II

When Lincoln appointed Henry Halleck general in chief in July 1862, he hoped that Old Brains would coordinate an offensive by McClellan's 100,000 on the Peninsula with Pope's 50,000 north of Richmond. But three men blighted this hope; their names were Pope, McClellan, and Jackson.

Pope's first act as commander of the newly designated Army of Virginia was to issue an address to his troops. He did nothing to diminish his reputation for braggadocio in this singularly inept document. "I come to you out of the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies," he declared. "I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you . . . certain phrases [like] . . . 'lines of retreat,' and 'bases of supplies.' . . . Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Let us look before us and not behind. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear."²⁰

This snide denigration of eastern troops won Pope few friends. Fitz-John Porter declared that Pope had "written himself down, what the military world has long known, an Ass." This expressed McClellan's opinion as well. At the same time, Pope believed that McClellan's "incompetency and indisposition to active movements were so great" that little help could be expected from the Army of the Potomac.²¹ Lee could hardly have hoped for a more mutually antagonistic pair of opponents had he chosen them himself.

After the Seven Days', McClellan expressed readiness to renew the offensive if Lincoln would send him another 50,000 men. Privately,

20. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 12, pt. 3, pp. 473—74.

21. Porter quoted in Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, 387; Pope quoted by Salmon P. Chase in David Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York, 1954), 97.

however, the general was telling a New York Democratic leader that he had "lost all regard and respect" for the administration and doubted "the propriety of my brave men's blood being shed to further the designs of such a set of heartless villains." When Halleck became general in chief, McClellan vented his anger at serving under an officer "whom I know to be my inferior." As for Stanton, he was a "deformed hypocrite & villain." If he "had lived in the time of the Savior, Judas Iscariot would have remained a respected member of the fraternity of Apostles."²² For his part, Lincoln had lost faith in McClellan's willingness to fight Lee. The president did not have 50,000 men to spare, but even if he could have sent 100,000, he told a senator, McClellan would suddenly discover that Lee had 400,000.²³ At the end of July, Lincoln and Halleck decided to withdraw the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula to unite it with Pope's force.

Confederate actions had influenced this decision. To counter Pope's threat to the rail junction at Gordonsville northwest of Richmond, Lee had sent Jackson with 12,000 men to that point on July 13. When McClellan remained quiet on the Richmond front, Lee detached A. P. Hill with another 13,000 to join Jackson on July 27. Rumor magnified this force—for in spite of Jackson's failures on the Peninsula his name was worth several divisions—and helped persuade Lincoln of the need to reinforce Pope. As Lee pieced together information about McClellan's withdrawal, he used his interior lines to shift most of his troops by rail sixty miles to Gordonsville. The Army of the Potomac had to travel several times that far by water down the James, along the Chesapeake Bay, and up the Potomac before arriving within marching distance of Pope. The efficiency of this Union movement was not helped by McClellan's bitter protests against it or by his subordinates' distaste for coming under Pope's command. "Pope will be thrashed . . . & be disposed of" by Lee, wrote McClellan to his wife with relish at the prospect. "Such a villain as he is ought to bring defeat upon any cause that employs him."²⁴

While McClellan sulked in his tent, Jackson moved against Pope's

22. McClellan to Samuel L. M. Barlow, July 15, 23, 1862, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; McClellan to Ellen McClellan, July 13, 22, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

23. Theodore C. Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill., 1927–33), I, 563.

24. McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Aug. 10, 1862, McClellan Papers.

two advance divisions near Cedar Mountain twenty miles north of Gordonsville. Commanding this Union force was none other than Jackson's old adversary Nathaniel P. Banks. Eager to redeem his reputation, Banks attacked on August 9 even though he knew that Jackson outnumbered him at least two to one. Expecting imminent reinforcements, the Union general sent his two undersize divisions forward in a headlong assault that drove back the surprised rebels and put Jackson's old Stonewall Brigade to flight. Having mishandled the first stage of the fight, Jackson went to the front himself to rally his troops and then watched approvingly as A. P. Hill's division punished the Yankees with a slashing counterattack. Banks fell back several miles to the support of late-arriving reinforcements after losing 30 percent of his force. Within the next two days the rest of Pope's army came up and forced Jackson to pull back to Gordonsville.

The chief result of this battle of Cedar Mountain was to confirm the transfer of operations from the Peninsula to the Rappahannock River halfway between Richmond and Washington. Here for ten days Lee's reunited force of 55,000 (he had left 20,000 around Richmond) carried on a campaign of thrust and parry with Pope's army of equal size. Lee probed for an opening to isolate and attack a portion of the enemy, while Pope maneuvered to hold his position while awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from the Peninsula that would enable him to go over to the offensive. Since that was just what Lee wanted to prevent, he determined on what was becoming a typical Lee stratagem: he divided his army and sent Jackson's corps on a long clockwise flanking march to cut Union rail communications deep in Pope's rear. This maneuver defied military maxims about keeping an army concentrated in the presence of an enemy of equal or greater size. But Lee believed that the South could never win by following maxims. His well-bred Episcopalian demeanor concealed the audacity of a skillful gambler ready to stake all on the turn of a card. The dour Presbyterian who similarly concealed the heart of a gambler was the man to carry out Lee's strategy.

For Jackson had reverted from the sluggard of the Chickahominy to the gladiator of the Valley. Indeed, the Valley was where Pope thought the rebels were heading when his scouts detected Jackson's march northwestward along the Rappahannock on August 25. But Pope's under-strength cavalry failed to detect Jackson's turn to the east on August 26, when he marched unopposed along the railroad to Manassas, the main Union supply base twenty-five miles behind Pope. In one of the war's great marches, Jackson's whole corps—24,000 men—had covered more than fifty miles in two days. The hungry, threadbare rebels swooped down on the mountain of supplies at Manassas like a plague of grasshoppers. After eating their fill and taking everything they could carry away, they put the torch to the rest.

The accumulation of supplies at Manassas and the maintenance of the vulnerable single-track line that linked Pope to his base had been the work of Herman Haupt, the war's wizard of railroading. The brusque, no-nonsense Haupt was chief of construction and transportation for the U.S. Military Rail Roads in Virginia. He had brought order out of chaos in train movements. He had rebuilt destroyed bridges in record time. His greatest achievement had been the construction from green logs and saplings of a trestle 80 feet high and 400 feet long with unskilled soldier labor in less than two weeks. After looking at this bridge, Lincoln said: "I have seen the most remarkable structure that human eyes ever rested upon. That man, Haupt, has built a bridge . . . over which loaded trains are running every hour, and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks."²⁵ Haupt developed prefabricated parts for bridges and organized the first of the Union construction corps that performed prodigies of railroad and bridge building in the next three years. Their motto, like that of their Seabee descendants in World War II, might have been: "The difficult we can do immediately; the impossible will take a little longer." As an awed contraband put it, "the Yankees can build bridges quicker than the Rebs can burn them down."²⁶

Within four days Haupt had trains running over the line Jackson had cut. But unfortunately for the North, Pope's military abilities did not match Haupt's engineering genius. Still confident and aggressive, Pope saw Jackson's raid as an opportunity to "bag" Jackson before the other half of Lee's army could join him. The only problem was to find the slippery Stonewall. After burning the supply depot at Manassas, Jackson's troops disappeared. Pope's overworked cavalry reported the rebels to be at various places. This produced a stream of orders and countermanding orders to the fragmented corps of three commands: his own,

25. Francis A. Lord, Lincoln's Railroad Man: Herman Haupt (Rutherford, N.J., 1969), 77.

26. Turner, Victory Rode the Rails, Frontispiece.

two corps of the Army of the Potomac sent to reinforce him, and part of Burnside's 9th Corps which had been transferred from the North Carolina coast.

One of the Army of the Potomac units moving up to support Pope was Fitz-John Porter's corps, whose commander had called Pope an Ass and who had recently written in another private letter: "Would that this army was in Washington to rid us of incumbents ruining our country."²⁷During this fateful August 28, Porter's friend McClellan was at Alexandria resisting Halleck's orders to hurry forward another Army of the Potomac corps to Pope's aid. McClellan shocked the president with a suggestion that all available troops be held under his command to defend Washington, leaving Pope "to get out of his scrape by himself." If "Pope is beaten," wrote McClellan to his wife, "they may want me to save Washington again. Nothing but their fears will induce them to give me any command of importance."²⁸ Almost broken down by worry, Halleck failed to assert his authority over McClellan. Thus two of the best corps in the Army of the Potomac remained within marching distance of Pope but took no part in the ensuing battle.

Meanwhile Jackson's troops had gone to ground on a wooded ridge a couple of miles west of the old Manassas battlefield. Lee and Longstreet with the rest of the army were only a few miles away, having broken through a gap in the Bull Run Mountains which Pope had neglected to defend with a sufficient force. Stuart's cavalry had maintained liaison between Lee and Jackson, so the latter knew that Longstreet's advance units would join him on the morning of August 29.

The previous evening one of Pope's divisions had stumbled onto Jackson's hiding place. In a fierce firefight at dusk the outnumbered blue-coats had inflicted considerable damage before withdrawing in a battered condition themselves. Conspicuous in this action was an all-western brigade (one Indiana and three Wisconsin regiments) that soon earned a reputation as one of the best units in the army and became known as the Iron Brigade. By the war's end it suffered a higher percentage of casualties than any other brigade in the Union armies—a distinction matched by one of the units it fought against on this and other battle-

27. Porter to Manton Marble, Aug. 10, 1862, quoted in T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), 148.

28. CWL, V, 399; Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 45; McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Aug. 22,1862, McClellan Papers.

fields, the all-Virginia Stonewall Brigade, which experienced more casualties than any other Confederate brigade.

Having found Jackson, Pope brought his scattered corps together by forced marches during the night and morning of August 28–29. Because he thought that Jackson was preparing to retreat toward Longstreet (when in fact Longstreet was advancing toward Jackson), Pope committed an error. Instead of waiting until he had concentrated a large force in front of Jackson, he hurled his divisions one after another in piecemeal assaults against troops who instead of retreating were ensconced in ready-made trenches formed by the cuts and fills of an unfinished railroad. The Yankees came on with fatalistic fury and almost broke Jackson's line several times. But the rebels hung on grimly and threw them back.

Pope managed to get no more than 32,000 men into action against Jackson's 22,000 on August 29. The fault was not entirely his. Coming up on the Union left during the morning were another 30,000 in McDowell's large corps and Porter's smaller one. McDowell maneuvered ineffectually during the entire day; only after dark did a few of his regiments get into a moonlight skirmish with the enemy. As for Porter, his state of mind this day is hard to fathom. He believed that Long-street's entire corps was in his front—as indeed it was by noon—and therefore with 10,000 men Porter did nothing while thousands of other northern soldiers were fighting and dying two miles away. Not realizing that Longstreet's corps had arrived, Pope ordered Porter in late afternoon to attack Jackson's right flank. Porter could not obey because Longstreet connected with Jackson's flank; besides, Porter had no respect for Pope and resented taking orders from him, so he continued to do nothing. For this he was later court-martialed and cashiered from the service.²⁹

29. Porter remained in command of the 5th Corps until November, when he was ordered before the court-martial, which convicted him. After the war the cashiered general repeatedly sought a new trial and finally won reversal of the verdict in 1886, when testimony by Confederate officers and the evidence provided by captured southern records demonstrated that Longstreet had indeed been in Porter's front and that the Union general therefore could not have obeyed Pope's order. To some degree Porter was the victim of Republican attacks on McClellan and his associates, of whom Porter was the closest. But Porter's failure to do anything with his corps on August 29 deserved at least mild censure. For a study of this affair that is sympathetic to Porter, see Otto Eisenschiml, The Celebrated Case of Fitz-John Porter (Indianapolis, 1950); for brief critical appraisals, see Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), I, 324–30, II, 785–89; and Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, 522–23.

While Pope fought only with his right hand on August 29, Lee parried only with his left. When Longstreet got his 30,000 men in line during the early afternoon, Lee asked him to go forward in an attack to relieve the pressure on Jackson. But Longstreet demurred, pointing out that a Union force of unknown strength (Porter and McDowell) was out there somewhere in the woods. Unlike Lee and Jackson, Longstreet preferred to fight on the defensive and hoped to induce these Federals to attack him. Lee deferred to his subordinate's judgment. Thus while Longstreet's presence neutralized 30,000 Federals, they also neutralized Longstreet.

That night a few Confederate brigades pulled back from advanced positions to readjust their line. Having made several wrong guesses about the enemy's intentions during the past few days, Pope guessed wrong again when he assumed this movement to be preliminary to a retreat. He wanted so much to "see the backs of our enemies"—as he had professed always to have done in the West—that he believed it about to happen. He sent a victory dispatch to Washington and prepared to pursue the supposedly retreating rebels.

But when Pope's pursuit began next day the bluecoats went no more than a few hundred yards before being stopped in their tracks by bullets from Jackson's infantry still holding their roadbed trenches. The Federals hesitated only momentarily before attacking in even heavier force than the previous day. The exhausted southerners bent and almost broke. Some units ran out of ammunition and resorted to throwing rocks at the Yankees. Jackson was forced to swallow his pride and call on Long-street for reinforcements. Longstreet had a better idea. He brought up artillery to enfilade the Union attackers and then hurled all five of his divisions in a screaming counterattack against the Union left, which had been weakened by Pope's shift of troops to his right for the assaults on Jackson. Once Longstreet's men went into action they hit the surprised northerners like a giant hammer. Until sunset a furious contest raged all along the line. The bluecoats fell back doggedly to Henry House Hill, scene of the hardest fighting in that first battle in these parts thirteen months earlier. Here they made a twilight stand that brought the rebel juggernaut to a halt.

That night Pope—all boastfulness gone—decided to pull back toward Washington. On September 1 two blue divisions fought a vicious rearguard action at Chantilly, only twenty miles from Washington, against Jackson's weary corps which Lee had sent on another clockwise march for one final attempt to hit the retreating Union flank. After warding off this thrust in a drenching thunderstorm, the beaten-down bluecoats trudged into the capital's defenses. During the previous five days they had suffered 16,000 casualties out of a total force of 65,000, while Lee's 55,000 had lost fewer than 10,000 men. Lee's achievement in his second strategic offensive was even more remarkable than in his first. Less than a month earlier the main Union army had been only twenty miles from Richmond. With half as many troops as his two opponents (Pope and McClellan), Lee had shifted the scene to twenty miles from Washington, where the rebels seemed poised for the kill.

Behind Union lines all was confusion. When news of the fighting reached Washington, Secretary of War Stanton appealed for volunteer nurses to go out to help with the wounded. Many government clerks and other civilians responded, but a portion of them—a male portion—turned out to be worse than useless. Some were drunk by the time they reached the front, where they bribed a few ambulance drivers with whiskey to take them back to Washington instead of the wounded. To this shameful episode should be contrasted the herculean labors of Herman Haupt, who sent trains through the chaos to bring back wounded men, and the sleepless work of numerous women nurses headed by Clara Barton. "The men were brot down from the field and laid on the ground beside the train and so back up the hill 'till they covered acres," wrote Barton a few days later. The nurses opened hay bales and spread the hay on the ground to provide bedding. "By midnight there must have been three thousand helpless men lying in that hay. . . . All night we made compresses and slings—and bound up and wet wounds, when we could get water, fed what we could, travelled miles in that dark over these poor helpless wretches, in terror lest some one's candle fall into the hay and consume them all."³⁰

The despair of that dark night spread through the North during the first half of September. "The nation is rapidly sinking just now," wrote a New York diarist. "Stonewall Jackson (our national bugaboo) about to invade Maryland, 40,000 strong. General advance of the rebel line threatening our hold on Missouri and Kentucky. Cincinnati in danger.

30. Barton to Mrs. Shaver, Sept. 4, 1862, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

. . . Disgust with our present government is certainly universal."³¹ Army morale also plunged. Although the men had fought well, they knew they had been mishandled. And they knew whom to blame: Pope and McDowell. Baseless rumors of treason rose against McDowell—for no other reason, perhaps, than that this luckless general had commanded the army at first Bull Run and commanded its largest corps in the reprise. Pope and McDowell in turn blamed McClellan and Porter for lack of cooperation and refusal to obey orders.

The administration was inclined to agree with Pope. Lincoln considered McClellan's behavior "unpardonable." He "wanted Pope to fail," the president told his private secretary. The cabinet almost unanimously favored McClellan's dismissal. But the president instead merged Pope's army into the Army of the Potomac, put McClellan in charge of the defense of Washington, sent Pope to Minnesota to pacify Indians, and relieved McDowell of command and ultimately exiled him to California. Stanton and Chase remonstrated against the retention of McClellan. Lincoln himself was "greatly distressed" by having to do it. But while McClellan "had acted badly in this matter," said the president, he "has the Army with him. . . . We must use what tools we have. There is no man in the Army who can lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he. . . . If he can't fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight."³²

Lincoln's judgment was confirmed by an extraordinary incident that occurred during the dispirited retreat of Pope's troops toward Washington on September 2. The weather was "cold and rainy," recalled a veteran years later. "Everything bore a look of sadness in unison with our feelings. . . . Here were stragglers plodding through the mud . . . wagons wrecked and forlorn; half-formed regiments, part of the men with guns and part without . . . while everyone you met . . . looked as if he would like to hide his head somewhere from all the world." Suddenly an officer with a lone escort rode by and a captain came running back to the bivouac. "Colonel! Colonel! General McClellan is here!" he shouted. " 'Little Mac' is back here on the road."

Enlisted men caught the sound! . . . From extreme sadness we passed in a twinkling to a delirium of delight. A Deliverer had come. . . .

31. Strong, Diary, 253, 252, 256.

32. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 47; Howard K. Beale, ed., The Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 113; Donald, ed., Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: Diaries of Chase, 116–21.

Men threw their caps high into the air, and danced and frolicked like school-boys. . . . Shout upon shout went out into the stillness of the night; and as it was taken up along the road and repeated by regiment, brigade, division, and corps, we could hear the roar dying away in the distance. . . . The effect of this man's presence upon the Army of the Potomac . . . was electrical, and too wonderful to make it worth while attempting to give a reason for it.³³

Within days McClellan had the army ready for field service again. And they had to take the field immediately, for with scarcely a pause Lee was leading his ragged but confident veterans across the Potomac for an invasion of the North. Most northerners saw this as a calamity. But Lincoln viewed it as an opportunity to cripple Lee's army far from its home base. He told McClellan to go after Lee, and "destroy the rebel army, if possible."³⁴

Lee and Davis recognized that this could happen, but after weighing the alternatives they had decided that the possible gains outweighed the risk. The Army of Northern Virginia could not attack the formidable Washington defenses. It could not stay where it was, in a fought-over region denuded of supplies at the end of a long and precarious rail line. Men and horses were worn down by the relentless marching and fighting of the past ten weeks; their "uniforms" were rags; some of them lacked shoes. The safe course was to pull back toward Richmond to rest and refit. But Lee was not the man to choose the safe course. Though weary, his army was flushed with victory and the enemy was unnerved by defeat. Lee sensed that this was the North's low-water mark. Kirby Smith and Bragg were marching into Kentucky. Van Dorn and Price were preparing to invade Tennessee. This was no time for the Army of Northern Virginia to rest on its laurels. It must take the war into the North and force the Lincoln government to sue for peace. Maryland like Kentucky beckoned with the prospect of joining her sister slave states. Lee's hungry warriors could feed themselves from the fat farms of Maryland and Pennsylvania while drawing the enemy out of war-ravaged Virginia during the harvest season. At the very least, Lee could cut the B & O and—if things went well—burn the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge over the Susquehanna at Harrisburg, thereby severing Washington's main links with the West. A successful invasion might induce European powers

33. William H. Powell and George Kimball quoted in Battles and Leaders, II, 490n. and 550—51n.

34. Lincoln to McClellan, Sept. 15, 1862, in CWL, V, 426.

to recognize Confederate nationhood. It might encourage Peace Democrats in the upcoming northern elections. A "proposal of peace" backed by southern armies on northern soil, wrote Lee to Davis on September 8, "would enable the people of the United States to determine at their coming elections whether they will support those who favor a prolongation of the war, or those who wish to bring it to a termination."³⁵

For political as well as military reasons, therefore, Lee started his army splashing across the Potomac fords thirty-five miles above Washington on September 4. Reinforced by three divisions called from Richmond, the army numbered some 55,000 men before it crossed the river. But from a variety of causes—exhaustion, hunger, sickness from subsisting on green corn, torn feet from marching barefoot on stony roads—stragglers fell out by the thousands during the next few days. A Virginia woman who lived in a Potomac River town described these stragglers:

When I say that they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes. All day they crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: "I've been a-marchin' and a-fightin' for six weeks stiddy, and I ain't had n-a-r-thin' to eat 'cept green apples an' green cawn, an' I wish you'd please to gimme a bite to eat." . . . I saw the troops march past us every summer for four years, and I know something of the appearance of a marching army, both Union and Southern. There are always stragglers, of course, but never before or after did I see anything comparable to [this]. . . . That they could march or fight at all seemed incredible.³⁶

Most of the soldiers, however, were in high spirits as they entered Frederick on September 6 singing "Maryland, My Maryland." But like Bragg's army in Kentucky, they received a less enthusiastic welcome than they had hoped. This was the unionist part of Maryland. And these rebels did not inspire confidence. One resident of Frederick described them as "the filthiest set of men and officers I ever saw; with clothing that . . . had not been changed for weeks. They could be

35. Clifford Dowdey, ed., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (Boston, 1961), 301. For an analysis of Lee's motives and goals for the invasion, see Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), II, 350–53.

36. Mary Bedinger Mitchell, "A Woman's Recollections of Antietam," Battles and Leaders, II, 687–88.

smelt all over the entire inclosure."³⁷ Although the men behaved with more restraint toward civilian property than Union soldiers were wont to do, their purchases of supplies with Confederate scrip did not win popularity. Despite the cool reception, Lee doggedly followed President Davis's instructions and issued an address "To the People of Maryland." We have come, he said, "with the deepest sympathy [for] the wrongs that have been inflicted upon the citizens of a commonwealth allied to the States of the South by the strongest social, political, and commercial ties . . . to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen."³⁸ The silent response of Marylanders was eloquent. It constituted the first failure of the invasion.

The second was caused by a stroke of fate which proved that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction. Although Lee expected his army to live largely off the land, he needed to open a minimal supply line through the Shenandoah Valley, especially for ammunition. But the Union garrison at Harper's Ferry blocked this route. Known as the "railroad brigade," this unit had the duty of protecting the B & O and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. When the Confederate invasion cut these arteries east of Harper's Ferry, McClellan urged Halleck to transfer the garrison to the Army of the Potomac, which was marching from Washington to intercept Lee. But Halleck refused—an unsound strategic decision that unwittingly baited a trap for Lee.

To eliminate this garrison in his rear, Lee detached almost two-thirds of his army and sent them in three columns (the largest under Jackson) to converge on the heights overlooking Harper's Ferry. Planning to net the 12,000 bluecoats there like fish in a barrel, Lee intended to reunite his army for a move on Harrisburg before McClellan could cross the South Mountain range that protected the rebel flank. For the third time in three campaigns Lee was dividing his army in the presence of a larger enemy. To an officer who expressed concern about this, Lee replied: "Are you acquainted with General McClellan? He is an able general but a very cautious one. . . . His army is in a very demoralized and chaotic condition, and will not be prepared for offensive operations—or he will not think it so—for three or four weeks. Before that time I hope to be on the Susquehanna."³⁹

37. James F. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee's Maryland Campaign, September 1862 (New York, 1965), 108.

38. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 19, pt. 2, 601–2.

39. John G. Walker, "Jackson's Capture of Harper's Ferry," Battles and Leaders, II, 605–6.

But instead of three of four weeks, Lee had only that many days before the enemy would be upon him. To be sure, McClellan with 70,000 men (soon reinforced to 80,000) was moving cautiously in search of Lee's 50,000 (which he estimated at 110,000). But the bluecoats were no longer demoralized, and on September 13 their non-gambling commander hit the all-time military jackpot. In a field near Frederick two Union soldiers found a copy of Lee's orders, wrapped around three cigars lost by a careless southern officer, detailing the objectives for the four separate parts of his army. This fantastic Juck revealed to McClellan that each part of the enemy army was several miles from any of the others and that the two largest units were twenty or twenty-five miles apart with the Potomac between them. With his whole force McClellan could push through the South Mountain passes and gobble up the pieces of Lee's army before they could reunite. McClellan recognized his opportunity; to one of his generals he exulted, "Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip 'Bobbie Lee,' I will be willing to go home."⁴⁰

Although animated by this vision, McClellan did not want to move rashly—after all, those rebels still outnumbered him. Instead of setting his troops in motion immediately, McClellan made careful plans and did not order the men forward until daylight on September 14, eighteen hours after he had learned of Lee's dispositions. As things turned out, this delay enabled Lee to concentrate and save his army. A pro-Confederate citizen of Maryland had witnessed McClellan's response to the finding of the lost orders and had ridden hard to inform Stuart, who passed the information along to Lee on the night of September 13. Lee ordered troops to block the passes through South Mountain. Next day two Union corps fought up-hill against D. H. Hill's Confederate division defending Turner's Gap. Taking heavy losses, Hill's hardy band hung on behind stone walls and trees until Longstreet came up with reinforcements and held off the Federals until nightfall. Withdrawing after dark, these outnumbered rebels had given Lee an extra day. Meanwhile another Union corps under William B. Franklin had smashed through Crampton's Gap six miles to the south after a sharp firefight with three Confederate brigades. Despite great numerical superiority, Franklin advanced timidly southward toward the forces besieging Harper's Ferry and failed to arrive in time to save the Union garrison at the Ferry.

40. John Gibbon, Personal Recollections of the Civil War (New York, 1928), 73.

Although the half of Lee's army north of the Potomac had warded off disaster, the invasion of Maryland appeared doomed. The whole Union army would be across South Mountain next day. The only apparent Confederate option seemed to be retreat into the Shenandoah Valley. But when Lee received word that Jackson expected to capture Harper's Ferry on September 15, he changed his mind about retreating. He ordered the whole army to concentrate at Sharpsburg, a Maryland village about a mile from the Potomac. Lee had decided to offer battle. To return to Virginia without fighting would mean loss of face. It might endanger diplomatic efforts to win foreign recognition. It would depress southern morale. Having beaten the Federals twice before, Lee thought he could do it again—for he still believed the Army of the Potomac to be demoralized.

Lee's estimate of northern morale seemed to be confirmed by Jackson's easy capture of Harper's Ferry. The Union garrison was composed mostly of new troops under a second-rate commander—Colonel Dixon Miles, a Marylander who had been reprimanded for drunkenness at First Bull Run and whose defense of Harper's Ferry was so inept as to arouse suspicions of treason. Killed in the last exchange of fire before the surrender, Miles did not have to defend himself against such a charge. As Jackson rode into town dressed as usual in a nondescript uniform and battered fatigue cap, one of the disarmed Union soldiers said, "Boys, he's not much for looks, but if we'd had him we wouldn't have been caught in this trap!"⁴¹

The various Confederate units that had besieged Harper's Ferry marched as fast as possible for Sharpsburg fifteen miles away. Until they arrived on September 16 and 17, Lee had only three divisions in line with their backs to the Potomac over which only one ford offered an escape in case of defeat. During September 15 the Army of the Potomac began arriving at Antietam Creek a mile or two east of Lee's position. Still acting with the caution befitting his estimate of Lee's superior force, McClellan launched no probing attacks and sent no cavalry reconnaisance across the creek to determine Confederate strength. On September

41. Henry Kyd Douglas, "Stonewall Jackson in Maryland," Battles and Leaders, II, 627. Paul R. Teetor, A Matter of Hours: Treason at Harper's Ferry (Rutherford, N.J., 1982), argues from circumstantial evidence that Miles deliberately sabotaged the defense of the garrison. A retired judge who presents his argument in the manner of a brief against Miles, Teetor cannot be said to have "proved" his case though he has raised several disturbing questions.

16 the northern commander had 60,000 men on hand and another 15,000 within six miles to confront Lee's 25,000 or 30,000. Having informed Washington that he would crush Lee's army in detail while it was separated, McClellan missed his second chance to do so on the 16th while he matured plans for an attack on the morrow. Late that afternoon—as two more Confederate divisions slogged northward from Harper's Ferry—McClellan sent two corps across the Antietam north of the Confederate left, precipitating a sharp little fight that alerted Lee to the point of the initial Union attack at dawn next day.

Antietam (called Sharpsburg by the South) was one of the few battles of the war in which both commanders deliberately chose the field and planned their tactics beforehand. Instead of entrenching, the Confederates utilized the cover of small groves, rock outcroppings, stone walls, dips and swells in the rolling farmland, and a sunken road in the center of their line. Only the southernmost of three bridges over the Antietam was within rebel rifle range; this bridge would become one of the keys to the battle. McClellan massed three corps on the Union right to deliver the initial attack and placed Burnside's large gth Corps on the left with orders to create a diversion to prevent Lee from transferring troops from this sector to reinforce his left. McClellan held four Union divisions and the cavalry in reserve behind the right and center to exploit any breakthrough. He also expected Burnside to cross the creek and roll up the Confederate right if opportunity offered. It was a good battle plan and if well executed it might have accomplished Lincoln's wish to "destroy the rebel army."

But it was not well executed. On the Union side the responsibility for this lay mainly on the shoulders of McClellan and Burnside. McClellan failed to coordinate the attacks on the right, which therefore went forward in three stages instead of simultaneously. This allowed Lee time to shift troops from quiet sectors to meet the attacks. The Union commander also failed to send in the reserves when the bluecoats did manage to achieve a breakthrough in the center. Burnside wasted the morning and part of the afternoon crossing the stubbornly defended bridge when his men could have waded the nearby fords against little opposition. As a result of Burnside's tardiness, Lee was able to shift a division in the morning from the Confederate right to the hard-pressed left where it arrived just in time to break the third wave of the Union attack. On the Confederate side the credit for averting disaster belonged to the skillful generalship of Lee and his subordinates but above all to the desperate courage of men in the ranks. "It is beyond all wonder," wrote a Union officer after the battle, "how such men as the rebel troops can fight on as they do; that, filthy, sick, hungry, and miserable, they should prove such heroes in fight, is past explanation."⁴²

The fighting at Antietam was among the hardest of the war. The Army of the Potomac battled with grim determination to expunge the dishonor of previous defeats. Yankee soldiers were not impelled by fearless bravery or driven by iron discipline. Few men ever experience the former and Civil War soldiers scarcely knew the latter. Rather, they were motivated in the mass by the potential shame of another defeat and in small groups by the potential shame of cowardice in the eyes of comrades. A northern soldier who fought at Antietam gave as good an explanation of behavior in battle as one is likely to find anywhere. "We heard all through the war that the army 'was eager to be led against the enemy,' " he wrote with a nice sense of irony. "It must have been so, for truthful correspondents said so, and editors confirmed it. But when you came to hunt for this particular itch, it was always the next regiment that had it. The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness." But when the order came to go forward, his regiment did not falter. "In a second the air was full of the hiss of bullets and the hurtle of grape-shot. The mental strain was so great that I saw at that moment the singular effect mentioned, I think, in the life of Goethe on a similar occasion—the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red." This psychological state produced a sort of fighting madness in many men, a superadrenalized fury that turned them into mindless killing machines heedless of the normal instinct of self-preservation. This frenzy seems to have prevailed at Antietam on a greater scale than in any previous Civil War battle. "The men are loading and firing with demonaical fury and shouting and laughing hysterically," wrote a Union officer in the present tense a quarter-century later as if that moment of red-sky madness lived in him yet.⁴³

42. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets, 250.

43. David L. Thompson, "With Burnside at Antietam," Battles and Leaders, II, 661–62; Rufus R. Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin, quoted in Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets, 218. The 6th Wisconsin, a regiment in the Iron Brigade, lost 40 men killed and 112 wounded out of about 300 engaged at Antietam.

Joseph Hooker's Union 1st Corps led the attack at dawn by sweeping down the Hagerstown Pike from the north. Rebels waited for them in what came to be known as the West Woods and The Cornfield just north of a whitewashed church of the pacifist Dunkard sect. "Fighting Joe" Hooker—an aggressive, egotistical general who aspired to command the Army of the Potomac—had earned his sobriquet on the Peninsula. He confirmed it here. His men drove back Jackson's corps from the cornfield and pike, dealing out such punishment that Lee sent reinforcements from D. H. Hill's division in the center and Longstreet's corps on the right. These units counterpunched with a blow that shattered Hooker's corps before the Union 12th Corps launched the second wave of the northern assault. This attack also penetrated the Confederate lines around the Dunkard Church before being hurled back with heavy losses, whereupon a third wave led by a crack division of "Bull" Sumner's 2nd Corps broke through the rebel line in the West Woods. Before these bluecoats could roll up the flank, however, one Confederate division that had arrived that morning from Harper's Ferry and another that Lee had shifted from the inactive right near Burnside's bridge suddenly popped out in front, flank, and rear of Sumner's division and all but wiped it out with a surprise counterattack. Severely wounded and left for dead in this action was a young captain in the 20th Massachusetts, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

For five hours a dreadful slaughter raged on the Confederate left. Twelve thousand men lay dead and wounded. Five Union and five Confederate divisions had been so cut up that they backed off as if by mutual consent and did no more serious fighting this day. In the meantime Sumner's other two divisions had obliqued left to deal with a threat to their flank from Confederates in a sunken farm road southeast of the Dunkard Church. This brought on the midday phase of the battle in which blue and gray slugged it out for this key to the rebel center, known ever after as Bloody Lane. The weight of numbers and firepower finally enabled the blue to prevail. Broken southern brigades fell back to regroup in the outskirts of Sharpsburg itself. A northern war correspondent who came up to Bloody Lane minutes after the Federals captured it could scarcely find words to describe this "ghastly spectacle" where "Confederates had gone down as the grass falls before the scythe."⁴⁴

Now was the time for McClellan to send in his reserves. The enemy center was wide open. "There was no body of Confederate infantry in

44. Charles Carleton Coffin, "Antietam Scenes," Battles and Leaders, II, 684.

this part of the field that could have resisted a serious advance," wrote a southern officer. "Lee's army was ruined, and the end of the Confederacy was in sight," added another.⁴⁵ But the carnage suffered by three Union corps during the morning had shaken McClellan. He decided not to send in the fresh 6th Corps commanded by Franklin, who was eager to go forward. Believing that Lee must be massing his supposedly enormous reserves for a counterattack, McClellan told Franklin that "it would not be prudent to make the attack."⁴⁶ So the center of the battlefield fell silent as events on the Confederate right moved toward a new climax.

All morning a thin brigade of Georgians hidden behind trees and a stone wall had carried on target practice against Yankee regiments trying to cross Burnside's bridge. The southern brigade commander was Robert A. Toombs, who enjoyed here his finest hour as a soldier. Disappointed by his failure to become president of the Confederacy, bored by his job as secretary of state, Toombs had taken a brigadier's commission to seek the fame and glory to which he felt destined. Reprimanded more than once by superiors for inefficiency and insubordination, Toombs spent many of his leisure hours denouncing Jefferson Davis and the "West Point clique" who were ruining army and country. For his achievement in holding Burnside's whole corps for several hours at Antietam—and being wounded in the process—Toombs expected promotion, but did not get it and subsequently resigned to go public with his anti-administration exhortations.

In the early afternoon of September 17 two of Burnside's crack regiments finally charged across the bridge at a run, taking heavy losses to establish a bridgehead on the rebel side. Other units found fords about the same time, and by mid-afternoon three of Burnside's divisions were driving the rebels in that sector back toward Sharpsburg and threatening to cut the road to the only ford over the Potomac. Here was another crisis for Lee and an opportunity for McClellan. Fitz-John Porter's 5th Corps stood available as a reserve to support Burnside's advance. One of Porter's division commanders urged McClellan to send him in to bolster Burnside. McClellan hesitated and seemed about to give the order when he looked at Porter, who shook his head. "Remember, General," Porter was heard to say, "I command the last reserve of the last

45. Frederick Tilbert, Antietam (Washington, 1961), 39; E. P. Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate, ed. T. Harry Williams (Bloomington, 1962), 262.

46. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 19, pt. 1, p. 577.

army of the Republic."⁴⁷ This warning reminded McClellan of the danger from those phantom reserves on the other side, so he refused to give the order.

Meanwhile Lee looked anxiously to the south where his right flank seemed to be disintegrating. Suddenly he saw a cloud of dust in the distance that soon materialized as marching men. "Whose troops are those?" Lee asked a nearby lieutenant with a telescope. The lieutenant peered intently for what seemed an eternity, then said: "They are flying the Virginia and Confederate flags, sir." Sighing with relief, Lee observed: "It is A. P. Hill from Harper's Ferry."⁴⁸ Indeed it was. Having remained behind to complete the surrender arrangements, Hill had driven his hard-fighting division up the road at a killing pace in response to an urgent summons from Lee. These troops crashed into Burnside's flank in late afternoon just as the Yankees seemed about to crumple Lee's right. Surprised and confused, the Union attackers milled around, stopped, and retreated. The surprise was compounded by the captured blue uniforms many of Hill's men were wearing, which caused four Union flank regiments to hold their fire for fatal minutes.

Night fell on a scene of horror beyond imagining. Nearly 6,000 men lay dead or dying, and another 17,000 wounded groaned in agony or endured in silence. The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined. After dark on September 17 the weary southern corps and division commanders gathered at Lee's headquarters to report losses of 50 percent or more in several brigades. Scarcely 30,000 Confederates remained alive and unwounded. Lee nevertheless stayed in position next day almost as if to dare McClellan to renew the assault. McClellan refused the dare. Although two more fresh Union divisions arrived in the morning, he was still hypnotized by a vision of Lee's limitless legions. The armies remained quiet during the 18th, and that night Lee yielded to necessity and ordered his troops back to Virginia. McClellan mounted a feeble pursuit, which A. P. Hill brushed off on September 20, and the Confederates got clean away into the Valley.

47. Thomas M. Anderson, in Battles and Leaders, II, 656n. Porter later denied the occurrence of this incident, but his testimony is suspect.

48. Murfin, The Gleam of Bayonets, 282.

McClellan wired news of a great victory to Washington. "Maryland is entirely freed from the presence of the enemy, who has been driven across the Potomac. No fears need now be entertained for the safety of Pennsylvania." Forgotten were Lincoln's instructions to "destroy the rebel army." Secretary of the Navy Welles may have echoed the president's opinion when he wrote two days after the battle: "Nothing from the army, except that, instead of following up the victory, attacking and capturing the Rebels, they . . . are rapidly escaping across the river. . . . Oh dear!" In letters to his wife, McClellan expressed pride in his achievement and pique at such fault-finding. "Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly & that it was a masterpiece of art. . . . I feel that I have done all that can be asked in twice saving the country. . . . I feel some little pride in having, with a beaten & demoralized army, defeated Lee so utterly. . . . Well, one of these days history will I trust do me justice."⁴⁹

History can at least record Antietam as a strategic Union success. Lee's invasion of Maryland recoiled more quickly than Bragg's invasion of Kentucky. Nearly one-third of the rebels who marched into Maryland became casualties. When an unwary regimental band struck up "Maryland, My Maryland" after the retreat across the Potomac, men in the ranks hissed and groaned. Seeing the point, the musicians switched to "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." At Whitehall and the White House the battle of Antietam also went down as a northern victory. It frustrated Confederate hopes for British recognition and precipitated the Emancipation Proclamation. The slaughter at Sharpsburg therefore proved to have been one of the war's great turning points.

49. Beale, ed., Diary of Welles, I, 140; McClellan to Halleck, Sept. 19, 1862, in McClellan's Own Story (New York, 1887), 621; McClellan to Ellen McClellan, Sept. 18, 20, 1862, McClellan Papers.