Chapter Six

TURNING POINT

1. Kill, Confiscate or Destroy

AFTER the spring of 1862 the Civil War began to dominate the men who were fighting it. They still had the option to win or to lose, but they could no longer quite be said to be in charge of it. Coming of age, the war began to impose its own conditions; finally it come to control men instead of being controlled by them.

Until that spring ended, the situation was still more or less fluid; the war might yet be disposed of in such a way that it would not become one of the great turning points in history. But after the western army had been scattered and ordered to occupy territory instead of destroying Confederate fighting power, and after the eastern army had been driven into its muggy camp of refuge at Harrison’s Landing, the situation began to harden. From now on many things would happen, not so much because anyone wanted them to happen as because the pressure of war made them inevitable.

This began to be visible that summer in the West.

Grant was holding Memphis, western Tennessee, and northern Mississippi — one division here, two divisions there, detachments spraddled out for hundreds of miles to guard bridges, railroad lines, junction towns, and river ports. Buell was marching east to take Chattanooga. He was moving along the line of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, repairing it as he went, condemned to a snail’s progress. Ahead of him he had Ormsby Mitchel’s division holding a stretch of northern Alabama.

Mitchel was a voice crying in the wilderness. He had been in Alabama since early April, when the rest of Buell’s people went down to fight at Shiloh and take part in the Corinth campaign. Mitchel had gone to Huntsville, where he seized the Memphis and Charleston machine shops, and he fanned troops out to east and west, taking special pains to take the railroad bridges over the Tennessee at Decatur and at Bridgeport. He kept pestering headquarters with urgent messages, asserting that from where he was he could see the end of the war. If Buell came over fast, he said, he could get into Chattanooga without trouble; after that he could capture Atlanta, and from Atlanta he could march all the way north to Richmond, because all of that part of the Confederacy was “comparatively unprotected and very much alarmed.”¹

Mitchel may very well have been right, but he could not get anyone to listen to him — except for Halleck and Buell, both of whom were irritated. He was told to break the railroad bridge at Decatur so that Rebels could not use the Memphis and Charleston if they regained possession of it, and after that he was to sit tight and await developments. He obeyed, fuming with impatience. As a diversion he sent out a handful of men on a long-shot raid to break the railroad that led from Chattanooga down to Atlanta; the raid failed, after a spectacular locomotive chase that has provided material for novelists, dramatists, and feature writers ever since, and most of the raiders were caught and hanged as spies. But finally, after Corinth was taken, Buell was sent over toward Chattanooga, and Mitchel was sternly rebuked for having destroyed the bridge at Decatur and was told to rebuild it.² He was also told to tighten up on discipline because his troops had been misbehaving badly.

Specifically, there was the case of the 19th Illinois and Colonel John Basil Turchin.

The 19th Illinois was a more or less typical midwestern regiment, but Turchin was neither typical nor middlewestern. He had been born in Russia forty years earlier, had been educated at the Imperial Military School in St. Petersburg, had served on the Russian general staff, and had fought in the Crimea. In 1856 he came to America and went to work in the engineering department of the Illinois Central Railroad, and when the Civil War started he got into uniform and became colonel of this 19th Illinois. He was a stiff drillmaster — he seems to have been a friend of the departed Elmer Ellsworth, whose amateur Zouaves cut such a swath on militia parade grounds just before the war — and when the 19th left Springfield late in the summer of 1861 it was considered something of a crack outfit.

The first thing that happened to the 19th was a train wreck, which occurred in Indiana while the regiment was on its way east to join the Army of the Potomac. The wreck was a horror, killing twenty-four men and injuring one hundred and five, as heavy a toll as a regular battle would have taken, and while the regiment was recuperating its orders were changed and it was sent down to Kentucky to join Buell’s army. Buell was impressed by the 19th’s smart appearance at drill, and Colonel Turchin soon had command of a brigade in Mitchel’s division.

Whatever its achievements on the parade ground, the 19th had a heavy hand with occupied territory. One of the northern Alabama towns was held by the 33rd Ohio, which did so much looting that on complaint of the citizens its colonel was rebuked and the regiment was withdrawn. The townsfolk exulted only briefly, for the 33rd was replaced by the 19th Illinois; and according to army legend, before the day was over the luckless citizens were begging the authorities to let them have the 33rd again — compared with the Illinois regiment, it was a model of decorum.

The real trouble, however, came in the town of Athens, Alabama, where one of Turchin’s regiments was shot up by lurking guerrillas. Turchin considered this a gross violation of the laws of war, and anyway he seems to have had a czarist officer’s notions about the way people ought to behave in occupied territory. He called up his 19th Illinois and drove the guerrillas away, and after things were under control he told the boys to go ahead and take the town apart — “I shut mine eyes for one hour.” One hour was all the 19th needed. When it got through, Athens looked as though it had been hit by Cossacks. Citizens later contributed forty-five affidavits alleging that personal property to the value of more than fifty thousand dollars had been carried off. Turchin was court-martialed and dismissed from the service (although somebody eventually pulled wires in Washington and got him reinstated); but what had happened really did not have very much to do with him, anyway. It was the Illinois boys and not the Imperial Russian officer who had carried off watches, jewelry, heirlooms, and oil paintings, and all that had been needed to set them off had been one signal.³

It was recalled afterward that a detachment of men from the 19th, given horses and assigned to work as scouts and couriers, promptly became famous as “the forty thieves,” and the regimental historian confessed that “perhaps there was some slight reason” for this title.⁴

Colonel Turchin may have been unique, but the 19th Illinois was not; it was just about average, and the average soldier in the western armies was learning to regard himself as a cross between licensed freebooter and avenging angel. In northern Mississippi a soldier was writing to his sister: “Our men are using this country awful rough. Such animals as chickens, fences, swine, etc., are entirely unseeable and unfindable within fifteen miles of where our camp has been this last week.” Oddly enough, this reflected high morale: “I never saw men in as good spirits and as confident as this army now appears … I can’t see why people will stay at home when they can get to soldiering. I think a year of it is worth getting shot for to any man.”⁵

The generals tried to stop this sort of thing, but they never came close. These volunteer soldiers were bound to get out of hand once they got into what they considered enemy country. Lieutenants and captains lived on terms of approximate equality with their men. They could not be severe with them; would not, in any case, the idea not entering their heads; and although generals might issue stern orders against looting and robbery, these orders were almost completely ignored at the operating level. Subalterns who were Pete and Joe to their men could not keep the army from trailing a cloud of stragglers wherever it went, and the stragglers were under no man’s control. Any farmhouse within ten miles of camp, one soldier estimated, would get at least fifty uniformed visitors a day, begging and cadging what they could and stealing anything that was not offered to them.⁶

The official records for this period are full of stiff orders from — of all people — William Tecumseh Sherman, who asserted passionately: “This demoralizing and disgraceful practice of pillage must cease, else the country will rise on us and justly shoot us down like dogs and wild beasts.” Even John Pope, whom the people of Virginia would soon consider the very author of lawless war, made himself highly unpopular with his volunteer troops by his efforts to restrain them. He met a party from the 27th Ohio bringing in a wagonload of fence rails for firewood, made them return the rails, and then ordered their colonel to “put these ——————— in the guard house until they could be court-martialed and shot as an example to the rest of the — — volunteer — —”⁷

None of this did any good (and the volunteers went unhanged) for the fact was that the army saw nothing in the least wrong in taking what it needed from the people of the South. Higher officials were infected as well as enlisted men. Stout German-born General Osterhaus furiously denounced a soldier who was brought before him for killing a cow until he learned that his own cook had the animal’s liver and was preparing it for the general’s supper. Then he changed his tune: “Ah, dot iss it, den? Vell den, you always bring me de livers and den I never know nuttin’ about de killin’ of de animals.” A Wisconsin colonel, lecturing two culprits who had been caught looting, said sternly: “Now boys, I have to punish you. I am so ordered by the General. I want you two to understand that I am not punishing you for stealing, but for getting caught at it, by God!”

An Indiana soldier said that “the generals were slow to adopt the confiscation idea” and issued all sorts of orders against foraging, but “in time the veteran learned to circumvent all such orders, and to modify the cruel penalty by a system of division with the officers in command, who allowed the boys to construe orders to suit their needs.” Highhanded foraging, he confessed, had “marvellous beauties.” Almost universally, in eastern and western armies alike, company and regimental officers did not even pretend to try to enforce orders against foraging.⁸

In part, this was just what was bound to happen in a civil war in nineteenth-century America. The rowdy strain was coming to the surface again; it had been called up to help create the war, and there was no way to repress it. Army life at any time lifts from men the feeling of personal responsibility for their acts; it was doing this now in a land where the strain of irresponsibility ran high at the best of times. An army of invasion composed of volunteers who considered themselves free citizens despite their uniforms and their oaths of enlistment was going to “use this country awful rough,” and that was that.

But that was not all of it. Super-patriots back home were demanding a hard war. Newspapers in Chicago and other northern cities sharply condemned the court-martial of Colonel Turchin, complaining that Buell was altogether too kind to the people of Alabama and Tennessee, who, being in a state of rebellion, needed to be punished. The soldiers sympathized with this criticism — the more so, perhaps, since at the moment the war was not being prosecuted very energetically. To protect Rebel property was beginning to look like being soft with rebellion itself; an officer too alert to prevent foraging and looting might very well be an officer secretly in sympathy with the Confederacy. (General Buell was growing immensely unpopular with his men for this reason.) Anything that hurt anyone in the South, probably, would ultimately hurt the rebellion; secession was treason, men who supported it were traitors, and the worst that happened to them was no more than they deserved.⁹

It was expressed very clearly by the men of the 12th Wisconsin, who occupied Humboldt, Tennessee, that summer. They took over a print shop and for a time got out a weekly newspaper, with enlisted men as editors. The paper spoke the private soldier’s mind, and one of its editorials hit the keynote: “The time for negotiating peace has passed; henceforth let us conquer a peace. Let the blows fall thick and heavy, and keep on falling. Let us lay aside the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of war, pull off our coats, and ‘wade in.’ … Let our divisions move on, kill, confiscate or destroy, throw every sympathy to the wind that might stand in the way, and bring the traitors to a traitor’s fate by the shortest and quickest way.”¹⁰

The shortest and quickest way, as far as the private soldier was concerned, was to hit hard at anything that stood in his path — to devastate country as well as to fight enemy armies; in general terms, to wreak vengeance on all inhabitants of the Confederacy. The judge advocate in a court-martial in Buell’s army summed it up a little later when he defined “a vigorous war policy” as one in which the man who actively or passively aided the secession movement “is considered to have no rights that the government is bound to respect.”¹¹

Quite simply, this meant that the institution of slavery was doomed. The great majority of Union soldiers had entered the war with no particular feeling against slavery and with even less feeling in favor of the Negro. They had no quarrel with the idea that the Negro was property; indeed, it was precisely that fact that was moving them and writing the institutions doom. Because looting and foraging held “marvellous beauties” for the army of occupation, because ruining a farm seemed one way to strike at the enemy, and because general hell-raising was fun anyway, they were commissioning themselves to strike at Rebel property — and here was the most obvious, plentiful, and important property of all. With the Negro’s ultimate fate they rarely bothered their heads. It was enough to know that the South would have a hard time functioning without him.

U. S. Grant got this idea ahead of his troops. Grant had never been an anti-slavery man. He had once owned a slave himself, his wife had owned several, his wife’s family had owned many. But as early as the fall of 1861 he was writing to his father, saying that while he wanted to whip the rebellion but preserve all southern rights, “if it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war on slavery, let it come to that.” In the summer of 1862 he saw the myriad contrabands that were following northern armies, and commented: “I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end, but it weakens the enemy to take them from them.” Somewhat later he told his friend Congressman Elihu B. Washburne: “It became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with one another except as one nation, and that without slavery.”¹²

Not only was the Negro a visible and easily removable piece of Rebel property; he was also a very helpful fellow, and Union soldiers who found him so began to feel a vague sort of sympathy for him. Ormsby Mitchel’s men were learning that contrabands would give full information about movements of Confederate troops, and if they were utterly unable to estimate numbers correctly — when asked how many Rebels were in a given detachment they would usually say, “Three hundred thousand!” — their services nevertheless were invaluable. When Buell sternly ordered Mitchel to keep fugitive slaves out of his lines, several of Mitchel’s officers came to his tent, laid down their swords, and said they could not obey the order. This was plain mutiny, but Mitchel ignored it and wrote his own angry protest at Buell’s order direct to Secretary Stanton. An Ohio soldier, musing on the rights and wrongs of the situation, wrote down his thoughts:

“The white Rebel, who had done his utmost to bring about the rebellion, is lionized, called a plucky fellow, a great man, while the Negro, who welcomed us, who is ready to peril his life to aid us, is kicked, cuffed and driven back to his master, there to be scourged for his kindness to us … There must be a change in this regard before we shall be worthy of success.”

This soldier saw at a Tennessee crossroads one day a road sign that read: “Fifteen miles to Liberty.” He reflected: “If liberty were indeed but fifteen miles away, the stars tonight would see a thousand Negroes dancing on the way thither; old men with their wives and bundles, young men with their sweethearts, little barefoot children all singing in their hearts.”¹³

 … The war itself, in plain words, was going to destroy slavery; not the fevered arguments of the abolitionists, nor the stirring of vague humanitarian sentiments among the northern people, but simply the war, and the fact that men were going to do whatever they had to do to win it. Lincoln himself was governed by this as much as was the most heedless soldier in the ranks.

For Lincoln this was an uneasy summer. The military machine had slowed almost to a stop and there did not seem to be any easy way to get it started again. He had brought John Pope east from Mississippi and had created a new army for him in upper Virginia, an army made up of the baffled fragments that had tried so clumsily to round up Stonewall Jackson a few weeks earlier. This had led to the immediate resignation of John Charles Frémont, but so far it had had no other good result. A week after Malvern Hill, Lincoln went down to Harrison’s Landing to talk to McClellan, who was jaunty and confident and who thought that he could yet take Richmond if he were properly reinforced. (That phantom, nonexistent Rebel army of the Pinkerton reports was still being taken seriously at headquarters.)

McClellan had another thought, which he put on paper for the President’s benefit. He believed that the Union armies would refuse to fight if this war became a war against slavery.

In a long memorandum McClellan spelled out his ideas of what war policy ought to be: “Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” Military power should never be used to interfere with “the relations of servitude”; where contrabands were pressed into army service, their lawful owners should be properly compensated.¹⁴

It was a bad time for a general to hand that sort of document to Lincoln, who was not contemplating property confiscation, political executions, or territorial organization of rebellious states, but who had reached the conviction that he could not win the war without coming out against slavery.

Lincoln was a mild-mannered prairie politician who, in his own brief time as a soldier, had been told to go to hell by red-necked volunteers and had been ordered by a court-martial to carry a wooden sword for gawky unofficerlike ineffectiveness; but of all the leaders of the North, he more than any other had the hard, flaming spirit of War — the urge to get on with it at any cost and to drive on through to victory by the shortest road. So far he was little more than a name to the men in the ranks, and McClellan was the man they adored above all others; but of the two, it was the President and not the general who understood what was on the enlisted man’s mind.

Lincoln had said that if he did anything at all about slavery he would do it solely because he believed that it would help to win the war. Now the machine was stalling, and he had to get it moving again; and he had concluded that to do this he would have to call on the emotional power of the anti-slavery cause. The thoughts that would finally become the Emancipation Proclamation were taking shape in his mind when he visited McClellan; less than a week later, back in Washington, he would voice them to two members of his Cabinet. In the previous autumn he had rebuked Frémont for proclaiming abolition prematurely in Missouri; early this spring he had similarly rebuked General David Hunter for doing the same thing along the Carolina coast; now he was making up his mind to proclaim it himself … and the general of his principal army was telling him that the soldiers would not fight if he did.

Lincoln went back to Washington. Not long after, he called Halleck east and made him general-in-chief, in command of all the armies.

On form, the appointment looked good. The biggest gains had been made in the West — Missouri cleared, Kentucky saved, half of Tennessee in hand, armies of invasion poised in northern Mississippi and Alabama, with another army and a strong fleet in New Orleans — and all of this except the New Orleans business had been done by men under Halleck’s orders. The fact that a great chance had been missed on the slow crawl from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth was not yet apparent — not in Washington, anyway, although Grant and Ormsby Mitchel had been smoldering over it — and neither was the folly that had dispersed Grant’s and Buell’s armies and substituted the occupation of territory for a drive to destroy Rebel armies. In July 1862 the performance sheet made Halleck look like a winner, and so Halleck was summoned to Washington to take the top command.

It would take time for him to get oriented. This time would be a free gift to the Confederacy, which was led by men to whom it was dangerous to make gifts. And as a result this would be the summer of the great Confederate counterattack, with final Confederate independence looking more likely for a few brief haunted weeks than at any other time in all the war.

2. Cheers in the Starlight

Major General John Pope was an odd figure. Montgomery Blair once remarked venomously that he was a cheat and a liar like all the rest of his tribe, and while a disgruntled Blair was apt to be harsh in his judgments, Pope did have a pronounced ability to irritate people. He came on from the West exuding headstrong energy and loud bluster, and for a few weeks he held the center of the stage; then he evaporated, exiled to the western frontier to police the Indian tribes, leaving hard words and recriminations behind him. He had been given a comparatively minor part to play, and he almost succeeded in losing the war with it.

The War Department brought him east in a well-meant effort to get a little drive into the Virginia campaign, and it turned over to him some fifty thousand troops that were scattered all across northern Virginia and told him to weld them into an army and go down and fight Lee. Pope did his best, but the odds were all against him. It would have taken a good deal of time and some really inspired leadership to make a cohesive army out of the fragments that had been given him, and Pope did not have either.

To begin with, there was McDowell’s corps. These men, who had marched vainly back and forth across upper Virginia while the Army of the Potomac was fighting in front of Richmond, still considered themselves McClellan’s men. They did not like McDowell — for some incomprehensible reason they considered him disloyal to the Union cause — and they resented the orders that had held them away from McClellan’s command.

Next came the mountain army with which Frémont had vainly contemplated making a dash down into eastern Tennessee. About half of this corps was made up of German troops, and there was a noticeable lack of harmony between these and the native American regiments; the latter had not cared at all for Frémont, and when he was replaced by Franz Sigel, who had campaigned with varying success in Missouri, they liked Sigel no better. Their spirits were not improved when they learned that the rest of the army was lumping themselves and the Germans together, indiscriminately, as a Dutch outfit.

Lastly, there was the corps which Nathaniel P. Banks had led up and down the Shenandoah Valley. These men had never had any luck. Stonewall Jackson’s men had run rings around them and had seized their supply dumps and trains so consistently that jeering Rebels referred to Banks as their favorite commissary officer. The human material in this corps was good enough — which, for the matter of that, was true of the other two corps as well — but the men had never won anything so far and they seem to have been dismally aware that under Banks they were not likely to win anything in the future.

Pope tried to fit these three groups together into an army. To raise the men’s spirits he issued a spread-eagle proclamation, announcing that out West the Union armies were used to looking upon the backs of their enemies; he hoped that eastern armies would get the same habit, and from now on they would forget about defensive positions and lines of retreat and would devote themselves entirely to the attack. He was quoted as saying that his headquarters would be in the saddle, which led the irreverent to remark that he was putting his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be, and instead of inspiring the men his impassioned words just made them laugh. In addition, Pope published harsh rules to govern the conduct of Rebel civilians within the Union lines, threatening wholesale imprisonments, executions, and confiscations. Nothing much ever actually came of these rules, but they did win for Pope a singular distinction: he became one of the few Federal generals for whom General Lee ever expressed an acute personal distaste. Lee remarked that Pope would have to be “suppressed” — as if he were a lawless disturber of the peace rather than an army commander — and he undertook to see to it personally, a fact that was to have extensive consequences.

Pope was moving down the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, preparing to descend on Richmond from the northwest while McClellan’s presence on the James forced the city’s defenders to look toward the southeast. But Pope and McClellan were too far apart to co-operate effectively, and they were such completely dissimilar types that it is hard to imagine them working together anyway. McClellan remained in his camp, making no offensive gestures, and Lee presently concluded that it would be safe to send Stonewall Jackson up to look after Pope.

Jackson had not lived up to his reputation in the Seven Days’ fighting, but he seemed to be himself again now and he moved with vigor. Some word of his move got to Washington, which began to suspect that the Pope-McClellan operation was not going to work very well, and Halleck, the new generalissimo, went down to Harrison’s Landing to talk to McClellan. And now, once more, McClellan tripped over his wild overestimate of Confederate manpower.

It was essential to the present operation that McClellan move to attack Richmond. He could do this, he told Halleck, if he had thirty thousand more men. Halleck told him twenty thousand would be tops and asked if he could make the move with those reinforcements; McClellan said that he would try, although he was obviously dubious about it — for Lee, he assured Halleck, commanded two hundred thousand men.¹

Halleck quickly reached what would seem to be a logical conclusion. If Lee’s army was bigger than Pope’s and McClellan’s combined — which was what McClellan’s estimate said — then it was obvious folly to let him occupy a position between them. There was only one thing to do: fuse these two Union armies into one and have them operate as a unit. To do this without uncovering Washington, it would be necessary to withdraw McClellan from the banks of the James. Early in August the orders went out. McClellan was to get his men north as quickly as possible so that he and Pope could join forces.

Bringing McClellan north was what really untied things. To get all of his men, guns, and equipment from the James to the upper Rappahannock and the Potomac would be a slow process. While it was being done the Army of the Potomac would be entirely out of action and the initiative would be with the Confederates. For some weeks to come they would be the ones who would be calling the signals.

They would be calling them in the West as well as in the East; indeed, during this summer the entire direction of the war would be in their hands, and the Confederate forces that had been doomed to an almost hopeless defensive in May were being given the chance to stage an all-out offensive in August. For Grant’s army was divided and immobilized, and Buell was painfully creeping along a shattered railway line, stitching it together as he went, and the Richmond government got reinforcements over into Mississippi from the region beyond the river, posted these where they could watch Grant’s men, and sent Beauregard’s old army swinging up through mid-Tennessee toward Kentucky in a hard counterblow that canceled all Federal strategic plans.

It was Beauregard’s army no longer. After his retreat from Corinth, Beauregard became ill and took leave of absence. He had never been able to get along with Jefferson Davis anyway, and Davis now replaced him, giving the army to scowling, black-bearded Braxton Bragg, who was always able to get along with Davis but who could hardly ever get along with anybody else.

Bragg was a fantastic character, as singular a mixture of solid competence and bewildering ineptitude as the war produced. He distrusted democracy, the volunteer system, and practically everything except the routine of the old regular army, and just before Shiloh he had complained that most of the Confederate soldiers had never fired a gun or done a day’s work in their lives. He was disputatious to a degree, and in the old army it was said that when he could not find anyone else to quarrel with he would quarrel with himself. A ferocious disciplinarian, he shot his own soldiers ruthlessly for violations of military law, and his army may have been the most rigidly controlled of any on either side.

This summer he was at the top of his form. He took his army off toward the east and then went up into Tennessee, smoothly by-passing Buell and heading straight for the Ohio River. In Kentucky, it was believed, the people would rise enthusiastically to welcome him, and he carried wagonloads of muskets to arm the recruits that were expected there. From eastern Tennessee a smaller Confederate army under Kirby Smith drove the Federals out of Cumberland Gap and moved north simultaneously. It would join up with Bragg’s men somewhere in Kentucky.

While this was going on — causing Buell to forget about Chattanooga and the railroad and to start backtracking feverishly in an effort to overtake Bragg — Lee in Virginia was devoting himself with deft persistence to the task of suppressing Pope.

Jackson had the first part to play. He struck Pope’s advance at Cedar Mountain a few days after McClellan had received his orders to evacuate Harrison’s Landing and head for the transports at Hampton Roads, and opened a furious attack. Pope’s advance was composed of Banks’s corps, and these men put up an unexpectedly stout fight, knocking Jackson’s men back on their heels and for an hour or so giving them a good deal more than they could handle. But Jackson had a huge advantage in numbers, and by dusk he had driven Banks’s corps off in rout with heavy loss. Pope’s main body came up next day, and Jackson drew off to wait for Lee and the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia.

He did not have long to wait, for McClellan’s departure freed Lee of concern for the James River area. Pope presently found himself up against the first team, and he was woefully outclassed. Lee quickly maneuvered him out of the triangle between the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers and made him draw back; then, anxious to finish him off before McClellan’s men could come up and give Pope the advantage of numbers, Lee divided his army and sent Jackson off in a long sweep around Pope’s right flank, to strike at his supply base at Manassas Junction.

Jackson reached this base and destroyed it after a spectacular two-day march around and through the Bull Run Mountains. Utterly confused, Pope turned to strike him, fumbled in the attempt, and at last came upon him in a secure position overlooking the old Bull Run battlefield. And there, for two days at the end of August, Pope’s men fought a second battle of Bull Run — a bigger, harder, bloodier battle than the first, in which steady slugging replaced the stumbling retreats and panics of the first engagement, and in which General John Pope, from first to last, never quite knew what was going on.

Lee reunited his divided army on the field of battle, while Pope supposed that only Jackson’s corps was present. Mistaking a rearrangement of the Confederate lines for the beginning of a withdrawal, Pope exultantly telegraphed Washington that the Rebels were in retreat and that he would pursue them with horse, foot, and guns. Then, just as what Pope imagined to be his pursuit was getting under way, Lee struck him hard in the flank with James Longstreet’s thirty thousand veterans, and Pope’s army was broken and driven north across Bull Run in a state of confusion little better than the one that had been seen at the end of the first battle a year earlier. A good part of McClellan’s army had joined Pope just before the battle, but these men fared no better than Pope’s own soldiers; and as September began, the whole disorganized lot was withdrawing sullenly into the fortifications around Washington, and almost all of Virginia was back in Confederate hands.²

And here was a cruel end for all of the high hopes which the spring had created — Virginia lost, most of Tennessee lost, Bragg’s victorious army heading for the Ohio River and reclaiming Kentucky as it went, brushing aside the green Federal troops which midwestern governors were hastily sending down into that state, while Buell came plodding north in ineffective pursuit. Lee’s hard-fought soldiers went splashing across the Potomac fords, their bands playing “Maryland, My Maryland,” while Bragg openly made plans to inaugurate a Confederate governor in Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort. And in Washington it seemed a question whether the demoralized men who had been whipped at Bull Run could possibly be pulled together into an effective army in time to accomplish anything whatever.

All of this came just as Abraham Lincoln was preparing to issue a proclamation of emancipation for Negro slaves.

He had made up his mind this summer. The base of the war would have to be broadened and an immeasurable new force would have to be injected into it. It would become now a social revolution, and there was no way to foretell the final consequences. At the very beginning Lincoln had accepted secession as a variety of revolution and had unhesitatingly used revolutionary measures to meet it, but he had clung tenaciously to the idea that the one ruling war aim was to restore the Union, and he had steered carefully away from steps that would destroy the whole social fabric of the South.

But it could not be done that way. The necessities of war were acting on him just as they acted upon the private soldier. To a correspondent, this summer, he was writing that he had never had a wish to touch the foundations of southern society or the rights of any southern man; yet there was a necessity on him to send armies into the South, and “it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.” To another correspondent he was writing that there was no sense to try “rounding the rough angles of the war”; the only remedy was to remove the cause for the war. To do this he would do everything that lay ready for his hand to do: “Would you drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it in the future with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose water?”³

He would not use elder-stalk squirts. There was no way now to avoid the fundamental and astounding result. Come what might, Lincoln would free the slaves, as far as the stroke of a pen on a sheet of paper could accomplish that.

Yet he could not do it now. Secretary Seward, who had talked of a higher law and an irrepressible conflict long before the war began, was warning him: Issue your proclamation at this moment, when our armies have been beaten and we are in retreat all along the line, and it will look like nothing more than a cry for help — an appeal to the Negro slaves to rise and come to our rescue. You cannot issue it until you have somehow, somewhere, won a military victory.… Lincoln reflected on that matter and put his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation away in a cubbyhole in his desk. This war could not be turned into a revolutionary war for freedom while it was in the process of being lost. Everything had to wait for victory.

A victory was needed for more reasons than one. Overseas, the British Government seemed to be on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation — an act that would almost certainly bring effects as far-reaching and decisive as French recognition of the American colonies had brought in 1778. Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Cabinet seemed at last ready to take the step. They would wait just a little while to see what came of Lee’s invasion of the North. Then, if all went well …

Then the wild impossible dream would come true, America would become two nations, and the outworn past with its beauty and its charm, its waste and its cruelty and its crippling limitations, would reach down into the future. Here was the crisis of the war, the great Confederate high-water mark. Never afterward was a final southern victory quite as close as it was in September 1862. The two halves of the war met here — the early formative half, when both the war and the change that would come from the war might still be limited and controlled, and the terrible latter half, which would grind on to its end without limits and without controls.

By one of the singular ironies in American history, the man who was standing precisely at this point of fusion — the man through whom, almost in spite of himself, the crisis would be resolved — was that cautious weigher of risks and gains, General McClellan.

McClellan had been quietly but effectively shelved. When his army came north it was fed down to Pope by bits and pieces, until by the final day of the Bull Run fight all of it was gone and McClellan was left isolated in Alexandria, across the river from Washington, a general without an army. He had not formally been removed from command, but his command had been most deftly slipped out from under him. The thing had been done deliberately. Secretary Stanton disliked and distrusted him, such men as Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase considered him no better than an outright traitor, and the Republican party leadership was almost mutinous against Lincoln for having supported him so long; and, anyway, it appeared that victory just was not in the man. He had been set aside, and the war would go on without him.

But the trouble was that at this particular moment McClellan was indispensable.

He had warned Lincoln that Union soldiers would not fight in an avowed war against slavery, and there would be time enough later on to find out whether that was so; but what mattered most right now was that this could never be turned into a war against slavery or anything else unless the Army of the Potomac very speedily won a victory over Robert E. Lee, and there was not a remote chance that it could do that now without General McClellan. Its elements had been thrown in with Pope’s and had been beaten. Pope was wholly discredited, and the dispirited troops who were retreating into the Washington lines were not, at the moment, an army at all in any real sense of the word. They never had been an army, as the word is properly understood; they were young men who had heard bugles and drums and had seen flags waving and had felt something outside of themselves come in and move them; and now they were tired, dirty, unhappy, conscious that they had been beaten because they had been poorly led, the flame gone out of them. They were ready to quit and they could not conceivably be turned into a useful army again, in time to do any good, by anyone but the one man who had trained them, the man in whom they had unwavering confidence, to whom they had given a mystic and inexplicable devotion. And that man, of course, was McClellan.

Neither the War Department nor the Cabinet could see this, but Lincoln could, and he acted on what he saw — risking that which he dared not lose in order to win that which he had to have. He put McClellan back in command and in effect told him to pull the army together and go out and whip the Army of Northern Virginia.

 … It became a legend, and a true thing to be remembered in the long years of peace, how McClellan this one time rose to a great challenge and met it fully. He was a small man, and he missed many chances, and he probably was afraid of something; not of death — there is much testimony about his courage under fire, and he had picked up the hard West Point training — but of life and the things that can go wrong in it; but for one evening of his life he was great, and the Confederate tide began to ebb as the sun went down over the Virginia hills to the sound of men who cheered as if they had touched the shores of dream-come-true. McClellan rode out from Alexandria on his great black war horse, a jaunty little man with a yellow sash around his waist, every pose and gesture perfect. He cantered down the dusty roads and he met the heads of the retreating columns, and he cried words of encouragement and swung his little cap, and he gave the beaten men what no other man alive could have given them — enthusiasm, hope, confidence, an exultant and unreasoning feeling that the time of troubles was over and that everything would be all right now. And it went into the legend — truthfully, for many men have testified to it — that down mile after mile of Virginia roads the stumbling columns came alive, and threw caps and knapsacks into the air, and yelled until they could yell no more, and went on doing it until the sun went down; and after dark, exhausted men who lay in the dust sprang to their feet and cried aloud because they saw this dapper little rider outlined against the purple starlight.⁴

And this, in a way, was the turning point of the war. It was odd that it should happen this way, because this war was one of the great hinges of history, a closing and an opening of mighty doors, and McClellan believed that it was something very different — a bit of a disagreement among gentlemen, which would be settled presently in the way of gentlemen so that everyone could go back to what they had had before the disagreement began; and no one would go back to anything after this. McClellan rode down the roads to the sound of a mighty cheering and a great crying, and because he did the war would go on and on to its destined end, with McClellan himself fading out of it in an extended anticlimax and with most of the men who called out to him dying or drifting off into the limbo of old soldiers who have had it.

No one could ever quite explain it. The men who threw their caps and yelled themselves hoarse and of their own will became a solid army again could never quite find the words for it, and the best McClellan himself could say finally was: “We are wedded and should not be separated” — which, after all, perhaps was the obscure essence of it. But whatever it was that really happened, it would finally give Abraham Lincoln what he was looking for. And American history would be different forever after.

3. High-Water Mark

The tension became almost unendurable, yet it lasted just a little more than a fortnight. Then it snapped, in a great explosion of fire and sound and violence, and the war came to a climax in its worst single day of death.

The Army of Northern Virginia had crossed the Potomac, and no one knew just where it was. No one could be sure, either, where Bragg’s western army had gone. The rumor suddenly reached Washington that Bragg’s men, having given Buell the slip, were coming east to join Lee, over whatever impossible mountain route across eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and Lincoln was anxiously wiring the western commanders, asking them: “What degree of certainty have you that Bragg with his command is not now in the valley of the Shenandoah, Virginia?”¹

Buell scoffed at the notion, which in point of fact was rather fantastic. Yet Buell was not the man to give reassurance. He had been outmaneuvered; Bragg had got away from him, and Buell was now in the act of chasing him up to the Ohio. The administration was impatient with him and planned to remove him; did actually send orders to George Thomas to take Buell’s place and was dumfounded when Thomas calmly replied that it would not be fair to remove Buell right now and that he would greatly prefer not to take the offered promotion. Buell stayed on, in uncertain tenure, while Halleck told a friend that the administration was going to guillotine all losing generals; the hard policy of the French revolutionists — win or be dropped — was going to prevail from now on. It might be unjust, Halleck admitted, but it was inevitable; the cause had to have victories.²

It would have to have three victories, for the Confederacy was striking in three places at once. The rough timing that co-ordinated Bragg’s offensive with Lee’s had been extended to Mississippi. There a tough little Confederate army had been put together, led by Earl Van Dorn, a handsome, curly-haired soldier who had been a friend of Sherman at West Point; a dashing romantic chap who had a reputation as a ladies’ man and who would one day die of it, dodging any number of Yankee bullets on the battlefield to take one from an angry husband in his own office.… Van Dorn had Pap Price with him and some stout fighters from beyond the Mississippi, and he was sliding forward now to attack Grant, or possibly to slip through Grant’s lines and join Bragg in Kentucky — a possibility which, Halleck was warning Grant, “would be most disastrous.”³

But the victory that was needed most and first would have to be won in the East; the West was where the North finally would have to win the war, but the East was always the place where the North could lose it, and the danger was never greater than in September of 1862.

McClellan hastily reorganized the Army of the Potomac, got most of it north of the river, and took it cautiously north and west through Maryland, with cavalry patrols sending blind groping tentacles out in front reaching for Lee’s army.

If McClellan’s men had been in the lowest of spirits after the second battle of Bull Run, they had high morale now. Getting up into western Maryland was like getting back home. Civilian sentiment here ran strongly for the Union. As the army marched through towns and villages, people lined the streets to wave flags and to cheer, offering food and drink to any men who could break ranks and help themselves. The soldiers were no longer moving in a vacuum; they were touching the solid core of national sentiment once more, and they did not have to draw all of their inspiration from the little general who led them. They exulted in the welcome they were getting, told one another that they were in God’s country once more, and whenever they set eyes on McClellan they cheered until their voices broke, crowding close around him, trying to touch at least the horse he rode, assuring the man that they would do whatever he asked them to do.⁴

McClellan was as cautious as ever. Lee’s army lay on the western side of South Mountain, a high ridge that takes off from the Potomac as a continuation of the Blue Ridge and runs in a long slant for sixty-five miles to the north and east. The passes were held by Lee’s cavalry, and from the loyal people beyond the mountain came all sorts of unreliable rumors about Lee’s strength and movements. Halleck kept sending messages of warning: If McClellan slid too far to the right Lee was apt to come past his left and seize Washington, if he held to the left Lee might go around his right, too rapid an advance would be dangerous, to advance too slowly would permit Lee to invade Pennsylvania … and so on and so on, every warning underscoring the hesitancy that McClellan carried with him in any case, the unspoken threat of the guillotine always felt.

What McClellan would finally have done if he had been left to himself is beyond imagination; what actually happened was a dazzling stroke of pure, uncovenanted good luck that cleared up the fog of doubt and put the game squarely in his hands. To this day no one has known quite how it happened, and it is probable that no one will ever know, but some Confederate officer lost a copy of Lee’s orders outlining all of his plans and movements, and this copy was speedily brought to Union headquarters, authenticated, and laid before McClellan.

Now McClellan knew where Lee was, what he was trying to do, and exactly where he proposed to go.

There was a Federal garrison of ten thousand men in Harper’s Ferry, and Lee did not wish to leave this garrison lying across his line of communications. He knew that McClellan’s army had been badly disorganized at Bull Run and that it would take a little time to pull it back into shape, and McClellan was not in the least likely to move fast anyway. It seemed to Lee that it would be safe to delay the invasion while he gobbled up the Harper’s Ferry people, and this he undertook to do, dividing his army into four parts in order to do it.

With Longstreet and Longstreet’s command, Lee himself moved up to Hagerstown, Maryland, not far from the Pennsylvania border — there was some chance that Pennsylvania militia, stirred by the rising threat to the homeland, might come down to make trouble, and it was well to hold Hagerstown in some strength. One division of troops under D. H. Hill was placed at Boonsboro Gap, the principal pass through South Mountain, where the main road from Washington came west. All the rest of the army was sent down to surround and capture Harper’s Ferry, part of the men swinging back into Virginia to come on the place from the south and west, the remainder going down through Maryland in the lee of South Mountain, Stonewall Jackson in command of the lot.

The pieces of the Army of Northern Virginia, accordingly, were very badly separated. McClellan was at Frederick, Maryland, just a short march from Boonsboro Gap. He was closer to the head and the tail of Lee’s army than the head and tail were to each other — and with Lee’s orders on his desk McClellan knew all of this, and Lee did not know that he knew it. The utter destruction of Lee’s army was a definite possibility.

One thing McClellan did not know, and because he did not know it his movements would have a halting, trance-like quality. He did not know that Lee’s army was woefully, tragically understrength.

The army had fought hard and it had marched hard, and it was very close to sheer exhaustion. Thousands upon thousands of men had left the ranks, too worn down to go any farther. (The fact that many of these men had no shoes and that Maryland had hard roads on which a barefooted man could not march had a good deal to do with this.) Other thousands had innocently left the army when it crossed the Potomac, on the simple ground that they had enlisted to defend the South from invasion, not to invade the North; the idea that the homeland could be aggressively defended on northern soil was just a little too intricate for them. All in all, it is probable that Lee lost between ten and twenty thousand men from these causes in the first two weeks of September. Of enlisted infantrymen, present for duty equipped, Lee may have had fewer than forty thousand all told. His army was smaller than it was at any other time in the war until the final agonizing retreat to Appomattox.

Yet McClellan lived by the old faith. He still thought that he was outnumbered.

He was not taking as many men into Maryland as he had had on the peninsula. In the middle of September the Army of the Potomac numbered just over eighty-seven thousand, and by no means were all of these combat soldiers; nearly one fifth of the army, at this stage of the war, was occupied on various noncombatant assignments and could not be put on the firing line in battle. McClellan, of course, knew this — he always was acutely aware of his own army’s weaknesses — and he could not, for the very life of him, see that the other army was much worse off than his own. The shadowy, unreal host which outnumbered him from the beginning was still opposite him. Luck might have given him the greatest opening any Union general ever had, but when he set about exploiting it he would be very, very careful.⁵

His first moves were simple and direct.

He sent one corps to break through the mountain at Crampton’s Gap, five or six miles to the south of the main pass near Boonsboro; if it moved fast, this corps ought to be able to rescue the Harper’s Ferry garrison before Jackson swallowed it. With the rest of the army McClellan moved straight for Boonsboro Gap, planning to get to the far side of the mountain and destroy the separate pieces of Lee’s army before they could reunite.

The start was made promptly enough, and in each of the passes the Confederates were so greatly outnumbered that they had no chance to fight more than a delaying action. They hung on stoutly, however, aided considerably by the Pinkerton delusion as to numbers; D. H. Hill had five or six thousand soldiers to defend Boonsboro Gap, and the Federal command thought that he had thirty thousand, which meant that the attack could not be driven home until most of the army had come up. In the end, Hill hung on all through September 14, retreating only after night had come. Crampton’s Gap was lost sooner, but McClellan’s corps commander there, General William B. Franklin, did not think it safe to march boldly for Harper’s Ferry until the next morning. When morning came it took time to get his troops moving, and before he could accomplish anything Harper’s Ferry had been surrendered and the Confederacy had picked up ten thousand Yankee prisoners, vast quantities of small arms and military stores, and a useful supply of artillery. Jackson rode through the town after the surrender, a remarkably uninspiring-looking man in dusty uniform with an old forage cap pulled down over his eyes — he could no more look like a dashing soldier than could U. S. Grant. One of the surrendered Union soldiers studied him, remarked that he didn’t look like much, and then added bitterly: “But if we had him we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in.”⁶

September 15 saw McClellan through the South Mountain gaps, and Lee was trying desperately to pull his army together before the Yankees could destroy it piecemeal. Lee thought at first that he would have to get everybody back into Virginia as quickly as possible, but when he learned about the capture of Harper’s Ferry he changed his mind. He would reassemble at Sharpsburg, a little country town a dozen miles south of Hagerstown, near the Potomac, behind the meandering valley of Antietam Creek; if McClellan wanted to fight they would fight there, and afterward it might be possible to go on with the invasion of the North. In any case, the fight would enable the Confederacy to get the military loot south from Harper’s Ferry.

So what there was of Lee’s army was ordered to take its place on the rolling hills west of Antietam Creek, and there the advance guard of the Army of the Potomac found it on the evening of September 15.

There, too, the Army of the Potomac faced it all day of September 16 — the day on which it was proved afresh that Lee could put up a consummate bluff and that McClellan could never in the world call the bluff. For half of the undersized Confederate army had not yet come up from Harper’s Ferry, and if McClellan had simply ordered an advance all along the line the Confederates who were present must, beyond all question, have been driven into the river, Lee in person with them. But McClellan made no advance that day. He needed the time to think things over, to examine Lee’s lines at long range, to get his guns into position, to talk with his subordinates, to weigh the risks which he would not take. He presented Lee with twenty-four hours, which was not five minutes more than the absolute minimum Lee had to have for survival, and when at last the Union attack was made — at misty dawn on September 17 — the Confederates had just enough men on hand or coming up to make a fight of it.

There never was another day like Antietam. It was sheer concentrated violence, unleavened by generalship. It had all of the insane fury of the Shiloh fight, with this difference: at Shiloh the troops were green and many of them ran away at the first shock, while those who remained fought blindly, by instinct. At Antietam the men were veterans and they knew what they were about. Few men cut and ran until they had been fought out, their formations blown apart by merciless gunfire; and those who did not run at all fought with battle-trained skill, so that the dawn-to-dusk fight above Antietam Creek finally went into the records as the most murderous single day of the entire war.

It began with a Federal attack on the Confederate left, under Stonewall Jackson, posted in a cornfield and two woodlots in front of a whitewashed Dunker church. Joe Hooker, the handsome, profane, hard-drinking and hard-fighting commander of McClellan’s right wing, smashed the cornfield and its occupants with the concentrated fire of three dozen fieldpieces and then sent his army corps swinging straight up toward the Dunker church, which marked the high ground that anchored this end of the Confederate line. Some of the Confederate units here were mangled almost beyond repair, but just as Hooker’s men neared the little church Jackson brought up reinforcements — John B. Hood’s Texas brigade and three tough little brigades from D. H. Hill’s division — and the Federals were driven back to their starting point, a good fourth of their number shot down, half of the remainder driven off in disorganized flight.

All of this took about an hour, or perhaps a little longer, and accomplished nothing at all except the creation once more of an appalling list of casualties. Now McClellan sent in another army corps, the men who had followed Banks on his luckless adventurings in the Shenandoah Valley and who had fought so stoutly at Cedar Mountain. (Banks was no longer with them; he had been replaced by an old regular, Joseph K. F. Mansfield, a red-faced soldier who wore a pleasing fringe of white hair and whiskers.) The cornfield and part of the woods were regained and then largely lost again; Mansfield was killed, Hooker was wounded, two army corps had been used up, another hour had passed, and the casualty list was substantially longer.

Now McClellan sent in a third corps, the largest in the army, eighteen thousand men or thereabouts under old Edwin Sumner, who had been an army officer since 1819, possessed a great roaring voice that could carry the length of an active battle line, and was known by his troops as the Bull of the Woods, or just Old Bull. He was a simple, straightforward sort of war horse; forty years in the regular army had harrowed out all of his complexities, leaving nothing but a devotion to duty and an everlasting respect for the military hierarchy and its system of discipline. He would never get used to the volunteer army; would stare, shake his head, and swear in utter disbelief when he saw some stripling in his early twenties wearing a major’s shoulder straps — in the pre-war army, field officers were invariably gray-haired.

This morning Sumner was to take his three divisions and crush the Rebel left. He rode with the leading division, led by John Sedgwick, and forgot about the other two, which as a result came into action too late. Sedgwick and Sumner rode across the ground that had been so terribly fought over, got into the farthest fringe of woods, and seemed to have the Dunker church plateau firmly in their possession — and then were hit in the flank and rear by a fresh Confederate division that had just finished the long hike up from Harper’s Ferry and whose attack now took them completely by surprise. Sedgwick was wounded, more than a third of his men were shot, the rest were driven off in complete disorder, and the triumphant Confederates swept back across the cornfield and the scarred little woodlots until the long line of Federal guns — fifty or more of them, drawn up in a solid rank to support McClellan’s right — blasted them, stopped their advance, and made them beat a sullen retreat.

With one division wrecked, Bull Sumner went back to put the rest of his corps into action. He sent his men up out of the creek valley some distance south of the cornfield and the Dunker church, and they ran into a Confederate battle line posted in a sunken lane that zigzagged along the reverse slope of a long ridge. As the fighting in the Dunker church area burned itself out, this sunken road became a new cockpit. The Confederates here were as secure as the Federals had been in that other sunken lane at Shiloh, and Federals who tried vainly to drive them out wrote afterward that they met here the heaviest fire they saw in all the war.

Sumner’s two remaining divisions came in in disjointed fashion, one at a time. (Thousands of men were shot that day because McClellan could not, from first to last, put on one co-ordinated offensive.) The first one to attack the sunken road was led by William French, a stout, choleric man who was a doughty head-down fighter but nothing more. His battle line got to the crest of the ridge, drove off the Confederate skirmishers who held the place, paused briefly for breath, and then went rolling on to attack the sunken road; and the Rebels hunkered down behind their natural breastwork, let them come in close, and then broke them and drove them back with tremendous rolling volleys of musketry. French’s men re-formed, tried it again, broke again, tried once more, and then lay on the ground and kept up such fire as they could while they waited for the other division to come up.

This one was commanded by a stout fighter, Israel B. Richardson, a Mexican War veteran who seems to have patterned himself after old Zachary Taylor, cultivating a rough-and-ready air and disdaining to wear anything resembling a proper uniform. He led his men in person, stalking along on foot with a naked sword in his hand, using the point of it to drive skulkers out from behind haystacks and outhouses, blaspheming them in a voice that rose above the din of battle. A house was on fire at one end of the ridge, and the smoke from its burning mingled with the heavy battle smoke, and the men climbed the ridge in a choking fog. Richardson finally got an Irish brigade and some New Englanders up on high ground where they could enfilade part of the sunken road, some of the Confederates broke and ran for it, and at last the whole line caved in. The sunken lane was taken — it it was so full of corpses that for the rest of the war veterans referred to it simply as “Bloody Lane” — and the whole center of Lee’s line was a frazzled thread, so worn that Longstreet and his staff were helping exhausted gunners work a battery, while D. H. Hill took up a musket and rallied a handful of stragglers for an abortive counterattack.

Lee’s army could have been broken then and there, but Richardson went down with a mortal wound — this was a bad day for general officers — and he was the only driver on this part of the field. McClellan had two spare army corps ready and waiting, but he used one to hold the right of his line (he feared that Lee would hit him with a counterattack) and he held the other one in reserve, and the assault died out after Bloody Lane had been won.

By now it was noon, and after a time the left of McClellan’s line took up the battle. General Burnside was in command here, with four divisions, and he put them into action hesitantly, one at a time, taking long hours to win the crossings of Antietam Creek and get to the high ground overlooking Sharpsburg. By midafternoon, however, despite all the delays, the high ground was taken, and once more utter defeat for Lee’s army was in immediate prospect. But, once more, Confederate reinforcements came up just in time — A. P. Hill’s division, brought up from Harper’s Ferry in a man-killing forced march that left half of the men gasping by the roadside, too dead-beat to march another step, but that brought the other half in on Burnside’s flank just in time to stave off defeat. Burnside reacted nervously to the flank attack, pulled his men back, sent word to McClellan that he thought he might possibly hold on if he were reinforced … and at last the sun went down and the battle ended, smoke heavy in the air, the twilight quivering with the anguished cries of thousands of wounded men.

Lee’s men had taken a dreadful pounding and they had astounding losses — more than ten thousand men between dawn and dusk, a good fourth of all the men he had on the field — but they had not quite been driven out of Sharpsburg and the high ground. McClellan had lost even more heavily, with more than two thousand men killed in action and nearly ten thousand wounded, of whom upward of a thousand would die; but he had men to spare. Two corps had hardly been engaged at all, and reinforcements were coming up. By every dictate of military logic, Lee would have to cross the Potomac and get back to Virginia as soon as darkness came; if he stayed where he was one more day, the Army of the Potomac could pulverize him.⁷

But Lee did not retreat. He pulled his frayed lines together, brought up stragglers, and next morning, with fewer than thirty thousand infantrymen in his command, he calmly waited for McClellan to renew the fighting. (Of all the daring gamblers who ever wore an American military uniform, Lee unquestionably was the coolest.) His bluff worked. McClellan pondered, waited for reinforcements, laid plans for an all-out offensive for tomorrow, or day after tomorrow, or some other time, and let the entire day of September 18 slip by, two exhausted armies facing each other under a blistering sun, the heavy stench of death fouling the air, nervous sputters of picket-line firing rippling from end to end of the lines now and then, nothing of any consequence happening.

That night Lee ordered a retreat. Even McClellan was likely to attack if he was given time enough, and the Army of Northern Virginia just could not afford a finish fight here, with the river at its back. These twenty-four hours of silent defiance had restored Confederate morale, and as the tired Confederates crossed the river and tramped back into Virginia they felt that they had somehow won a victory. McClellan let them go unmolested. His men, like Lee’s, felt proud of what they had done, but they were not disposed to claim a sweeping triumph. The most they were prepared to say was voiced by one of McClellan’s division commanders, the tough and grizzled George Gordon Meade: “We hurt them a little more than they hurt us.”

But the soldiers could not see all of it. Incomplete and imperfect as it had been, Antietam was a decisive Union victory. It had broken the great southern counteroffensive, it had given Lincoln the opening he needed, and it would change the character of the entire war, turning it openly and irrevocably into a war against slavery. As the long gray columns crossed the river and started plodding down the Virginia roads, the South’s high tide had begun to ebb.