America Aflame (43 page)

McClellan left for Washington in early August with a token force. Many of his troops moved from the peninsula to Pope's command in northern Virginia. Sensing that the Union's Army of Virginia was in a state of flux and had a new commander few officers and fewer enlisted men liked, Lee was determined to destroy the Union army. It was a result that had evaded him during the Seven Days' Battles. Moving swiftly before McClellan's men could reinforce Pope, and dividing his army—a risk he took because he believed Pope would not take advantage—he sent Stonewall Jackson forward on a wide flanking movement around Pope to seize his supplies at a familiar place, Manassas Junction, on August 27. Pope took the bait and engaged Jackson while James B. Longstreet launched a smashing attack against the bewildered Union forces. Pope's greatest maneuver of the day was an effective retreat across Bull Run to Washington. As Robert Frost put it eloquently many years later, Lee's two great divisions under Jackson and Longstreet “were like pistols in his two hands, so perfectly could he handle them.”
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The contest was almost a replay of the First Battle of Bull Run, though befitting the new ferocity of the war the casualties were greater. The 5th New York suffered three hundred deaths in ten minutes. For all his success, Lee's attack proved costly again, as he lost 19 percent of his force compared with 13 percent for the Federals, even though Union casualties were greater in absolute terms. Despite the casualties, the growing belief on both sides in the invincibility of Lee and the incompetence of Union officers and politicians was bolstered. Toward the end of June, Union forces had glimpsed the spires of Richmond. By the end of August, Rebel troops menaced Washington. Two days after the second Union debacle at Bull Run, President Lincoln relieved Pope of his command and reinstalled McClellan as commander of the consolidated Army of the Potomac.

The war in the East changed the men as much as the western war had altered the lives of its combatants. The Peninsula Campaign and Second Bull Run transformed them from wide-eyed recruits to hardened veterans. “I have changed much in my feelings,” Marion Hill Fitzpatrick wrote a day after Second Bull Run. “The bombs and balls excite me but little and a battlefield strewed with dead and wounded is an every day consequence.”
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The Peninsula debacle followed by the Bull Run disaster plunged President Lincoln into despair. The turn in the war after such a promising start to the new year altered his spiritual perspective on the conflict. The uncertainty of God's purpose gnawed at Lincoln. He waited for a sign.

The summer successes encouraged Robert E. Lee to gamble on continued federal incompetence. On September 4, 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac into western Maryland, a mere thirty-five miles from Washington. Lee had saved Richmond and sent Pope's army packing, but he had not destroyed the enemy's will or capability to fight. He knew his was a risky maneuver, but he felt he had no choice. With a force inferior in numbers and materiel, he must take advantage of every physical and psychological situation that favored his troops. Now was such a moment. Take the war to the enemy's territory. His plan was to move into Pennsylvania, capture the state capital at Harrisburg, sever railroad connections with the Northwest, and put himself in a position to threaten Philadelphia and Washington. At the least, it would take the pressure off Richmond. At most, he could destroy the North's resolve and end the war.

In a letter to President Davis just before he crossed into Maryland, Lee admitted that his army, now reduced to fifty thousand able-bodied men, was “not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy's territory. It lacks much of the material of war, is feeble in transportation … and the men are poorly provided with clothes, and in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes. Still we cannot afford to be idle, [we] must endeavor to harass, if we cannot destroy them.” He would carry still fewer troops into battle, as some could no longer walk on the gravel roads barefoot, and others sickened on a diet of green corn and green apples as the army marched beyond its supply lines. McClellan, of course, believed Lee had at least a hundred thousand men marching into Maryland.
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Lee's troops hoped for a friendly reception in Maryland. They struck up a popular song:

I hear the distant thunder hum

The Old Lines' bugle, fife and drum;

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—

Hazza—she breathes, she burns, she'll come!

Maryland! My Maryland!

The farmers and townspeople ignored the footsore soldiers. There would be no popular uprising. No flowers strewn across the army's path; just stones and dust.

McClellan moved at his usual snail's pace to intercept Lee's army. On September 13, two Union soldiers found a piece of paper wrapped around three cigars near Frederick, Maryland. The paper contained Lee's campaign orders, fallen from the pocket of a careless Rebel officer. The orders confirmed intelligence McClellan had already received about the division of Lee's army and where the forces were located. The orders also indicated that Union forces far outnumbered Lee's. McClellan clutched the document and cried, “If I cannot whip Bobbie Lee, I will be willing to go home.” Despite the huge advantage, McClellan still took his time marching westward, allowing Stonewall Jackson's troops to come up and join Lee's army for a combined force of forty thousand men against McClellan's seventy-five thousand. The delay also allowed Lee to learn of the intelligence leak and plan accordingly. Had McClellan moved swiftly and attacked, he would have enjoyed a four-to-one advantage in troop strength. Lee decided to hold defensive positions along a creek called Antietam. With the Potomac behind him, Lee's only options were to fight or retreat. Despite inferior numbers, he had come too far to go home. Besides, Lee had great confidence his men could defeat McClellan. Lincoln hoped otherwise. He wired his general, “Destroy the rebel army, if possible.”
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Antietam Creek runs through the Catoctin Valley “like a poem in blue and gold,” covered with patches of woods, sunlit fields, ripe orchards, and mountains gently rolling on the near horizon. The trees were just beginning to show their autumn colors. The valley had not one level spot. The depressions between the hills offered cover for infantry against artillery. Though most of these depressions were dry, some had creeks meandering through. Such was Antietam Creek, whose crooked course was typical. The fields were fat with corn and deep-green clover.
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Although McClellan waited almost two days to initiate the battle, he still had a considerable edge in troop strength. Many Rebel soldiers were hobbled with feet bleeding from the rocky Maryland roads, and they struggled to join the main force. McClellan had more than twice as many soldiers ready for combat. Had his planned three attacks on the left, center, and right of the Confederate line occurred together, McClellan would have prevailed. Lack of coordination and poor communication, which plagued both armies at crucial moments throughout the war, thwarted those plans.

At dawn on Wednesday, September 17, Union General Joe Hooker attacked Jackson's corps on the Confederate left, advancing in a long line through David Miller's cornfield, bayonets flashing just above the stalks, and into the woods, where they found the enemy. Hooker's men pushed the Confederates back to the German Baptist Church (now known as the Dunkard Church) and a sunken road (now called, appropriately, Bloody Lane). The Union advance continued in severe combat until Hooker was wounded. The Rebels, under Texan John Bell Hood, pushed the Federals back over the same ground so dearly gained during the morning. By noon, the battle ended with thirteen thousand men lying dead or wounded and the two armies at virtually the same place where they began the day. After the fighting, a fellow officer asked Hood where his division was. The Texan responded, “Dead on the field.” Sixty percent of his soldiers were gone.
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Union General Ambrose E. Burnside struck the Confederate right at midday and pushed the Rebels back across the Stone Bridge (today known as Burnside Bridge) over Antietam Creek and down toward the Potomac. How Burnside's men took this bridge astonishes because a steep bank rises from the creek, a perfect elevation from which to guard the bridge. Yet Burnside's men waded through the Rebel fusillade and pushed the Confederates back. He could not hold it. Reinforcements never came.

The Confederates were more fortunate. A. P. Hill's division, the last of Stonewall Jackson's corps to arrive, appeared just in time, setting off jubilation among the Rebels and confusion in federal ranks, as they wore captured blue uniforms. Hill waved his sword aloft to rally his men, who retook the bridge and saved the day and the war for the Confederacy. Years later, as Lee lay on his deathbed, his last words were “Tell Hill he must come up,” recalling when the fate of his army and of his country hung in the balance.
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The day should have belonged to the Union army. McClellan's attacks were hopelessly uncoordinated, and he failed at crucial moments to bring up reserves that he never used. The Confederates fought ferociously, but had a more astute and aware commander been at the Union helm, Lee's army might very well have been destroyed.

The bloodiest day of the Civil War was over: thirteen thousand Confederate troops dead or wounded and twelve thousand Union casualties; twice as many Americans killed in that single day than in every other nineteenth-century American war combined. A survey of the field revealed the democracy of death. A boy of fifteen hugged in the death embrace of the veteran of fifty—“the greasy blouse of the common soldier here pressing the starred shoulder of the Brigadier,” a boy from Georgia and another from Pennsylvania, their arms outstretched to each other as if seeking a last embrace. A Pennsylvania soldier expressed the feelings of many of his comrades on both sides when he walked over the battlefield at dusk: “No tongue can tell, no mind conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed this morning. God grant these things may soon end and peace be restored. Of this war I am heartily sick and tired.”
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The battle was a tactical draw, but a technical victory for the Union as the Confederates vacated the field, crossing the Potomac while McClellan congratulated himself on “saving the Union.” The Army of the Potomac allowed Lee to escape without pursuit. McClellan's army was exhausted. The day was exceedingly hot, and the close combat blanketed the battlefield with smoke, making breathing difficult. Many soldiers had temporarily lost all or part of their hearing. The artillery fire rumbled down from the hills like peals of thunder that never ceased. The powdery smoke, laced with saltpeter, burned the noses, throats, and eyes of the soldiers, who left the field, if they could, with tears streaming down their faces. The soldiers themselves did not know the outcome. A Union soldier wrote, “So terrible has been the day; so rapid and confused the events, that I find it impossible to separate them, so as to give, or even to form for myself any clear idea of what I have seen.”
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Lincoln was incredulous that McClellan had allowed Lee to cross back into Virginia, his army intact. McClellan and his army were still encamped near Antietam when the president visited on October 1, two weeks after the battle. From a high vantage point, Lincoln looked out over the valley and the Union camp. “What is all this?” he asked his guide. “Why, Mr. Lincoln, this is the Army of the Potomac.” The president paused and declared, “No … This is
General McClellan's body-guard
.” While McClellan rested, J. E. B. Stuart's cavalry conducted raids into Maryland and Pennsylvania, virtually unopposed. Though of little strategic importance, these forays added to the embarrassment. Lincoln had had enough and relieved McClellan of his command, replacing him with Ambrose E. Burnside, whose troops had given a good account of themselves on that bloody day at the bridge.
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Lee's successful escape allowed him and his officers to put the best face on a failed invasion. He would fight another day. As he wrote to his daughter on September 23, “We … did not consider ourselves beaten as our enemies supposed. We were greatly outnumbered and opposed by double if not treble our strength and yet we repulsed all their attacks, held our ground and retired when it suited our convenience.”
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The afterlife of Antietam far exceeded its meager strategic results. By September 1862, civilians on both sides had become uneasily accustomed to the high casualty accounts. Families of servicemen had received letters describing the carnage of war in gory detail. Newspapers sensationalized the brutality of battle and the heroic exploits of martyrs to their cause. Words painted vivid pictures, but the images were imagined.

Mathew Brady, already a noted photographer, sent two colleagues, Alexander Gardner and James Gibson, to record the Antietam battlefield a day after the bloody contest. They snapped photos of bloated corpses, bodies lying like cordwood in a ditch, and remnants of horses strewn across the field. The photographers may have taken a little artistic license in rearranging some bodies for mass effect, but the pictures offered an accurate portrait of what the war had become. They went on display in New York City in October, and the response was electric. The
New York Times
reported, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.” The reporter was sensitive enough to recognize that behind the photographs lay “widows and orphans, torn from the bosom of their natural protectors.… Hearts cannot be photographed.”
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