by Bruce Catton
So the battle ended, at last, and the armies held much the same ground they had held at dawn—except that nearly 23,000 men had become casualties. As always, the night that followed the battle was hideous: from one end of the line to the other the darkness was dreadful with the cries of wounded men who were calling for help. The Federals held the cornfield and the sunken road and the various crossings of the Antietam, and Lee held an unbroken position covering the ford that led back to Virginia; he had lost a fourth of his army but he had not been driven away, and in a narrow tactical sense he had actually had the better of it. Incredibly, he remained in position all of the next day, September 18, and he and Jackson even planned to take the offensive, giving it up at last when a close study of the situation showed that it simply was not possible.5 McClellan for his part had had all the fighting he wanted. He received 13,000 fresh troops that morning, and he had on the scene two army corps which had hardly been used, but he was willing enough to wait; and that night, while the Army of the Potomac lay in its soiled bivouac, Lee’s army rounded up its guns, its stragglers, and as many of its wounded as could be moved and threaded its way back across the Potomac to safety. The Maryland campaign was over.
What it meant could be seen better from a distance than at close range. Whatever might be true of the battle itself, Lee had unquestionably lost the campaign; the attempt to win a decisive victory north of the Potomac had failed. McClellan notified Halleck that “Maryland is entirely freed from the presence of the enemy, who have been driven across the Potomac,” and to Mrs. McClellan on September 18 he sent a thin chirp of pleasure: “The spectacle yesterday was the grandest I could conceive of; nothing could be more sublime. Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it was a masterpiece of art.”6
The soldiers themselves knew only that they had been in a terrible fight. The battle had had a strange spectacular quality, because most of it was fought out in the open where everybody could see it, and the veterans remembered what they had seen as well as what they had had to endure. A Northern newspaperman recalled “long dark lines of infantry swaying to and fro, with columns of smoke rising from their muskets, red flashes and white puffs from the batteries—with the sun shining brightly on all this scene of tumult, and beyond it upon the rich dark woods and the clear blue mountains south of the Potomac.” A reporter from Charleston told of the immense billows of smoke from the great ranks of Federal cannon (Southern artillerists remembered Sharpsburg forever as “artillery hell”) and reflected that the whole of the great Federal Army was in plain sight, assault waves carrying flags up to the Confederate lines, behind them huge columns “so far in the distance that you could recognize them as troops only by the sunlight that gleamed upon their arms.” A Wisconsin soldier let it go by calling the whole thing “a great enormous battle—a great tumbling together of all heaven and earth.”7
They all remembered the terrible guns. One Southerner remarked, with feeling: “Of all mean things the climax is reached when compelled to receive the fury of cannonading with no opportunity to inflict damage,” and a Confederate surgeon burst out: “I never was so tired of shelling in my life before. I hate cannons.” A Pennsylvanian said the battlefield was “a truly sickening and horrible sight,” and added: “No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed this morning.… Of this war I am heartily sick and tired.” David H. Strother, the former Harper’s correspondent who had the odd record of serving first on Pope’s staff and then on McClellan’s, said that when he crossed the battlefield after the Confederate retreat he found dead bodies hideously swollen and blackened: “Many were so covered with dust, torn, crushed and trampled that they resembled clods of earth and you were obliged to look twice before recognizing them as human beings.”8
A wounded Mississippian had the last word. After Sumner’s men had advanced toward the Dunker church, a Union officer passed over ground covered by Confederate wounded and paused to tell this prostrate Mississippi soldier, “You fought well and stood well.” The wounded man looked up at him and said: “Yes, and here we lie.”9
5: Taking the Initiative
General Lee was a hard man to convince. As far as he was concerned the battle had been an incident rather than the end of a campaign. He wanted to resume the offensive just as soon as he could collect his stragglers, and he had a definite plan: recross the Potomac at Williamsport, ten or twelve miles upstream from Sharpsburg, and march northeast to Hagerstown, striking toward Pennsylvania and so compelling McClellan to come up and fight a new battle. Less than three weeks earlier Lee had set out to defeat the Army of the Potomac on Northern soil, and not even the tremendous shock of Antietam had made him abandon this idea. To his uncomplicated but tenacious mind it was the other man’s army, not his, that had just brushed the edge of disaster.
When Lee took his army back to Virginia on the night of September 18 the army was extremely weak, but it seemed that it might be possible to strengthen it quickly. Many thousands of men had left the ranks in the last fortnight but they had not gone far and most of them could probably be recalled. On the night of September 17, some five thousand stragglers had been brought back into the ranks, making good half of the loss the battle had caused and enabling Lee to hold his position all of the next day.1 It was reasonable to suppose that many more would return now that the army was south of the Potomac. As soon as they did the campaign could be resumed.
But it developed that the army had been hurt worse than Lee thought. It was going to take time to recall the missing thousands and bring them back to a fighting pitch. All of the lower Shenandoah Valley was swarming with men who were drifting away toward the South, feigning wounds or sickness, dodging the patrols, compelling Lee at last to admit that “many of them will not stop until they reach their distant homes.” An officer stationed at Winchester to halt this exodus reported that it was hopeless to try to do it with less than a full regiment of cavalry, and he predicted that “unless prompt and effective measures are taken thousands will escape up the valley.… It is disgusting and heartsickening to witness this army of stragglers.” The figures told the story. On September 22 there were hardly more than 36,000 men with the army, not counting the cavalry, and morale was not good. Lee finally had to tell Mr. Davis that although the advance on Hagerstown still looked like the best move, it could not be done: “I would not hesitate to make it even with our diminished numbers, did the army exhibit its former temper and condition; but, as far as I am able to judge, the hazard would be great and a reverse disastrous. I am therefore led to pause.”2
In plain terms the army had been bled white, and it was not until a week after the battle that Lee realized how serious the situation was. Only then could he accept Antietam as a defeat rather than a check. He had to rebuild his army. The next move would be up to General McClellan if he cared to make one.
Like Lee, McClellan was led to pause. On September 19 he got troops down to the bank of the Potomac, and Fitz John Porter thrust a detachment across the river to see where the Rebels had gone. The next morning this detachment found out that the Rebels had not gone far. A. P. Hill struck it hard, driving it back into Maryland with substantial losses, and thereafter the Army of the Potomac remained in camp and tried to repair battle damages. It had suffered from straggling, too. George Gordon Meade, temporarily commanding Hooker’s corps, reported that the corps had fewer than 6000 men present for duty the day after the battle; five days later it numbered more than 14,000. In one division alone, 4000 men returned to the ranks in those five days.3 Like Lee’s army, this army had been hurt.
McClellan had no intention of following up the victory until his army had been fully restored to health; a reasonable idea, in view of his abiding conviction that Lee’s army was always larger than his. It did occur to him, however, that he ought to follow up on the political advantages which the victory seemed to offer, and he set out quickly to demand a reorganization of the War Department and a f
ree hand for himself. On September 20, while Lee was trying to find some way to get north of the Potomac and renew the fighting, McClellan wrote to Mrs. McClellan that he had taken his stand: “I have insisted that Stanton shall be removed & that Halleck shall give way to me as Comdr in Chief. I will not serve under him—for he is an incompetent fool—in no way fit for the important place he holds.… The only safety for the country & for me is to get rid of lots of them.” That evening he sent her another letter along the same line: “I hope that my position will be determined this week. Through certain friends of mine I have taken the stand that Stanton must leave & that Halleck must restore my old place to me. Unless these two conditions are fulfilled I will leave the service. I feel that I have done all that can be asked in twice saving the country. If I continue in its service I have at least the right to demand a guarantee.” Meditatively, he went on: “You should see my soldiers now! You never saw anything like their enthusiasm. It surpasses anything you ever imagined.”4
It seemed for a time that some such reorganization would come to pass. The Interior Department clerk and political eavesdropper T. J. Barnett, who had an acute ear for gossip which he was not always able to appraise accurately, wrote to McClellan’s friend Barlow on September 19 that things looked bad for the radicals: “McClellan is the acknowledged man. Unless I much mistake me, henceforth he will have a party that shall bestride these lilliputians. I think a new and conservative era has commenced; & that the day of little men & demagogues is waning.”5
To an extent, Barnett was right. One day was waning, a long day in the life of the republic, the last of its light going out as the shadows rose out of the valley of Antietam Creek and darkened the heights where men had fought so hard. Morning would bring a new day and not everyone could recognize it immediately. Perhaps the only man who really saw what Antietam meant was Abraham Lincoln, and he could do what neither Lee nor McClellan could do: follow up the opportunity which the battle presented. He had been waiting for a victory, and at last he had one—shaded, incomplete, unexploited, but still a victory. He would give it a meaning which the soldiers could not give it. On September 22 he called his cabinet together to present the final draft of the preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation.
There were no dramatics, because none were needed. Mr. Lincoln even opened the session by reading a chapter from the topical humorist, Artemus Ward, which struck Secretary Stanton as a most unseemly way to behave on so great a day. Then he laid the book aside and took up the proclamation, which he had put into final form the day before, and when he presented it he mused quietly as a man might who, doing a great deed, believed that God’s hand had been on his shoulder. As Secretary Welles remembered it, the President said that while he waited for victory over the army of invasion he had made what amounted to a covenant with God: a victory over Lee would mean that God intended the slaves to be free, and the President of the United States would guide himself accordingly. It might seem strange, Mr. Lincoln went on, that he should make such a covenant when his own mind was not really clear about things, but that was how it had been. Now Lee had been beaten, and the meaning was unmistakable: “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”6
As the President spoke, one fear that he had carried ever since Fort Sumter dropped from his shoulders. Montgomery Blair held it up to view for the last time: Would not this action carry the border states over into secession?
Here was the question which always before had brought paralysis. The border states, where slaveowners upheld the Union, had been nursed along with great care. Twice the President had overruled antislavery pronouncements, lest the border be lost because freedom was too great a word; but the border would not listen when he spoke of compensated emancipation, and the hope that a slaveowning society might, under exceptionally favorable conditions, read the signs of the times and adjust itself had finally died. It would never happen, such a society being—because of what it stood upon—too rigid for any adjustment whatever. Answering Mr. Blair, the President simply said that he had thought about the border state problem but that it was too late, and that right now “the difficulty was as great not to act as to act.” He had argued with the border state people and it had been in vain, and it seemed to Mr. Lincoln that “slavery had received its death blow from slave-holders—it could not survive the rebellion.”7
The same thought occurred to Secretary Chase. After the meeting he told John Hay that the behavior of the slave-holders had been “a most wonderful history of the insanity of a class that the world had ever seen.” If (Chase went on) the slave states had remained in the Union the peculiar institution might have gone on living for many years; it was protected, and no party, no aroused public feeling in the North, could hope to do much to it. By going to war the slavery people had “madly placed in the very path of destruction” the institution which they insisted must be preserved at any price.8
Truly it was too late. Nearly a year earlier the President had told Congress that he hoped to win the war without letting it become “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” but the hope had been vain. Violent enough, in all conscience, the war had been, from Fort Donelson and Shiloh to Gaines’s Mill and Antietam, the violence growing greater and deadlier with each battle. As the war grew more violent it grew larger, and as its dimensions were enlarged so also was its meaning; and hereafter it would be revolutionary, waged after the revolutionary manner—without remorse. It was no longer a war to erase a boundary line from a map, but a war fought to erase a word from the books. The Emancipation Proclamation simply ratified a process that had been started long before.
There was a deep continuity at work here. Many years earlier (just about fourscore and seven, as a matter of fact) the people had found it necessary to carry the word “freedom” into a war already begun, and by doing so they had broken an empire and put the world in a ferment. Now they were at it again, and their President was proclaiming freedom “thenceforward and forever” as a rallying cry: and the most vital, disturbing and unforgettable word in the language was being placed at the center of the nation’s ideas about the future. Nothing would ever be quite the same after this.
… Secretary Seward treated himself to a quiet and mildly rueful chuckle as he reflected on the strange ways of destiny. Years ago he had warned that something like today’s business was going to happen because slavery condemned the nation to an irresistible conflict in which a higher law would come into operation, and the words had sounded dangerous and Seward had been denied a presidential nomination as a result. Now he thought about it, and he wrote to his daughter: “Having for twenty years warned the people of the coming of this crisis, and suffered all the punishment they could inflict upon me for my foresight and fidelity, I am not displeased with the position in which I find myself now—of one who has not put forth a violent hand to verify my own predictions.” He did hope that the timing of this proclamation was right.9
The proclamation was read, commented upon, given a minor correction or so, and at last signed, and on the next day it was made public, to tell all men that the government had changed its policy; and at close range it was hard for many people to see just what had happened and what it meant. David Strother, who called himself a Virginia Yankee and perfectly embodied the border state man who would die for the Union but did not like a fight against slavery, wrote angrily: “The war is going against us heavily. The Revolution is raging at all points while the folly, weakness and criminality of our heads is becoming more decidedly manifest. Abraham Lincoln has neither sense nor principle.… The people are strong and willing, but ‘there is no king in Israel.’ The man of the day has not yet come.” In the Army of the Potomac a young Massachusetts officer named Robert Gould Shaw wrote that he could not see what practical good the proclamation could do: “Wherever our army has been there remain no slaves, and the proclamation won’t free them where we don’t go.” One of Barlow’s innumerable political tipsters exulted that the proclamation would be “the
knell of the Republican party,” giving all of the border states to the Confederacy, and Barnett told Barlow that the administration was highly nervous, fearful of what the Army of the Potomac might do, dreading a revolution in the North. The proclamation, he felt, had simply hastened the crisis, and the question now was whether the Democrats would invoke a revolution, striving “to create a chaos in the hope of a more perfect creation.”10
A great many people worried about what the army might do; and it is worthy of note that in all of the doubt and speculation on this matter “the army” meant, exclusively, the Army of the Potomac. No one ever dreamed or hinted that any other army—Grant’s, Buell’s, or anybody’s—might resist the proclamation, or fall into sulks because of it, or in any other way make it risky for the government to issue and enforce the new pronouncement. It was only this army that raised doubts, and this was in no way accidental; it happened so because only in this army had the high command openly and with passionate devotion aligned itself with the political opposition to the administration.
General Porter, for instance, was writing to Manton Marble of the New York World that “the proclamation was resented in the army” and that it had led to expressions of discontent “amounting, I have heard, to insubordination.” The men who had to do the fighting, said Porter, “are tired of the war and wish to see it ended honorably by a restoration of the union—not merely a suppression of the rebellion.” Such a distinction might be a little too finely drawn for the ordinary soldier to follow, but Porter insisted that the soldier’s heroism was offset “by the absurd proclamation of a political coward.”11
General McClellan was not quite certain what he ought to do; his uncertainty arising primarily from a doubt that this proclamation really applied to him. Three days after the proclamation was published he wrote to his friend, the New York merchant William H. Aspinwall, asking for advice:
