rebels were at large on Northern territory? “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated?” he asked. “I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet.” (There was a legend, widely known but eventually debunked, that in the fifteenth century Pope Callixtus III had issued an order excommunicating Halley’s Comet.)

  Back and forth they went until Lincoln ended the meeting on an ambiguous note. “I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves,” he allowed, “but hold the matter under advisement.” The president had already told the delegates that he was accustomed to hearing from religious leaders on the topic of slavery, and he found it strange that while clergymen held every variety of opinion, all of them claimed to know “the Divine will.” Why, Lincoln now wondered, didn’t God take the forthright approach and reveal his intentions “directly to me, for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it!”

  The attending stenographer did not record that a pause followed, but it is reasonable to assume that there was one. Then Lincoln continued on a less declarative note: “These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.”

  Would the discovery outside Frederick have qualified in Lincoln’s ever rational mind as a “miracle,” or simply as a “physical fact”? It was a package of cigars, after all, not a voice from a burning bush. Still, in this amalgam of coincidence and fortune, a very important “direct revelation” was received, and a scrap of rubbish in a Maryland meadow became the spark that ignited McClellan at the very moment of Lee’s vulnerability.

  Little Mac was elated. “Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home,” the general crowed as the paper worked its electrifying magic. To the president he wired: “I hope for a great success if the plans of the Rebels remain unchanged.”

  * * *

  McClellan moved as quickly as he could, which was not as quickly as some other generals might. He began by ordering William B. Franklin to take his corps to Harpers Ferry and rescue the garrison of 12,000 Union troops. With those forces added to his own, Franklin was to mop up Stonewall Jackson’s column. It was a perfectly fine plan, but time was of the essence—and McClellan instructed Franklin to get started the next morning. He seemed to have forgotten that soldiers can march at night.

  And he, too, stayed overnight in Frederick before setting off on Sunday, September 14, with some 70,000 men, marching in the direction of Hagerstown to snuff out Longstreet and Lee. But the Rebels had made one crucial adjustment in the roughly eighteen hours between the discovery in the meadow and the Union advance. Word of McClellan’s good fortune had traveled from a Confederate spy in Frederick to Lee’s headquarters, and now Lee was also on the move, embarking on a desperate race to minimize the damage.

  He ordered troops into the South Mountain passes, Crampton’s Gap and Turner’s Gap, to slow the Federals down. Firing downhill at the bluecoats struggling up, the Rebels exacted a high toll for passage over the ridge, chewed up time until darkness fell, and then slipped away. McClellan, watching the fighting from a distance, saw not tactical resistance but bracing confirmation that Lee’s army was immense. When Monday dawned and the Federals went through the passes and down into another picturesque valley, Little Mac figured that he was in the presence of more than 100,000 invisible Rebels. Lee, at the same moment, was taking his troops toward a ford in the Potomac where he planned to cross into Virginia, rejoin Jackson, and thus bring his actual strength up to about 43,000. By overestimating the size of the Rebel forces yet again, McClellan erased his substantial advantage over Lee’s regrouping army. Instead of attacking, he held back.

  Then Lee received word that the Harpers Ferry garrison had surrendered to Jackson before Franklin could reach it, which meant it was no longer necessary to suffer the ignominy of retreating over the river. Jackson could now come to him, here at the farm town of Sharpsburg, behind a winding stream called Antietam Creek. The Rebels spread themselves out and tried to appear numerous while waiting for Jackson to reinforce them. In the meantime, the Federals slowly filled the fields on the other side of the creek and awaited their orders. Night fell.

  When Tuesday came up from behind the mountains, a heavy fog lay over the tense fields. Jackson, having left a regiment behind at Harpers Ferry to process prisoners and pack up spoils, crossed the Potomac and formed his men on Lee’s left flank. Longstreet arrayed his divisions on the Confederate right. McClellan, meanwhile, polished his plans, which needed to be perfect because he was so badly outnumbered. Only at the end of the day did he finally set his forces in motion: sidling to his right, he accomplished little more than to show Lee where the first blow would fall.

  Wednesday, September 17, 1862. The bloodiest day in American history arrived in the middle of a night “so dark, so obscure, so mysterious, so uncertain … that there was a half-dreamy sensation about it all,” one general wrote. At the presidential cottage, Abraham Lincoln’s shallow sleep was troubled by the same “strange dream” that had welled up before
Fort Sumter and the first battle of Bull Run. A friend recalled Lincoln’s description: “He seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and … he was moving with great rapidity”—where, he did not know. As the president tossed and turned, frightened men pulled on their boots beside the creek and shuffled the stiffness out of their legs and backs. Beneath a dawning sky, the soldiers of I Corps under Major General Joseph Hooker fell in and shouldered their rifles. Led by the black-hatted brigade under the command of John Gibbon—the brigadier general Lincoln had challenged to write the decline and fall of the Confederacy—the three divisions set off down the Hagerstown Turnpike toward the left wing of Lee’s army.

  There they entered the mouth of hell. “No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed this morning,” a veteran of the battle of Antietam wrote. Yet certain images endure, searing themselves into the imaginations of generation after generation. Of a cornfield stripped bare by storms of gunfire, “cut as closely as with a knife,” as one officer described it, the fallen men in rows as neat as the sheared stalks. Of a sunken road gradually filling with Rebel corpses as wave after wave of Union soldiers crashed and broke against it. Of Burnside’s IX Corps bottled up at a bridge where one attempt after another to cross ended in a lead hailstorm falling from the bluff overhead.

  As the sun rose, flamed, and sank, the awful battle ranged across the entire Confederate front, men dropping by scores, then hundreds, then thousands. If McClellan had managed to feed his troops into the inferno all at once, left, right, and center, he would have crumpled the Army of Northern Virginia once and for all. But such precise coordination is simple only in theory; on actual Civil War battlefields it was virtually nonexistent. Hooker’s attack on the Rebel left at dawn was largely spent by the time Sumner and Franklin pushed their men toward the Hagerstown road around nine A.M. The assault on the center consumed the midday, while on the Confederate right, a somewhat sluggish Burnside wasn’t over his bridge and charging ahead until late afternoon. Lee, cool and ruthless, shifted his dwindling numbers from point to point along the line. At least twice the Federals actually broke through the butternut wall, and if McClellan had been bold enough to throw his reserves at these cracks, he might have finished matters. But McClellan feared the size of Lee’s own reserves, and again he held back. No doubt Little Mac felt vindicated when, at the end of the day, a column of fresh Rebels appeared from the south to halt Burnside’s advance just as he was driving Longstreet’s weakened line back through the streets of Sharpsburg. Those late-arriving Southern troops weren’t reserves or reinforcements, however; this was the regiment Jackson had left behind to wrap up business at Harpers Ferry. They were the last Rebel soldiers for miles and miles, but they were sufficient to bring the horrific day to an end.

  Some fourteen hours after it began, the battle was over. Darkness fell, and the night filled with moans and shouted curses and the screams of men in field hospitals having their maimed limbs cut off. Dead on the blasted battlefield lay some 2,100 Union soldiers and as many as 2,700 Confederates. Approximately 18,000 men were wounded, at least 2,000 of them mortally. The total of dead, wounded, and missing men exceeded 25,000.

  * * *

  Two decimated armies now occupied the same side of Antietam Creek, eyeball to eyeball, with the wide Potomac at Lee’s back and just one crossing available for his escape to Virginia. Lee had perhaps 30,000 uninjured soldiers, all of them exhausted. McClellan, reinforced on September 18 by 13,000 new arrivals, had more than 90,000 troops, some 33,000 of them fresh. With more fresh troops than Lee had troops in all, the Federals now outnumbered their foes by about three to one. A sharp push on the Confederate right might allow the Union to cut the road to the river crossing and trap the bloodied, starving Rebels.

  Lee, bluff and unyielding, stared at his opponent and did not move. McClellan, having wired both the War Department and his wife to say that he planned to renew the battle that day, stared back. Victory lay before his eyes, but all he saw was disaster. “I am aware of the fact that, under ordinary circumstances, a general is expected to risk a battle if he has a reasonable prospect of success,” McClellan later explained. “But at this critical juncture” he needed nothing less than “absolute assurance of success. At that moment—Virginia lost, Washington menaced, Maryland invaded—the national cause could afford no risk of defeat,” he wrote. “One battle lost, and almost all would have been lost. Lee’s army might then have marched as it pleased on Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York … and nowhere east of the Alleghanies was there another organized force able to arrest its march.”

  It is tempting to second-guess McClellan’s decision not to deliver what could have been a crushing blow. But in fairness to the general and his circumstances, the fighting of September 17 had left the Union command stunned and partially decapitated; many generals and colonels had been killed or wounded, and their regiments were scattered and bloody. George Meade, who took over command of I Corps from a wounded Joe Hooker, reported that half his force was gone by the morning of September 18, and the half that remained was in no mood to attack. “I do not think their morale is as good for an offensive as a defensive movement,” he warned. Burnside, for his part, was nervously weighing whether to pull back from his position on the Rebel right; pushing forward seemed out of the question.

  McClellan, moreover, was whipsawed: the speed with which the military situation had reversed was deeply disorienting. On September 12, Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania had estimated that the Rebel force numbered 440,000; now, a bare six days later, Lee was down to his last 30,000 uninjured men, a single day’s hard fighting from destruction. How was such an astounding change of fortune possible? McClellan’s inability to recognize and absorb this sudden shift brought on a resurgence of both his natural caution and his fear of failure. So he did nothing on September 18, and he continued to do nothing as Lee marched his army across the ford and into Virginia that night.

  Lincoln, too, struggled to understand what was going on, and the seventy miles between Washington and Sharpsburg might as well have been a thousand. “Few and foggy dispatches” made their way from the scene, according to Welles. “The battle of Antietam was fought Wednesday,” Lincoln later recalled, “and until Saturday I could not find out whether we had gained a victory or lost a battle.” Even then, when the president studied the morning report for Saturday, September 20, he wasn’t entirely sure how to think about what had happened. The accounting provided by the Army of the Potomac showed 93,149 men currently present for duty in and around the vicinity of Antietam Creek. As Lincoln’s secretaries put it, the president “could not but feel that the result was not commensurate with the efforts made and the resources deployed.”

  One fact was beyond mistaking, however: Lee was once again on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, less than two weeks after his invasion had begun. Now Lincoln had a promise to keep. As he told one congressman: “When Lee came over the river, I made a resolution that if McClellan drove him back I would send the proclamation after him.” The president took his latest draft from his desk and went to work. A visitor to the White House on Sunday evening reported being turned away; Lincoln was too busy writing to see anyone. Referring to the document that so absorbed him, the president later explained that he was “fix[ing] it up a little, and Monday I let them have it.”

  * * *

  In Kentucky, Don Carlos Buell spent the early part of September racing neck and neck with Braxton Bragg on parallel paths through the forested hills where Lincoln was born and spent his boyhood. Ulysses Grant, meanwhile, sent Buell all the reinforcements he could gather, and soon he was down to his last 50,000 men, most of them scattered through hostile territory. Sitting in Corinth and becoming ever more vulnerable as Buell’s army receded, Grant began to worry. As he feared, the Rebels noticed his predicament. Generals Sterling Price and Earl Van Dorn, fugitives from Missouri and Arkansas, decided to combine the remaining Confederate forces in Mississip
pi, whip Grant, and launch a third Rebel advance in support of Bragg and Lee.

  Rather than wait to be attacked, Grant struck first. As the battle of Antietam was raging in the East, he sent two converging columns toward the little town of Iuka, Mississippi, where Price was camped. Grant planned to bring the columns together like a hammer on an anvil; but, as with McClellan’s beautifully synchronized assault near Sharpsburg, Grant’s design worked only on paper. The column led by Brigadier General William Rosecrans bogged down on muddy roads and didn’t reach Iuka until September 19. There, Rosecrans clashed with Price, but the wind was wrong and the humid air served as a muffler, so the second column never heard the noise of the first column’s guns and thus never joined the battle. Price was bloodied, yet Grant’s problem remained.

  But then the Union got lucky: Bragg decided that he wasn’t interested in fighting Buell for possession of Louisville. He halted his army in northern Kentucky and let the Federals have the city and its fortifications. Promptly taking up occupancy, Buell was hailed as the savior of the Ohio River. But he showed little inclination to leave the place, which he would have to do if he was going to push the Rebels back. Lincoln’s patience with Buell, already thin, abruptly ran out; he ordered Halleck to fire Buell and replace him with George Thomas, who had proved his mettle by winning in January at Mill Springs.

  The order proved premature. Buell was hatching an offensive, and Thomas, informed of his promotion, begged Washington not to swap generals in the middle of a crisis. Politicians in Kentucky and Ohio also peppered Lincoln with protests. Backing down as quickly as he had snapped, the president left Buell in command but living on borrowed time. Buell decided to make the most of the reprieve. At the end of September, he set off in pursuit of Bragg, who was on his way to Frankfort to establish his Rebel-friendly government.