CHAPTER 30
Washington is full of exciting, vague, and absurd rumors . . . We have information that the Rebels have crossed the Potomac in considerable force, with a view of invading Maryland and pushing on into Pennsylvania. The War Department is bewildered, knows but little, does nothing, proposes nothing.
—GIDEON WELLES
Lincoln
Emboldened by another victory at Manassas, Confederate forces crossed the Potomac singing “Maryland, My Maryland.”* Their hopes were manifold: to live off the farms of the North, to “liberate” Maryland and bring her into the Confederacy, to reduce support for the northern war effort, and to help secure foreign recognition for the Confederacy. Lee expected the federal garrison at Harper’s Ferry to pursue him, opening up his supply lines to the Shenandoah Valley. When they stayed put, he sent three-fourths of his army under Jackson to dislodge them.
* This Confederate battle hymn remains the state song of Maryland.
On September 13, Union forces were near Frederick, Maryland, in search of Lee. One private noticed something out of the ordinary: three cigars wrapped in paper, lying on the ground. It was an order from Lee’s adjutant-general, detailing the planned movement of his army. Lee, who badly needed time to reunite with Jackson, was in great peril.
McClellan caught up with Confederate forces the following day and fought them for control of three mountain passes. The Confederates had lost them by the evening, but had gained another day’s delay. The following morning, Jackson forced the largest Union surrender of the entire war, 12,500 troops at Harper’s Ferry.
Late that afternoon, McClellan found his adversary near the town of Sharpsburg, west of Antietam Creek. When all of Jackson’s men returned, Lee would still have no more than thirty-eight thousand men; McClellan could bring seventy-five thousand to the fight.
At dawn on the 17th, one reporter remembered cannons “reverberating from cloud to mountain and from mountain to cloud . . . a continuous roar, like the unbroken roll of a thunder storm.” He was seven miles away.
At first light Union general Joseph Hooker crossed the creek and came down against Lee’s left flank. Separated by thirty acres of David Miller’s corn, the two forces eventually crashed, with “men firing into each other’s faces, the Confederate line breaking, the ground strewn with prostrate forms.” In the “sunken road,” a trench worn into the ground by wagon use, the reporter witnessed “a ghastly spectacle . . . resolution and energy still lingered in the pallid cheeks, in the set teeth, in the gripping hand” of the dead. “A young lieutenant had fallen while trying to rally his men; his hand was still firmly grasping his sword, and determination was visible in every line of his face.” Bodies lay together “in a heap amid the corn rows . . . the broad, green leaves were sprinkled and stained with blood.” Thirteen thousand died or were injured in the first four hours. Later that morning, Union forces were thrown against the center of Lee’s men. In the late afternoon, Union general Ambrose Burnside finally found and battled his way across a bridge to the south, hitting Lee to the right. As the Confederate army faced annihilation, a division of Jackson’s men crashed into Burnside’s forces, pushing them back across the bridge. McClellan’s delay had allowed Lee to reunite his army. Such were the state of things when the sun set on the bloodiest day of battle in the history of the United States. Among the killed, injured, or missing were 22,700 men, 12,400 Union and 10,300 Confederates.
Lincoln spent the day at the Soldiers’ Home,* completing his second draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He had resolved to wait for a victory. The carnage at Antietam would have to do.
* Lincoln’s presidential retreat, now known as “President Lincoln’s Cottage,” is open to the public, as is the room where he worked on the Emancipation Proclamation.
The next day, McClellan refused to give battle again. McClellan believed that Lee had 120,000 men, though in fact he outnumbered Lee by better than two to one. McClellan had twenty-nine thousand fresh troops that had not been used the first day, two-thirds of Lee’s entire force. But the battle was not made. That night, Lee began his retreat toward Virginia. When Lincoln heard the news, he wrote McClellan, “God bless you, and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if possible.”
But McClellan would not give chase. Lee’s men, who had sung “Maryland, My Maryland” on the way in, sang “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” as they left.
Shortly thereafter, representatives from the Woman’s Council called on the president. One woman remembered, “Not more ghastly or rigid was his dead face, as he lay in his coffin, than on that never to be forgotten night.” His appearance and the way he moved reminded her of a man sleepwalking. He briefly perked up when he learned that two of his guests were from Chicago. “You are not scared by Washington mud, then,” he said sitting between them, “for you can beat us all to pieces in that.”
The two ladies asked Lincoln for some words of encouragement, but he responded, “I have no word of encouragement to give!” He continued, “The fact is, the people haven’t yet made up their minds that we are at war with the South. They haven’t buckled down to the determination to fight this war through.
“They think there is a royal road to peace, and that General McClellan is to find it.” Furloughs and desertions outnumbered new recruits. Lincoln, who famously stretched for any reason to pardon soldiers, was asked, why not enforce the death penalty for desertion?
Lincoln protested, calling it “unmerciful, barbarous.” And the public would never stand for people executed by the dozens, “and they ought not to stand it.” Things would have to change a different way. In this Lincoln was correct. Nothing short of total war against the Confederacy could give the Union victory.
On September 22, Stanton was surprised to find himself summoned to a cabinet meeting. In light of managing his massive department, his attendance was not generally required. Lincoln read a story from Artemus Ward, and his cabinet laughed along, Stanton excepted. Lincoln then reached for his stovepipe hat and withdrew what he called “a little paper of much significance.”
In a “graver tone,” he said, “Gentlemen, I have, as you are aware, thought a great deal about the relation of this war to slavery; and you all remember that, several weeks ago, I read to you an order I had prepared on this subject, which, on account of objections made by some of you, was not issued. Ever since then, my mind has been much occupied with this subject, and I have thought all along that the time for acting on it might very probably come. I think the time has come now. I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion. When the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and,” he paused, “to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise.”
Stanton remembered Lincoln saying that “the question was finally decided, the act and the consequences were his, but that he felt it due to us to make us acquainted with the fact and to invite criticism on the paper which he had prepared.” Lincoln told his cabinet that 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, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation. It might be thought strange,” he acknowledged, but “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” Lincoln then read his proclamation to the cabinet. Pursuant to his powers as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, to seize the property of the enemy, he would declare, as of “January 1, 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Montgomery Blair of Maryland, voice of the border states in the cabinet, worried that the Unionist sentiment in the region would be jeopardized, and that throughout the North partisans would have a new weapon against the administration. Lincoln responded that the first was indeed a great danger, but no greater a danger than inaction, and did not worry about the second. At the end, only Bates and Blair dissented.
After the meeting, there was a gathering hosted by Chase where the guests drank wine “in a glorious humor.” Chase laughed, “this was a most wonderful history of an insanity of a class that the world had ever seen. If the slaveholders had stayed in the Union they might have kept the life in their institution for many years to come. That what no party and no public feeling in the north could ever have hoped to touch they had madly placed in the very path of destruction.” Hay noted, “They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life; they breathed freer; the President’s Proclamation had freed them as well as the slaves. They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.”
While many celebrated the September 22 issuing of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s challenges with McClellan were ongoing. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing?” Lincoln asked. “Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” When Lee invaded, Lincoln believed he tendered “us an advantage which we should not waive. We should not so operate as to merely drive him away. If we can not beat the enemy where he now is, we never can, he again being within the entrenchments of Richmond.” Reading about McClellan’s sore and fatigued horses, Lincoln wrote, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”
On October 3, Lincoln, joined by his friend Ward Hill Lamon, who had come with him to the White House from Illinois, surveyed the army, which he referred to as “General McClellan’s bodyguard.” While traveling from one corps to another, Lincoln, reflecting on the enormous loss of life in a war clearly far from finished, asked Lamon to sing one of his “little sad songs.” Lamon chose his friend’s favorite, “Twenty Years Ago”:
I’ve wandered to the village, Tom; I’ve sat beneath the tree
Upon the schoolhouse play-ground, that sheltered you and me:
But none were left to greet me, Tom, and few were left to know
Who played with us upon the green, some twenty years ago.