McClellan attacked on September 17, 1862, starting what became known as the battle of Antietam. In the most violent day of the whole Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers attacked, counterattacked, and fought on. It was said that one thirty-acre cornfield was so covered with dead bodies that one could walk across it without ever touching the earth.
“We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the war, perhaps of history,” telegraphed McClellan to Halleck and Lincoln at 1:25 p.m. This was the battle Lincoln had been waiting for. McClellan wrote, “It will be either a great defeat or a most glorious victory.”
McClellan ordered 60,000 of his 80,000 troops to assault 37,000 Confederates, but he could not push back an army that he assessed to be over 100,000. McClellan had more than twice as many men as Lee, but by attacking division after division, he afforded Lee the time to shift his troops to meet the Union attacks. McClellan, convinced that Lee had far more troops than he did, was unwilling to commit any of his 20,000 reserves to the battle. At one point, General John Sedgwick marched his division, with sixty-four-year-old E. V. “Bull” Sumner in the lead, through the cornfield, across the Hagerstown Pike, and into the West Woods, only to discover they were being fired upon from the rear. Once again, the Confederates, appearing to retreat, led the Union bluecoats into a trap. By the end of the day, Sedgwick would lose 1,700 men—killed, wounded, or missing.
The next day, September 18, 1862, both sides were exhausted; the battle came to a lull, not to be joined again. McClellan wrote to Halleck on September 19, “Our victory was complete. The enemy is driven back into Virginia.”
Lincoln had ordered McClellan to “destroy the rebel army,” but he did not. On the evening of September 18, 1862, Lee and his army crossed the Potomac again and returned to the safe haven of Virginia. McClellan sent a small detachment in pursuit, but it came to nothing.
For once, McClellan was not exaggerating the scope of the battle. Almost 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in one day at Antietam. This staggering number was four times the number that would be killed in the landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944. The total for this one day was more than the deaths in all of the other wars of the nineteenth century—the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War—combined.
ALTHOUGH THE VICTORY AT ANTIETAM was not decisive, it was enough for Abraham Lincoln. At the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln wrote out a second draft of his Emancipation Proclamation. He returned to the White House, where he refused to meet any visitors. He worked alone in his office, editing the most important statement of his life yet.
Five days after the battle at Antietam, he convened a special cabinet meeting on Monday, September 22, 1862. Lincoln presented to the cabinet a new four-page document of just under one thousand words. What Lincoln said at this momentous cabinet meeting was recorded by both Salmon Chase and Gideon Welles, independently, in their diaries. Chase wrote that Lincoln told them that “when the rebel army was at Frederick,” he had “determined” that if they be “driven out of Maryland,” he would issue a “Proclamation of Emancipation.” Lincoln continued, “I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and”—here Chase indicated that Lincoln hesitated a little—“to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise.”
Welles, who had been writing detailed entries in his diary almost every day since July 1862, recorded that the president began by informing the cabinet that regarding emancipation, “the question was finally decided, the act and the consequences were his,” but he wanted to invite the cabinet’s “criticism” of the paper he had prepared. In his explanation, Lincoln “remarked 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.”
Lincoln understood that his explanation of his actions would appear unusual to these shrewd politicians. He admitted as much. “It might be thought strange, he said, that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do.” Welles reported that Lincoln summed up his remarkable discourse by telling them, “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”
The members of the cabinet sat in silence. Lincoln broke it by picking up the text of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and beginning to read it aloud.
I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be suspended, or disturbed.
Although the language was still legalistic, the fruit of Lincoln’s continual brooding and editing over the long summer of 1862 was evident in this newly revised second proclamation. Unlike the document he had presented in July, Lincoln knew this proclamation would soon become public. With keen insight into the range of possible public reactions, he anticipated and therefore sought to alleviate public criticism. He stressed at the outset that the war remained about preserving the Union, even though he knew that the press would emphasize the freeing of the slaves. He built in precedent with a reminder of two laws passed earlier in the year about the handling of escaped slaves. He had employed scissors and paste to insert these laws into his document.
At the heart of Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he offered the language that reflected his change of heart. On the first day of January 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Lincoln concluded with generosity.
And the executive will in due time recommend that all citizens of the United States who shall have remained loyal thereto throughout the rebellion, shall (upon the restoration of the constitutional relation between the United States, and their respective states, and people, if that relation shall have been suspended or disturbed) be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.
Lincoln knew he was issuing a strong proclamation, solely based in his military powers as president, but he was determined to be fair and munificent to those who would be affected. Newspapers around the country published the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing that Lincoln would sign it into law on January 1, 1863.
However one might view the concrete results of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—how many people were freed in which areas of the Union—the symbolic significance of Lincoln’s act was powerful. He had changed the purpose of the war from restoring the old Union to creating a new Union cleansed of slavery. His old nemesis Horace Gree-ley spelled it out in large letters in his Tribune. “god bless abraham lincoln!” Greeley predicted, “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation.”
ON OCTOBER 1, 1862, Lincoln traveled to Sharpsburg, Maryland, to visit McClellan. After the battle of Antietam, many questions remained. Why did McClellan not pursue and defeat Lee’s army when he had the opportunity? If McClellan needed time to recover from Antietam, why was he not planning to cross the Potomac and pursue Lee now?
The next day, as Lincoln prepared to review the troops, artillery officer Charles Wainwright observed the president riding in an ambulance wagon. Wainwright was not impressed. “Mr. Lincoln not only is the ugliest man I ever saw, but the most uncouth and gawky in his manners and appearance.” McClellan started to explain how the battle took shape, but Lincoln, seemingly not interested, turned away and asked to be driven back to the camp.
The next morning, Lincoln awakened Ozias M. Hatch, the Illinois secretary of state, who had accompanied him on his visit. They walked to an eminence from which they could survey th
e camp. Lincoln, gesturing with his long arms, asked, “Hatch, what do you suppose all these people are?”
“Why,” replied Hatch, “I suppose it be a part of the grand army.”
“No,” responded the President, “you are mistaken.”
“What are they then?” asked Hatch.
Lincoln paused, and then “in a tone of patient but melancholy sarcasm,” replied, “That is General McClellan’s body guard.”
LINCOLN’S PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION did not bring him the full backing of radical Republicans. Believing that he had waited too long already, they were not pleased to be asked to wait an additional one hundred days for the signing of the proclamation. Senators Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Henry Wilson, and Lyman Trumbull welcomed Lincoln’s proposal, but also cast a critical eye on what the proclamation did not do. They criticized it as a wartime measure too limited in its scope. The ultimate goal of the radical Republicans, and their abolitionist allies, became a constitutional amendment that would abolish slavery forever.
Meanwhile, many moderate Republicans and border-state Unionists worried about the meaning of the proclamation for Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Democrats, who had opposed Lincoln from the start, were enraged at what they saw as presidential authoritarianism. After a while, however, some of them became convinced that the proclamation provided them with an opening to turn around their political fortunes by appealing to a nation growing weary of war and death.
Lincoln, who always followed election results like an accountant checking financial records, watched the biennial elections in 1862 with concern. Twenty-three states voted in elections held in April, June, August, September, October, and November. No national body oversaw the elections, so voters went to the polls in the spring in New England and in late summer and fall in the West. The inconclusive course of the war and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation figured in differently as factors in various states according to the timing of their elections.
Lincoln, after the ambiguous victory at Antietam, traveled to Sharpsburg Maryland, to confer with General George B. McClellan.
By November, the election returns had given the Democrats a net increase of thirty-two seats in the House, reducing the Republican majority to twenty-five. Five vital states, where Lincoln had won every electoral vote in 1860—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—elected Democratic majorities in Congress. In the Senate, however, Republicans picked up five seats. Illinois elected nine Democrats and only five Republicans to the House of Representatives. Most painfully for Lincoln, in his home district, John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner, now a Democrat, defeated the Republican candidate, Leonard Swett, Lincoln’s close friend.
In state contests the results were more dismal. New York and New Jersey elected Democrats as governors. Criticizing Lincoln as an abolitionist dictator, Democrats gained control of the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The New York Times, usually a supporter of the president, summed up the total results as a “vote of want of confidence” in his leadership.
On November 5, the day after New Yorkers voted in the last mid term election, Lincoln asked Halleck to remove McClellan from his command of the Army of the Potomac. The next day Lincoln told Francis P. Blair that he had “tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.” The president appointed Ambrose P. Burnside as the new commander.
“NEVER HAS SUCH a paper been delivered to the National Legislature under auspices so grave, and rarely, if ever, has one been awaited with equal solicitude by the people of the country.” The National Intelligencer underlined the import of Lincoln’s annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862. After a string of military setbacks, interrupted in September by an ambiguous victory at Antietam, the publication of his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and the difficult 1862 elections, Lincoln delivered his annual message.
Listeners of the annual presidential message did not expect, nor did they usually receive, any rhetorical dessert at the end of the standard meat and potatoes of political fare. Lincoln’s annual message for 1862 covered a wide range of topics, with reports from a number of departments using words supplied by cabinet members. But unlike his first annual message in 1861, Lincoln decided to use this opportunity to educate citizens and to mobilize public opinion across the North.
One last time he spoke of the benefits of colonization. Next, after reminding Congress of his Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, he called their attention to “compensated emancipation.” He even offered three constitutional amendments to augment his plan, the first amendment calling for each state where slavery existed to have until 1900 to abolish it. Another amendment called on Congress to appropriate money for colonization. Lincoln’s goal was to end slavery peacefully even while still in the midst of war. He summarized the meaning of these amendments by stating, “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.”
By the end of 1862, Lincoln was speaking openly of slavery as the cause of the war. He recognized, however, that “among the friends of the Union,” a diversity of opinion existed. Some would perpetuate slavery; some would abolish it suddenly without compensation; some would abolish it gradually with compensation; some would remove the freed people, and some would retain them. In Lincoln’s habit of validating all voices, he listed five options. He did so in the best words their proponents would use. However, Lincoln averred that “because of these diversities, we waste much strength in struggles among ourselves.” He then discussed how persons advocating each of the five positions could see strengths and weaknesses in his three amendments.
Lincoln took time toward the end of this second annual message to offer a remarkable tribute to his senior colleagues. “I do not … forget that some of you are my seniors, nor that many of you have more experience than I, in the conduct of public affairs.” Yet, he said, he hoped that “in view of the great responsibility resting upon me, you will perceive no want of respect to yourselves, in any undue earnestness I may display.” Lincoln won the right to be heard about his own ideas by first expressing respect for his audience.
If his message to this point seemed gradualist in tone, his audience was certainly not prepared for his finale. “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” Although Lincoln appealed explicitly for support of his proposals, and implicitly for the Emancipation Proclamation, his conclusion expanded his appeal beyond any particular agenda to a willingness to embrace a new and better future.
In contrasting the “quiet past” with the “stormy present,” he tapped into his favorite metaphor to describe the Civil War. In this storm, Lincoln once again had been subjected to the voices of those who wished to define him and tell him what he should do.
Lincoln included himself when he said, “We must rise with the occasion.” Stung by criticism that he had underestimated the determination of the South to go its own way, he made no such misjudgments now about what was at stake or how long the war might go on. Lincoln replaced the studied, rational argument of his inaugural address with a more evocative rhetoric better able to resonate with the emotional fears and longings of his audience.
“As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” These words have often been mislaid or forgotten because of the dramatic final words that follow. Presidential leadership comes from the ability to articulate a compelling vision for the nation. For the first year and a half of the war, Lincoln’s public rhetoric showed him acting with fidelity to the great ideals of the past, especially as they were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. By the end of 1862, Lincoln became willing to change the definition of the war in terms of the future. In his concluding appeal, Lincoln joined together history and memory. From his first reading of Parson Mason Locke Weems’s biography o
f George Washington as a boy, to his first major speech, the address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield in 1838 as a young man, we find Lincoln always invoking history. He held himself accountable to the great ideals of both the founding fathers and the primary documents of the nation. Now he wanted Congress to join him in a new accountability, and asked them to unite behind him. He was aware of all the political divisions in Congress. To underscore their unified responsibility, he used the plural pronouns “we” and “us.”
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.
The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
When Lincoln spoke of a “fiery trial,” he borrowed an image from a recent visitor to the White House, Eliza P. Gurney, a Quaker minister from Philadelphia. Ten weeks earlier, Mrs. Gurney and three women had sought a meeting with the president to comfort and encourage him. Following her sermon about the necessity to seek divine guidance, Gurney convened a prayer meeting in the president’s office, kneeling and offering a prayer “that light and wisdom might be shed down from on high, to guide our President.”
Lincoln, reticent to speak about his deepest feelings, especially religious ones, became surprisingly open in a correspondence he subsequently began with Mrs. Gurney. In his first letter, on October 26, 1862, he thanked her for her “sympathy and prayers.” He then declared, “We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial.” The “indeed” indicated that he was responding to her sermon, in which she had commended Lincoln for the steadfastness of his leadership in such a difficult time. Lincoln’s image of “a fiery trial” was surely drawn from 1 Peter 4:12, a letter written to a people undergoing persecution: “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you.”
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