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.”35
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.36
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.”37
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.”38
Antietam also held off European recognition of the Confederacy and any attempt by the British to offer mediation. During the spring and summer of Rebel triumphs, French and British diplomats had seriously discussed these possibilities.
The Union victory at Antietam, narrow though it was, enabled President Lincoln to push forward with an initiative he had undertaken several months earlier. Lincoln introduced the “First Draft” of his Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet on July 22, 1862, a few weeks after the failed Peninsula Campaign. The proclamation was clearly a military document. Lincoln confided to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that he had given emancipation “much thought and had about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.” As a military measure, it would satisfy Lincoln’s constitutional conscience, since it could legitimately fall under the “war powers” granted to a president in a time of national emergency. The proclamation did not apply to those areas under Union control (the border states in particular). But in the rebellious parts of the South slaves were henceforth free. In practical terms, the document did not free any slave. Masters in those areas beyond the Union armies could safely ignore the edict, though their slaves would not. The document, however, represented a symbolic landmark for the nation that purported to live by the words of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The slaves welcomed the symbolism and continued their flight to freedom.39
Dead Confederate soldiers in a ditch at Antietam, September 1862. Modern weaponry and traditional tactics produced horrific casualties on both sides. Pohto by noted war photographer Alexander Gardner (1821–1882), who worked for Mathew Brady. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Lincoln’s caution reflected both his constitutional scruples and his desire to keep the North united behind the single objective of saving the Union. At heart, however, he was an emancipationist well before the war started. Joshua Speed, his closest friend, stated, “My own opinion of the history of the emancipation proclamation is, that Mr. Lincoln foresaw the necessity for it long before he issued it.” Lincoln himself confirmed Speed’s judgment in 1865: “I have always thought that all men should be free.” Still, knowing the racial sentiments of northerners, the president worried about the proclamation’s reception. “When I issued that proclamation,” he told a friend, “I was in great doubt about it myself. I did not think that the people had been quite educated up to it, and I feared its effects upon the border states.”40
Secretary of State William H. Seward urged the president to wait for a Union military victory so the proclamation did not appear as an act of desperation. In the meantime, Lincoln leaked news of the proclamation to friendly sources, and to several Radical Republicans who had pestered him on abolition since before he took the oath of office. Horace Greeley, the editor of the influential New York Tribune, had been lobbying the president to issue such an order for months. In August 1862, Greeley penned an editorial, “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” urging emancipation. Lincoln responded, holding fast to his priorities: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it.” Lincoln had already presented his preliminary proclamation to the cabinet, as he hinted privately to Greeley. The deft manipulation of the media would build public sentiment for emancipation so the president would appear to endorse that sentiment rather than being ahead of it.41
Antietam provided the opening the administration required. The latest draft of the proclamation Lincoln presented included a provision protecting the freed status of all those slaves who had stolen their freedom and had come to Union lines. He recognized that this simple document would make the cruel war that much more cruel. “The character of the war will be changed,” he noted to a friend. “It will be one of subjugation and extermination.”42
Although initially presented as a military measure, the proclamation also reflected Lincoln’s deep moral commitment to ending slavery. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles took notes on the cabinet meeting that followed Antietam. According to Welles, the president made little reference to military strategy. Instead, Lincoln explained that he “had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.… God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” If God’s purpose in continuing th
e war remained unknown to the president, the persistence of slavery may have held a clue. Lincoln, at last, had his sign.43
As news reached the army of Lincoln’s intentions, the reaction was mixed. An Ohio private, Chauncey Welton, assured his father, “I can tell you we don’t think mutch of [the Emancipation Proclamation] hear in the army for we did not enlist to fight for the negro and I can tell you that we neer shall or many of us anyhow no never.” The 20th Massachusetts, a unit from the most radical state in the North, seemed equally intransigent, according to Henry Livermore Abbott, who wrote to his aunt, “The president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust.”44
Others greeted the news as an affirmation of the ideals for which they fought. At last, a Union soldier sighed, the American flag “shall triumphantly wave over a free land, which it has never done yet.” An Illinois soldier expressed the most general feeling in the army when he noted that he and many of his fellow soldiers “like the Negro no better now than we did then but we hate his master worse and I tell you when Old Abe carries out his Proclamation he kills this Rebellion and not before.” Emancipation stood a better chance of receiving the approbation of the Union soldier as a military necessity rather than as a moral imperative.45
The civilian press, especially Republican papers, lauded the Emancipation Proclamation. Harper’s, which only a few months earlier had cautioned against abolition, reflected the evolving opinion in the North. The proclamation “clears the individual conscience and the national escutcheon. It is an invocation of the spirit of the Constitution to save its form.… For America does not say that all men are equal in any thing but right. But it does say, and, please God, will forever say and maintain, that all men … are men, and therefore are born with a natural equality of right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Some Democratic papers were hostile to the notion of abolition and warned that freedom did not imply equality for blacks. The Cincinnati Enquirer lamented, “Slavery is dead, the negro is not, there is the misfortune.”46
Southerners responded with fury. They accused the Lincoln administration of inciting racial warfare. For those who had doubted the fire-eaters’ warnings that a Lincoln presidency doomed slavery, the proclamation confirmed the worst. President Davis warned that any blacks captured during Rebel forays into northern territory would be summarily sent south into slavery. He concluded with bravado, “The day is not distant when the old Union will be restored with slavery nationally declared to be the proper condition of all of African descent.”47
Lincoln arrived at a different conclusion in his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in which we give, and what we preserve.” The fulfillment of this vision, or of President Davis’s, depended on battlefield results. Lincoln knew he had raised the stakes even higher: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”48
Two weeks later, saving the Union seemed more elusive than ever. Ambrose E. Burnside was famous for his whiskers, “sideburns,” as they came to be called. He was long on facial hair and short on military acumen. Burnside protested that he was unfit when Lincoln offered him command of the Army of the Potomac, and he was right. An Indiana native and West Pointer (1847), he resigned his commission in 1853 to concentrate on manufacturing rifles in Rhode Island. The enterprise failed. Like Grant, Burnside offered his services to his state when the Civil War began. He was an early supporter of the president, who enjoyed his friendship. Burnside rose to the rank of brigadier general in late 1861 after successful operations along the coast of North Carolina. Following McClellan’s failure in the Peninsula Campaign, Lincoln offered Burnside the command, which he refused. When Lee routed Pope at Bull Run, the president again turned to Burnside and received the same negative response. After Antietam, a desperate Lincoln prevailed upon a reluctant Burnside to take command.
Lincoln, frustrated by McClellan’s failure to follow Lee across the Potomac after Antietam, ordered Burnside to destroy Lee’s army in Virginia. At least, Lincoln reasoned, Burnside would fight. Yet again, cries of “On to Richmond!” filled the columns of the northern press. The southern press responded with derision, and a popular song, “Richmond Is a Hard Road to Travel,” dedicated to General Burnside, made the rounds of Confederate camps. Never mind; Burnside’s superior numbers would overwhelm the Rebels in one huge coordinated assault, and the war would be over by Christmas.49
On November 20, Burnside’s army of 114,000 men was ready to cross the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and place themselves between the Rebel forces and Richmond before Lee could gather his dispersed army and Jackson could join him from the valley. By the time the pontoons to cross the river arrived in early December, Lee’s two pistols, James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, had joined him to constitute a force of 72,500 men enabling the Virginian to unfold a plan of his own.
Lee ceded Fredericksburg to Union forces on December 11 with only token resistance. The Confederates withdrew to Marye’s Heights above the town. Lee’s infantry dug in at the base of the Heights, protected by entrenchments and a stone wall. Above the infantry, Lee arrayed his artillery and reserve troops. Burnside’s general officers counseled against an attack, but he was adamant. Lincoln had ordered Burnside to make a direct assault, and the general followed his orders. On the morning of December 13, federal forces emerged from the fog to attack the hills above the city.
Instead of a coordinated attack, Union soldiers attempted to scale the Heights in twelve successive waves across an open field raked by Rebel artillery. When each assault failed and the troops broke and ran, Rebel infantry, no longer fearing return fire, poured volley after volley against the retreating soldiers. Not one Union soldier reached the stone wall. A Union soldier compared the charge to “a great slaughter pen … they might as well have tried to take Hell.” By dusk, 12,600 Federals lay killed or wounded, with some of their comrades taking cover behind corpses against withering Rebel fire. In contrast, Confederates suffered 5,300 casualties. The field had changed colors: brown before the fight, blue covered with Union dead, then white after Rebel soldiers, many without shoes or proper clothing against the cold, stripped the corpses, and then red. Only blood and skin remained. From one of the hills above the city, Lee watched the close-ordered ranks of Union soldiers, banners flying, marching double-quick to their deaths, and remarked to Longstreet, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”50
Yet Lee hoped to continue the battle. He expected Burnside to regroup and come at him again. When the Union forces slipped back across the river, breaking off the engagement, Lee expressed his disappointment to his wife: “After all their boasting and preparation … they came as they went, in the night. They suffered heavily as far as the battle went, but it did not go far enough to satisfy me.” Lee did not press his own tired and cold men to pursue the retreating Federals, who still vastly outnumbered his own troops. He wired President Davis, “The enemy had disappeared from [my] front.” Richmond was saved, again.51
Burnside wanted to renew the attack the following day, but this time his officers talked him out of it. The general waited for two additional days before requesting a flag of truce to collect the dead and wounded from the battlefield. Wounded Union soldiers spent fifty hours exposed to the freezing cold, and many had joined the ranks of the dead by the time burial parties arrived. Many corpses were stiff as marble slabs from the cold, and lay “in every conceivable position, some on their backs with gaping jaws, some with eyes as large as walnuts, protruding with glassy stare, some doubled up like a contortionist.” Over there, one without legs, nearby, a head and legs without a trunk, and “every horrible expression, fear, rage, agony, madness, torture, lying in pools of blood … with fragments of shell sticking in oozing brains, with bullet holes all over the puffed limbs.”52
The gruesome scene reflected the heroism of the soldier as much as the foolhardiness of the officers. Fr
edericksburg, though a devastating defeat for the Union, stood as a symbol of Yankee bravery. A colonel of the 77th New York wrote: “None were ever more brave or more desirous to test their valor. The heroic deeds of those who did advance against the enemy will ever redound to the glory of our arms.” Walt Whitman, who had traveled hastily to Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother, asserted, “Never did mortal man in an aggregate fight better than our troops at Fredericksburg. In the highest sense, it was no failure.” Even the Confederates expressed admiration for the enemy’s courage. General George E. Pickett, who would come to know the consequences of charging a well-entrenched enemy at its center, marveled in a letter to his wife at the heroism of the Union’s Irish Brigade: “Your soldier’s heart almost stood still as he watched those sons of Erin fearlessly rush to their death. The brilliant assault … was beyond description.”53
Better to be an admiring spectator on the Confederate side than reaping the laurels of certain death in a futile charge. Henry Livermore Abbott, of the 20th Massachusetts, led one of the unsuccessful charges and was withering in his assessment of the battle and the war. “The whole army is demoralized,” he wrote to a friend the day after the battle. “The strongest peace party is the army.… The men who ordered the crossing of the river are responsible to God for murder.” Abbott reported mutinous talk among the soldiers against “those blood stained scoundrels in the government.”54
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