This Hallowed Ground (31 page)

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 (Banks was no longer with them; he had been replaced by an old regular, Joseph K. F. Mansfield, a red-faced soldier who wore a pleasing fringe of white hair and whiskers.)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.
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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.

P
RESIDENT LINCOLN
had the Cabinet in, and he made a ceremony of the business. Here was the paper, ready to be signed, dignitaries looking as impressive as might be; fifty miles up the Potomac there was the stricken field of Antietam, the autumn air tainted with death, every house and barn for miles around serving as a hospital, a bruised army in bivouac nearby. What was being done at the White House had been ratified in advance by what had been done around the Dunker church and in the cornfields and woods, along the sunken road and by the crossings of the sluggish little creek. Twenty-five thousand Americans, North and South, had been shot in order that Lincoln might sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

Looked at objectively, this proclamation was nothing much. It was not, technically, a proclamation at all but an official warning that if the rebellion did not cease by the end of 1862 a proclamation would be issued. It declared slavery extinct in precisely the areas where the Federal government at the moment lacked all power to enforce its decrees — in the states that were in rebellion; it let slavery live on in states like Maryland and Kentucky, which had remained in the Union and in which the government’s power was unquestioned. It was of dubious legality, and in any case it hardly said more than an act of Congress which had been passed two months earlier — the Confiscation Act, which granted freedom to the slaves of all persons thereafter found guilty of treason and of all persons who aided or supported the rebellion. If the President was going to declare himself on slavery, this preliminary proclamation was just about the least he could say.

Yet it closed a great door in the face of the southern Confederacy. It locked the Confederacy in with the anachronism that was the Confederacy’s
dreadful, fatal burden. Europe could not intervene now; the Civil War had been turned into something that no British statesman could touch. The South would be limited to its own resources, which were visibly inadequate. It could never get the help it needed from outside. Almost indiscernibly, but with grim finality, it had been isolated.

Beyond this, the stakes of the war had suddenly become incalculable. If the war should be won, the nation would for all time be wedded to the idea that all of its people must (as the proclamation said) be forever free. Free society and racism were defined as incompatibles. The race problem would have to be faced now, because by no imaginable subterfuge could it be dodged, and in time — in one generation, or in two, or in ten — it would have to be solved. People were committed to it now, the compact signed in the blood and fire of a war that went closer to the heart and the bone than any other experience in national history. An ideal that might be humanly unattainable had been riveted in so that it could never, in all the years to come, be abandoned.

The immediate effects of the proclamation were curious. First of them was the fact that it quietly cut the ground out from under the feet of General McClellan.

Not long after the document was signed and issued, McClellan met with a few officers in his headquarters tent. He wanted advice: what should he do about the proclamation? Democratic politicians and high army officers, he said, had been urging him to come out in open opposition to it. Should he do so, or should he keep silent? The proclamation seemed to him to be unwise and unsound, although he suspected that if he denounced it publicly some people might look upon his act as a species of military usurpation; still, he had been assured that the Army of the Potomac was so loyal to him that it would, to a man, enforce any decision he might make regarding war policy. What did these friends think he ought to do?

The friends spoke up promptly and sensibly. McClellan had been listening to dangerous nonsense, he must on no account let himself be made leader of the opposition, the people who were egging him on were his worst enemies; and anyone who supposed that this army would support open defiance of civil authority was imagining a vain thing, and skirting the edge of treason as well.… With all of this McClellan at length agreed. He concluded at last to issue a short address to his troops, reminding them that, however they might feel as citizens, they were bound as soldiers to accept and obey the decrees of the government.
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