Rise to Greatness (47 page)

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.

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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.”

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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 Mississippi, 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.

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A little after nine
A.M.
on Monday, September 22, Seward sent messengers to his fellow cabinet members, alerting them that Lincoln wanted to see them all at noon. At the appointed hour, “there was some general talk,” Chase reported, as the council collected around the table in the president’s office. Lincoln held up a prized possession: his brand-new copy of the latest book by Charles Farrar Browne, his favorite humorist. Browne was better known by his pen name, Artemus Ward, a screwball character who delighted audiences with his misspellings, malapropisms, and daffy adventures as proprietor of a traveling menagerie and wax museum. The president opened the book to page 34 and began to read aloud. “High-handed Outrage at Utica” was a very short story recounting Ward’s “recepshun” in that “trooly grate” upstate New York city. Things went wrong, however, when a “big burly feller” mistook Ward’s wax model of Judas Iscariot for the actual betrayer of Jesus Christ. The man dragged the statue from its display and smashed it, whereupon Ward filed a lawsuit. The jury ultimately delivered a verdict “of Arson in the 3d degree.”

Lincoln roared. His laugh, in the words of one who knew him, “stood by itself. The ‘neigh’ of a horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hearty.” Laughter was “the President’s life-preserver,” his answer to “the temporary excitement and relief which another man would have found in a glass of wine.” The reaction of the cabinet to Lincoln’s recitation is a matter of some dispute. Chase reported that they all were amused except for dour Edwin Stanton. According to Stanton, though, no one laughed, not even Seward. By Stanton’s account, Lincoln responded to the silence by asking: “Why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”

At last the president grew serious. “Gentlemen, I have—as you are aware—thought a great deal about the relation of this war to Slavery,” recorded Chase. Everyone in the room recalled that Lincoln had been prepared to use his war powers to order freedom for slaves in Rebel territory; since putting his order aside in July, he continued, “my mind has been much occupied with this subject,” even as he watched for the right moment to issue the decree. “I think the time has come now. I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in better condition. The action of the army against the Rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion.”

There was more to the story, and this part he told gingerly, as if he wasn’t sure how much to admit. As Welles reported it, Lincoln said he “had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.”

“I said nothing to anyone,” Lincoln explained to his colleagues, “but I made a promise to myself, and”—here, according to Chase, Lincoln hesitated—“to my Maker.”