A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  Slidell heard from Shaftesbury that a decision regarding Southern recognition was “close at hand, a very few weeks at the furthest.” Ironically, of all the concerns that might delay or precipitate the decision, Palmerston and Russell never mentioned slavery or public opinion as being among them. They were far more worried that the North would simply reject Britain’s offer to mediate. The Duke of Argyll had warned Palmerston at the beginning of September that the Americans would never accept any interference from Europe. “I think it right to tell you of a letter we have had from Sumner,” wrote the duke on September 2. “He says that there is no thought of giving up the Contest. He speaks, indeed, as if doing so were simply impossible.” It would therefore “be folly, I think, to attempt any intervention.”13

  But there had been more momentous news from America since Russell and Palmerston had agreed to hold a cabinet meeting on the subject. General Lee had apparently marched with his Confederate army north into Maryland. “The two armies are approaching each other to the North of Washington and another great conflict is about to take place,” Palmerston wrote to Russell on September 22. “Any proposal for mediation or armistice would no doubt just now be refused by the Federals. [But] if they are thoroughly beaten … they may be brought to a more reasonable state of mind.”14 Two days later, on the twenty-fourth, Palmerston informed a delighted Gladstone about the mediation plan. “The proposal would naturally be made to both North and South,” he wrote. “If both accepted we should recommend an Armistice and Cessation of Blockades with a View to Negotiation on the Basis of Separation.” If only the South accepted, “we should then, I conceive, acknowledge the Independence of the South.” Russell had suggested that the cabinet meeting should be held at the end of October, but Palmerston was now thinking it should be sooner. “A great battle appeared by the last accounts to be coming on … a few Days will bring us important accounts.”15

  —

  Britain was waiting for news even as thousands of American families were already grieving after the single bloodiest day of the war. Forty-eight hours after his victory at Second Bull Run, Robert E. Lee had indeed ordered his Army of Northern Virginia to move north. On September 4, his exhausted and underfed troops traversed the Potomac River into the border state of Maryland. Lee’s plan was to reach Pennsylvania, cut the rail links there, and isolate Washington from the rest of the country. He understood as well as the Confederate government that Europe was waiting for a clear-cut victory, but this was not the reason behind his decision to invade the North. He hoped that the very presence of Confederate soldiers on Northern soil would give President Davis the authority to demand “of the United States the recognition of our independence.”16 If that failed, Lee thought it would be a sufficient shock to the North to make the upcoming elections, which included several state governorships, turn in favor of the antiwar Democrats.

  On September 12, Lincoln overruled his cabinet and reinstated General McClellan to lead the Army of the Potomac. The soldiers trusted Little Mac, as they called him, and Lincoln felt strongly that this was no time for Washington to play favorites. Among the 80,000 troops who chased after Lee were Ebenezer Wells of the 79th New York Highlanders and George Herbert of the 9th New York Zouaves. Five major battles and twelve engagements in eighteen months had drained the regiments of their lifeblood. In the words of one chronicler, the Highlanders had withered to a “body of cripples.”17

  Ebenezer Wells had been wounded during the Second Battle of Bull Run. “My Sargent said to me, Wells, leave the field,” he recalled. “I said what for, he pointed to my leg. I looked and saw blood, I soon felt where it came from: I had been shot in the side.… [In] the intense excitement of that minute I only remember of having felt a slight stitch.” He was well enough to join the exodus from Washington a week later. The knowledge that McClellan was again their leader “revived the spirits of the men and without any rest we marched into Maryland.” It was probably fortunate that McClellan preferred to move his army at a crawl rather than a jog. Once again, the general’s remarkably inefficient intelligence had magnified Lee’s forces to twice their actual size, causing McClellan to become hypercautious.

  Ill fortune was, however, dogging Lee at every turn. His army should have had at least 15,000 more men, but many had straggled to the point of desertion or refused on principle to invade the North. Lee himself began the incursion with a nasty fall that left both his hands in splints. Generals Jackson and Longstreet also suffered minor but incapacitating injuries. All three had to be conveyed through Maryland in ambulances rather than gallantly leading their men on horseback. As the shoeless army tramped its way through the quiet countryside, it became clear that the Marylanders would not rise up or even offer breakfast to the Confederates. The men had to feed themselves with unripe apples and green corn snatched from the fields.18 Lee naturally worried about his supply line. Aware that there were Federal forces behind him that could cut off his army, he decided that he would have to neutralize the threat they posed before he proceeded farther north. He would have to detach his small army into even smaller, autonomous divisions—a risky maneuver, but it had worked against Pope, and Lee believed that he had the initiative.

  On September 13, the 27th Indiana Volunteers trailed into an abandoned Confederate camp outside Frederick. Four of them lay down on the grass to talk and rest in the late summer haze. One soldier, the future president of Oregon State University, noticed a yellow envelope lying in the field.19 Inside, the group found three cigars and Lee’s detailed plans for the next four days. The document, entitled Special Orders 191, was speedily relayed up the chain of command to McClellan. Almost as quickly, a Confederate sympathizer galloped off to report the dreadful news. At first, McClellan believed the orders were a trick, but a captain from Indiana recognized the handwriting and could vouch that the copyist on Lee’s staff had been a friend before the war.20 “I have all the plans of the rebels, and will catch them in their own trap,” McClellan telegraphed Lincoln. “Will send you trophies.”21

  McClellan delayed his move for two days, even though his 95,000-strong Army of the Potomac was facing a Confederate force of only 18,000. By September 16, Lee had managed to reunite two-thirds of his divided army and take up a position around a quiet Maryland village named Sharpsburg. About a mile away, on the other side of Antietam Creek, McClellan’s soldiers gathered in readiness. “Our Brigade stole into position about half-past 10 o’clock on the night of the 16th,” recalled a private in Company G of the 9th New York Volunteers. “No lights were permitted, and all conversation was carried on in whispers.” Their place in the line was inside a thin cornfield that sloped down toward a creek. They sat down on the plowed earth and watched dark moving masses in the distance. “There was something weirdly impressive yet unreal,” the private continued, “in the gradual drawing together of those whispering armies under cover of the night—something of awe and dread, as always in the secret preparation for momentous deeds.”22 The fighting began as the first rays of dawn revealed the countryside. At first there was sporadic firing, which grew louder and heavier as pockets of engagement blossomed into fields of thunder and flying debris.

  Map.11 Antietam or Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862

  Click here to view a larger image.

  As in previous battles, the landscape imposed itself on the fighting. “At Antietam it was a low, rocky ledge, prefaced by a corn-field,” wrote a Union soldier. “There were woods, too, and knolls, and there other corn-fields; but the student of that battle knows one cornfield only—the corn-field … about it and across it, to and fro, the waves of battle swung almost from the first.” By 10:00 A.M. the Confederates were in possession of the field that, instead of corn, contained the bodies of more than a thousand dead and wounded men.23 When the fighting shifted to the woods, Federal troops discovered to their horror that a battery of Confederate artillery had been swiftly moved to block the retreat. John Pelham, the twenty-four-year-old captain in charge of the artillery, was alread
y something of a hero in the South. During Antietam, his unflinching precision under fire made him a legend. After the battle, Stonewall Jackson said of him, “Every army should have a Pelham on each flank.” Henry MacIver happened to be delivering a message to Pelham when Federal cavalry attacked the position. The charge was so swift that Pelham and his men had only enough time to draw their revolvers. But the Scotsman never had a chance to use his: a bullet smashed through MacIver’s mouth, taking four teeth and part of his tongue with it before exiting through the back of his neck.24

  After the cornfield and the woods came a sunken road, which, over the course a terrible morning, was christened the Bloody Lane. For several hours along an eight-hundred-yard-long dirt track, a small but well-entrenched Confederate force was able to beat back each Federal charge. (The Irish Brigade lost half its men in less than twenty minutes; Brigade General Thomas Meagher, “the Prince of New York,” survived by being too drunk to ride.) But eventually they were overwhelmed and surrounded. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” recalled a private from New York.25 The break in the Confederate line offered McClellan a clear way through; he could have destroyed Lee’s center and then turned to crush each wing. Yet McClellan never called forward his reserves.

  In the afternoon, the hardest part of the fighting was at Rohrbach Bridge, which spanned Antietam Creek and led directly toward the Confederate brigades under General “Old Pete” Longstreet. Ambrose Burnside, who had led the Union capture of Roanoke in February, now commanded McClellan’s IX Corps, which included both the 9th New York and the 79th Highlanders. The bridge in question was only 12 feet wide but 125 feet long. Burnside divided his corps, sending some, including the 9th, to ford the river farther down; the rest, including the 79th, he ordered to charge across the bridge. The Confederates easily repulsed each assault until the 79th ended up having to trample over the bodies of their comrades in order to reach the other side.

  For three hours, various regiments made disjointed attempts to fight their way across Burnside’s Bridge, as it became known. “We had a heavy struggle crossing Antietam Creek,” George Herbert told his brother Jack. He had been in charge of the battery that was covering the ford and had watched as his friends waded through waist-deep water while bullets and shells picked them off one by one. The 9th was the first to reach the far bank. As soon as they were reunited, they were ordered to storm the Confederate position on the other side of a plowed field. It was three in the afternoon. “When the order to get up was given, I turned over quickly to look at Col. Kimball, who had given the order, thinking he had suddenly become insane,” wrote the regiment’s historian. “I was lying on my back … watching the shells explode and speculating as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off, for the very air seemed full of bullets.”26 The men around him were similarly battle-crazed. One wrote how “the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.”27

  The regiment managed to stagger on until they were within fifty yards of the Confederates. The two sides stared at each other and then roared into hand-to-hand combat. It was the Confederates who turned and fled toward Sharpsburg. The officers leading the 9th struggled to restrain their troops from chasing after them and finally resorted to taking out their revolvers and threatening to shoot.28 But at 4:30 P.M., the Union victors were blindsided by a fresh attack from Confederate reinforcements. The last of Lee’s divided forces had arrived at the battlefield, and the 9th had no choice but to retreat. Some of the men cried as they stumbled back down the hill. McClellan had failed to send reinforcements. When a courier from Burnside arrived with a plea for men and guns, McClellan replied: “Tell General Burnside this is the battle of the war.… Tell him if he cannot hold his ground, then the bridge, to the last man!—always the bridge! If the Bridge is lost, all is lost!” Burnside held the bridge but little else.29

  “Antietam was a fearful struggle,” wrote Ebenezer Wells. During the night of the seventeenth he had led his team of wagons to a hill; “the thickest of the fight had been just there. The road ran parallel with a stone wall which formed a good breastwork for the Southerners, and it was a heavy slaughter for our men.… It was a moonlit night, and I went to speak to a man sitting across the wall. I wondered what he stayed for.” Wells addressed a few words to him, only to realize that he was dead. “He must have been killed instantly, as he was in a nearly upright position as though in the act of climbing over. The bodies were piled up in heaps all about us.”30 Nearly six thousand men lay dying or dead in ditches and creeks, around fences and knolls, under trees, and across blackened fields. Another seventeen thousand were either waiting for medical attention or receiving what passed for care under hideous conditions.31 Remarkably, Henry MacIver was alive. He had been dragged from the field and carried to a nearby house. By the time he was seen to, he had almost drowned in his own blood. To prevent him from choking to death, the doctor put a silver tube down his throat.

  McClellan was so dazed by the scale of the battle that he did nothing to impede Lee’s retreat across the Potomac into Virginia. The shocking number of casualties on September 17 would make Antietam the single costliest day of the war. Twenty-five thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing. McClellan had lost nearly 15 percent of his men; Lee, almost a quarter. The Confederate general might have been defeated once and for all, with his army destroyed, if McClellan’s attacks had been better coordinated. McClellan had shown that he could take a strong hand and throw it away. Yet Antietam was still a victory of sorts for the North because Lee’s invasion had been halted. Although McClellan made the fatal mistake of allowing Lee to escape, he had pricked the aura of invincibility that had grown around the Confederates since the Seven Days’ Battles. He had proved that the Army of Northern Virginia could be stopped.

  A few days later, when both armies had deserted the battlefield, the Marquess of Hartington went to inspect the site in order to give a report to his younger brother, Lord Edward Cavendish, who was serving in one of the regiments sent out to defend Canada during the height of the Trent affair. Hartington had been in the United States for nearly a month, avoiding his expensive mistress, Catherine Walters (whom he affectionately called Skittles). Now, he walked over the silent terrain in appalled wonder. “In about seven or eight acres of wood,” he reported to his father, the Duke of Devonshire, “there is not a tree which is not full of bullets and bits of shell. It is impossible to understand how anyone could live in such a fire as there must have been there.”32

  Lord Hartington’s impression of Washington after the Battle of Antietam was that it resembled a vast camp. “You see hardly anything but soldiers and baggage-wagons, and stores moving up to the troops.… Washington is now completely surrounded by [forts], I think there are between forty and fifty,” he wrote on September 29, 1862. “No drink is allowed to be sold, and, though the place is full of soldiers, it is very quiet.” He admired the bearing of the volunteers and thought it “a great pity that such fine material should be thrown away, as they very likely may be, by having utterly incompetent officers.”33 Naturally, he was entertained by Seward, Lincoln, and a host of Washington dignitaries who had become friends with his other brother, Frederick, during the latter’s visit in 1859. By now the Americans were used to titled foreigners in their midst. Seward reminisced at length about his stay in England and the titled personages he had met. Lincoln was civil “and also told us stories. I said I supposed we had come at a bad time to see the country, and he said, ‘Well!’ He guessed we couldn’t do them much harm.” Secretary of War Stanton revolted Hartington for being a “most atrocious snob,” worse even than Seward. General McClellan, he thought, was quiet and modest in comparison, but Hartington was surprised by the general’s hatred of abolitionists.34

  Lincoln regarded Antietam as the victory he had been waiting for in order to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. “I think the time has come now,” he told the cabinet after the announcement on September 22. “I wish it were a better ti
me. I wish that we were in a better condition.” But, he continued, “I must do the best I can and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.” The proclamation declared that on January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious parts of the country would be “forever free.”35 Lincoln also included the prospect of compensated emancipation for slave owners—and emigration for freed blacks—in order to soften the objections of both Democratic voters and the border states. Seward had his reservations but supported the president. On September 26, he told his daughter that he hoped the proclamation had not been issued prematurely.36